Hi there lovelies - 2020 turned around after all huh? Hope you’re doing GOOD this week! I got a lot of stuff to share this week, so keep reading <3
First, Susan Sontag on why lists appeal to us:
“I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.
Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.” - Diary entry dated August 9, 1967
Below is Sontag’s list of likes and dislikes, which is “unordered like a stream-of-consciousness meditation” while “bearing the cyclical repetition and cadence of poetry”:
Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long-haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, ups, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.
Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food.
Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, Wagon-Lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, pen knives, aphorisms, hands.
Things I dislike: Television, baked beans, hirsute men, paperback books, standing, card games, dirty or disorderly apartments, flat pillows, being in the sun, Ezra Pound, freckles, violence in movies, having drops put in my eyes, meatloaf, painted nails, suicide, licking envelopes, ketchup, traversins [“bolsters”], nose drops, Coca-Cola, alcoholics, taking photographs.
Things I like: drums, carnations, socks, raw peas, chewing on sugar cane, bridges, Dürer, escalators, hot weather, sturgeon, tall people, deserts, white walls, horses, electric typewriters, cherries, wicker / rattan furniture, sitting cross-legged, stripes, large windows, fresh dill, reading aloud, going to bookstores, under-furnished rooms, dancing, Ariadne auf Naxos.
The next time you plan a getaway (lol), check out the style icon Joan Didion’s packing list
TO PACK AND WEAR:
2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
2 pair shoes
stockings
bra
nightgown, robe, slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with: shampoo
toothbrush and paste
Basis soap, razor
deodorant
aspirin
prescriptions
Tampax
face cream
powder
baby oilTO CARRY:
mohair throw
typewriter
2 legal pads and pens
files
house key“This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.”
—Joan Didion, “The White Album”
The next time you visit a museum (or ladies, the next time you’re PMSing), consider the contents page from James Elkins’ Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings
Crying at nothing but colors
Crying no one can understand
Crying from chromatic waves
Crying because you’ve been hit by a lightning bolt
Weeping over bluish leaves
The ivory tower of tearlessness
False tears over a dead bird
Crying because time passes
Weeping, watching the Madonna weep
Crying at God
Sobbing in lonely mountains
Crying at the empty sea of faith
Italo Calvino’s SIX MEMOS for the next millennium
“Perhaps it is a sign of our millennium’s end that we frequently wonder what will happen to literature and books in the so-called postindustrial era of technology. I don’t much feel like indulging in this sort of speculation. My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.”
Mina Loy’s Aphorisms on Futurism (think of this as a guidebook on how to be a futurist feminist)
DIE in the Past
Live in the Future.THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.
IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.
AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.
THE straight line and the circle are the parents of design, form the basis of art; there is no limit to their coherent variability.
LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.
OPEN your arms to the dilapidated; rehabilitate them.
YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened.
BUT the Future is only dark from outside.
Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light.FORGET that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself—
FOR the smallest people live in the greatest houses.
BUT the smallest person, potentially, is as great as the Universe.
WHAT can you know of expansion, who limit yourselves to compromise?
HITHERTO the great man has achieved greatness by keeping the people small.
BUT in the Future, by inspiring the people to expand to their fullest capacity, the great man proportionately must be tremendous—a God.
LOVE of others is the appreciation of oneself.
MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.
THE Future is limitless—the past a trail of insidious reactions.
LIFE is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself.
TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.
THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.
HE can compress every aesthetic principle in one line.
THE mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.
LOOKING on the past you arrive at “Yes,” but before you can act upon it you have already arrived at “No.”
THE Futurist must leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from stepping-stone to stone of creative exploration; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts.
THERE are no excrescences on the absolute, to which man may pin his faith.
TODAY is the crisis in consciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.
CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.
LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create.
UNSCREW your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of Life—Whole.
MISERY is in the disintegration of Joy;
Intellect, of Intuition;
Acceptance, of Inspiration.CEASE to build up your personality with the ejections of irrelevant minds.
NOT to be a cipher in your ambient,
But to color your ambient with your preferences.NOT to accept experience at its face value.
BUT to readjust activity to the peculiarity of your own will.
THESE are the primary tentatives towards independence.
MAN is a slave only to his own mental lethargy.
YOU cannot restrict the mind’s capacity.
THEREFORE you stand not only in abject servitude to your perceptive consciousness—
BUT also to the mechanical re-actions of the subconsciousness, that rubbish heap of race-tradition—
AND believing yourself to be free—your least conception is colored by the pigment of retrograde superstitions.
HERE are the fallow-lands of mental spatiality that Futurism will clear—
MAKING place for whatever you are brave enough, beautiful enough to draw out of the realized self.
TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark.
THEY are empty except of your shame.
AND so these sounds shall dissolve back to their innate senselessness.
THUS shall evolve the language of the Future.
THROUGH derision of Humanity as it appears—
TO arrive at respect for man as he shall be—
ACCEPT the tremendous truth of Futurism
Leaving all thoseKnick-knacks.
When you’re trying to come up with a new routine, consider Henry Miller’s “When you can’t create you can work”
Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
When you can’t create you can work.
Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
Art I’ve loved this week:
Bonus: Instagram accounts + Substacks I enjoy too much
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