Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the gratuitous.
Before we decided film should tell stories, we were content with the Lumière brothers’ slices-of-life and Méliès’ magic tricks, with workers leaving factories and trains arriving at stations, with the miracle that pictures were moving at all. And a young film viewer’s ontogeny recapitulates film-historical philogeny. Young children are at a protocinematic stage of development: they enjoy picture books and nonsense nursery rhymes, improvisational dance, scribbling with crayons, and other repetitive, relatively drama-free, narrative-free, content-free entertainments. They are attracted to cinema for its motion and its color and, for lack of a better word, its “magic.” Uncorrupted by exposure to more sophisticated entertainments, they ask no more of motion pictures than that they be what they are: motion-pictures.
As cinema grew up and learned to talk in the 1930s, it developed more rules and conventions. And as children grow, they learn how a movie is “supposed” to go; they internalize the beats of the structure. Most people spend the rest of their lives watching a type of film they were taught to enjoy in their childhood. Those who venture into the world of international film, art film, and counter-cinema may find that it’s not just about developing a taste for the slow or unusual, or getting out ahead of our desire for traditional narrative—it’s about getting back to our cinematic state of nature. Perhaps our mistake is in wanting to use films, to have them cater to us and keep us from boredom, rather than to see them, love them, and respect them as the free, precious, ephemeral things that they are.
—posted 2767 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the cheapest and the lowest.
Consider the barrenness of the notions that earthly things fall because they sink to the earth’s center or that fire rises to the empyrean home of burning suns and stars (i.e., the Aristotelian teleologies in physics). Yes, they accord well with our sense that falling and rising are peculiarly interesting aspects of the observed world. For centuries, however, the former made it harder to get to the Newtonian insight that all matter attracts all matter—and the Earth just happens, in a boring, quantitative way, to be the largest lump around. Similarly, the latter made it harder to see that anything less dense floats in anything more dense. Fire isn’t heading home. It’s just buoyant in a limited, measurable sense that has nothing to do with its romantic and sentimental associations.
Ditto for Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities; ditto for entelechies in biology. The mechanization of the world picture had its costs: One could no longer appreciate Dante in the same way, because Satan’s imprisonment at the Earth’s center—as far as possible from the heavens—had become a matter of sound physics and cosmology.
Such developments have moved around considerations of the Platonic overworld until it becomes the object of most of Rilke’s poetry, or—in another direction—the Symbolique of that extraordinary psychoanalyst, whose seminars I attended for four months during my second stay in Paris…
—posted 2775 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of Iubhdhán’s house.
I have a house in the land to the north, one half of it red gold, the lower half of silver.
Its porch is of white bronze and its threshold of copper, and of the wings of white-yellow birds is its thatch, I think.
The candlesticks are golden, with a candle of great purity, with a gem of precious stone in the very middle of the house.
But for myself and the high-queen, none of us are sad; a household there without old age, with yellow curly-crested hair.
Every man is a chess-player, there are good companies there without exclusion; the house is not closed against man or woman going to it.
—unknown Irish author,
twelfth to thirteenth century
—posted 2783 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of more.
The brevity-is-best rule seems to be supported by a much sounder maxim which reads: “Always send them away wanting more.” But that is a one-sided view. We can observe this maxim by giving them less than they want; we can also observe it by making them want more than we give them. The latter policy is clearly better.
—posted 2791 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of pleasure.
Before my first queer encounters, I had never fantasized about strictly pleasuring my partner. If my fantasies included me, they were muddied by abnegation and rooted in haphazard thrusting that happened to me. Who else could my fantasies include, you ask? Jessica, the cousin from Run’s House; the woman who ran my favorite boutique; Jennifer Lopez, and Wesley Snipes in Money Train—anyone but myself, really.
But the more I fantasized about women—local artists and coffee shop baristas—the more frequently I entered my own fantasies. And I began to fantasize about the pleasure I could give and could receive by other people desiring me. As I read about Delany performing fellatio on strangers at The Venus and The Capri, people he’d never invite home or have non-sexual relationships with, I began to pleasure myself in a plethora of ways and unabashedly.
I followed the footsteps of The Mad Masturbator, a man Delany encountered in the theaters who masturbated so much he could literally fall asleep while other people got him off, and touched myself as frequently as possible. It took years, but finally I discovered what Oprah and my mother meant when they said I could do it myself.
—posted 2799 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of confidence.
Using the last name of LaPlante, they lived on Commerce Street, a quiet, well-kept trailer park in a more run-down part of Dallas, from April 1949 until March 1950. Their neighbors regarded Sally as a typical 12-year-old living with her widowed father, albeit one never let out of his sight except to go to school. But she seemed to enjoy taking care of her home. She would bake every once in a while. She had a dog. La Salle provided her with a generous allowance for clothes and sweets. She would go shopping, swimming, and to her neighbors’ trailers for dinner. And while La Salle, as LaPlante, set up shop again as a mechanic, Sally attended Catholic school once more, at Our Lady of Good Counsel. (It, too, no longer exists, absorbed into Bishop Dunne Catholic School by 1961. The trailer park will be replaced this year by a posh apartment complex.)
A copy of Sally’s report card from her time at Our Lady of Good Counsel between September 1949 and February 1950 indicates she was a good student, with her only C+ grade coming in Languages in her final month there. Otherwise, she got primarily As and A-minuses, with the occasional B, the latter mostly coming towards the end of the school year. Her worst subjects were Geography and Writing. She also missed 10 days of school in September because she was hospitalized for appendicitis, spending at least three nights at the Texas Crippled Children’s Hospital (now the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children).
Sally’s apparently happy demeanor in Dallas grew more pensive after the operation. Josephine Kagamaster, the wife of La Salle’s business partner in the shop, remarked Sally did not move like “a healthy, light-hearted youngster,” and heard La Salle say the girl “walks like an old woman.” Otherwise, the consensus about Sally and her “father” was that they “both seemed happy and entirely devoted to each other.” Nelrose Pfeil, a neighbor, said, “Sally got everything she ever wanted. I always said I didn’t know who was more spoiled, Sally or her dog.” Maude Smilie, living at a nearby trailer on Commerce Street, seemed bewildered at the idea of Sally being a virtual prisoner: “[Sally] spent one day at the beauty parlor with me. I gave her a permanent and she never mentioned a thing. She should have known she could have confided in me.”
—posted 2809 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of incantations.
Max then goes on to make a point that I might well have made myself if I’d thought to put it so explicitly: while the technologies in our far-future SF now look more and more like numinous magical powers, our daily life is perfused by magical devices that obey relatively predictable rules—utter the right incantation and Siri tells you the weather. Which means we as readers are coming to expect an almost mechanistic causality to inform the magic in our fantasies.
—posted 2817 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of longing.
The 12th century was the age of courtly love: songs of courtship and admiration, tales of daring knights and worthy ladies. The courtly love tradition is thought of as quintessentially heterosexual, and yet a few works survive in which a woman addresses her sentiments to another woman, such as the lone surviving lyric of Bieiris de Romans. And during that era, in a convent somewhere in the vicinity of Tegernsee in Bavaria (Germany), a cloistered woman longed to be reunited with a dear friend. She poured her heart out in a passionate poem, written in Latin and, by some quirk of fate, copied into a collection of writings that survived the ages. Her name is unknown—she identifies herself simply as “A” and her love only as “G”, whom she addresses as “my only/singular rose.”
To her, G’s absence is “like someone who has lost a hand or a foot” and she laments, “I want to die because I cannot see you. What can I—so wretched—do? Where can I—so miserable—turn?” Her thoughts turn to past delights: “I recall the kisses you gave me, and how with tender words you caressed my little breasts.” And yet perhaps there was more to their story. “Come home, sweet love!” she concludes. “Prolong your trip no longer. Know that I can bear your absence no longer… remember me.” Shall we not imagine that G returned to the woman who found her “so lovely and full of grace [and] who… with such deep affection loves me”?
—posted 2825 days ago
Fall down seven.
So the first draft of no. 29 clocks in at 19,167 words, which I think is the longest first draft I’ve done (for as long as statistics have been kept, at any rate). And only a couple days past two weeks late on the initial deadline! —But there’s one scene that doesn’t exist yet, really, and one that needs to be radically uprooted and then maybe replanted upside-down, and there’s the one I decided to leave in its current form until I had a better idea of just how much off the leash I could let it get, which at least I think I might have now, but the overall point is this is also perhaps the messiest draft I’ve ever sat back and said okay, it’s done, let’s revise, but here we are.
The thing about this one is it’s the seventh of the volume, the seventh of the season, and like the first seventh it comes after an overture, an opening, a statement and initial elaboration of a theme, and so one might play a little, mess with structure, ring some changes, take a chance or two as one steps aside and contemplates for a moment where we’ve gotten and where we’re going. And it just so happened that iTunes decided to play a song from Merrily We Roll Along as I was sketching the initial outline, and, well, so.
(One might also note the seventh card of the Major Arcana is the Lovers, but I honestly have no idea why we keep bringing this up.)
—I wrote the draft from end to beginning, is the thing, and now I will revise it from beginning to end, and not having done it this way before I’m not sure what to expect, but at least it helps to explain the shagginess of the current circumstances. Let’s tentatively suggest that I might be done in January, with Patreons to receive copies at that point, and it might then appear here in February, but don’t let’s take that too seriously just yet?
—posted 2896 days ago
Portrait.
Now, I’m not insisting this is what the official portrait of Jo Maguire, Duchess of Southeast, Queen’s Favorite and King’s Huntsman, Widow of the Hawk and First of that Name, would look like…
—Sharnee Gates, styled by Dogukan Nesanir, photographed by Ronan Mckenzie
—posted 2904 days ago
