About Lucy

A short story by Munich-based writer and former journalist Emily Waugh:

At that time, Lucy wrote poetry. For hours, she would stare into space picking the right words, whispering the sounds to herself. She needed to write, she said. It kept her stable.

‘It’s not easy,’ she said, ‘being me.’ She had wanted me to answer no, I didn’t think her self-absorbed. I said nothing and worried over newspaper articles about pesticides harming the genitals of banana farmers I’d never meet. I only started writing after Lucy had left my life.

One morning, just before we were meant to return to university, I asked Lucy for a lift to the station. I was going to Bristol for the day to meet a friend. Lucy had sat up all night to finish an essay. Half-drunk cups of coffee and hand-written notes littered her desk. Lucy would often write on the backs of used envelopes. That’s how vital her thoughts were. As I shrugged on my coat, I saw she had crossed out most of her words. Her brain was no longer working in a linear way. I went to collect my parent’s car keys.

At this point in Lucy’s story, it’s true that I am responsible for what was about to happen. It’s also true that I am overdoing my own importance. It could also have been the weather. Or Chris Martin. Or the English custom of overgrown hedges on narrow roads. I could describe them more, make them more prominent in the climax. I could omit, excuse or exaggerate some details.

Apart from checking the platform number on my printed ticket, I don’t remember much about how we set off in the battered Golf that morning. I could make up some dialogue, but the fact is my memory, everybody’s memory, isn’t that good. The newest Coldplay album was playing. Lucy had remained loyal while I had not. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles whitened. She was focused on something that wasn’t the road. Something I couldn’t see. She didn’t look beautiful or even that sane. It was amazing that somebody so smart could so quickly have their thoughts unravelled. That even with the world at their fingertips, they could lose grip so quickly.

It rained as we weaved through the country lanes. The windscreen looked as if it were melting. The sight of rain blurring glass only occurred to me afterwards when bits of memory came together like papier-mâché. It might have been a snippet from a different morning altogether. Another morning where I had been nervous or happy or a much younger, more innocently generous me.

Lucy screamed. That piercing sound changed everything. She had hit something. Who she was, what had happened to her in life, didn’t matter at that moment. Something was on the ground because of her.

‘What do we do now?’

Read More: The London Magazine

via Webcurios

Marmosets: a very short story by Clarice Lispector

The first time we had a marmoset was just before New Year’s. We were without water and without a maid, people were lining up to buy meat, the hot weather had suddenly begun—when, dumfounded, I saw the present enter the house, already eating a banana, examining everything with great rapidity, and with a long tail. It looked like a monkey not yet grown; its potentialities were tremendous. It climbed up the drying clothes to the clothesline, where it swore like a sailor, and the banana-peelings fell where they would. I was exhausted already. Every time I forgot and absentmindedly went out on the back terrace, I gave a start: there was that happy man. My younger son knew, before I did, that I would get rid of this gorilla: “If I promise that sometime the monkey will get sick and die, will you let him stay? Or if you knew that sometime he’d fall out the window, somehow, and die down there?” My feelings would glance aside. The filthiness and blithe unconsciousness of the little monkey made me responsible for his fate, since he himself would not take any blame. A friend understood how bitterly I had resigned myself, what dark deeds were being nourished beneath my dreaminess, and rudely saved me: a delighted gang of little boys appeared from the hill and carried off the laughing man. The new year was devitalized but at least monkey-less.

A year later, at a time of happiness, suddenly there in Copacabana I saw the small crowd. I thought of my children, the joys they gave me, free, unconnected with the worries they also gave me, free, and I thought of a chain of joy: “Will the person receiving this pass it along to someone else,” one to another, like a spark along a train of powder. Then and there I bought the one who would be called Lisette.

She could almost fit in one hand. She was wearing a skirt, and earrings, necklace, and bracelet of glass beads. The air of an immigrant just disembarking in her native costume. Like an immigrant’s, too, her round eyes.

This one was a woman in miniature. She lived with us three days. She had such delicate bones. She was of such a sweetness. More than her eyes, her look was rounded. With every movement, the earrings shook; the skirt was always neat, the red necklace glinted. She slept a lot, but, as to eating, she was discreet and languid. Her rare caress was only a light bite that left no mark.

On the third day we were out on the back terrace admiring Lisette and the way she was ours. “A little too gentle,” I thought, missing the gorilla. And suddenly my heart said harshly: “But this isn’t sweetness. This is death.” The dryness of the message left me calm. I said to the children: “Lisette is dying.” Looking at her, I realized the stage of love we had already reached. I rolled her up in a napkin and went with the children to the nearest first-aid station, where the doctor couldn’t attend to her because he was performing an emergency operation on a dog. Another taxi—”Lisette thinks she’s out for a drive, mama”—another hospital. There they gave her oxygen.

Read more: Biblioklept

Kipling, Kim, and Being a Third Culture Kid

I was in 9th grade when I first heard the name Rudyard Kipling mentioned in school. My history teacher had decided to inaugurate a unit on imperialism, and Kipling’s zealous verses soon rang loudly through the classroom:

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Read more: 3 Quarks Daily 

Trading Misery for Death

Abdel Wahab Yousif, a young Sudanese poet died in 2020 when a rubber boat packed with African immigrants sank into the sea shortly after setting off from Libya on its way to Europe. He had predicted his own death at sea in  his recent poems:

You’ll die at sea.

Your head rocked by the roaring waves,

your body swaying in the water,

like a perforated boat.

In the prime of youth you’ll go,

shy of your 30th birthday.

Departing early is not a bad idea;

but it surely is if you die alone,

with no woman calling you to her embrace:

“Let me hold you to my breast,

I have plenty of room.

Let me wash the dirt of misery off your soul.”

This is the last poem he wrote:

You are destined to go;

Today, tomorrow,

or the day after.

No one can halt the heavy wheel of destruction

running over life’s body.

It’s all in vain

no last-minute savior will come

and rescue the world’s body.

It’s all in vain

no flash of light,

to scare away the darkness.

Everything is dying:

Time. Language.

Screams. Dreams.

Songs. Love. Music.

All in vain.

Everything is gone,

except a violent vacuum

dead bodies wrapped in melancholic silence

and a heavy downpour of destruction.

Read more: ARABLIT

Leaves by Lloyd Schwartz

                         1 

Every October it becomes important, no, necessary

to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded

by leaves turning; it's not just the symbolism,

to confront in the death of the year your death,

one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony 

isn't lost on you that nature is most seductive

when it's about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its 

incipient exit, an ending that at least so far 

the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)

have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe

is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception

because of course nature is always renewing itself—

        the trees don't die, they just pretend,

        go out in style, and return in style: a new style.

                        2 

Is it deliberate how far they make you go

especially if you live in the city to get far 

enough away from home to see not just trees 

but only trees? The boring highways, roadsigns, high 

speeds, 10-axle trucks passing you as if they were 

in an even greater hurry than you to look at leaves:

so you drive in terror for literal hours and it looks 

like rain, or snow, but it's probably just clouds

(too cloudy to see any color?) and you wonder, 

given the poverty of your memory, which road had the 

most color last year, but it doesn't matter since 

you're probably too late anyway, or too early—

        whichever road you take will be the wrong one

        and you've probably come all this way for nothing.

                        3 

You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly

a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through

and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably

won't last. But for a moment the whole world

comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—

red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,

gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations

of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.

It won't last, you don't want it to last. You 

can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop. 

It's what you've come for. It's what you'll

come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll 

        remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt

        or something you've felt that also didn't last.

Copyright © 1992 by Lloyd Schwartz. From Goodnight, Gracie (The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Appears courtesy of the author.

William Blake's Dark Vision Of London

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

(Aeon)

September

 

“All the months are crude experiments,out of which the perfect September is made.”
-Virginia Woolf

Ernest Hemingway Louis Vuitton Writer’s Trunk

Once presented, this Louis Vuitton trunk offers a first compartment for books, 6 other compartments for ink and writing tools and a box dedicated to the storage of a typewriter and manuscripts. Only the Corona Portable 3 typewriter can be inserted in this box.

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Love in the Time of Hillbilly Elegy: On JD Vance’s Appalachian Grift

Justin B. Wymer knows a snake when he sees one:

The hardest drive I ever had to make lasted 15 minutes. It was from my father’s house on a hilly farm in Winfield, West Virginia, to St. Albans, the small town I grew up outside, on the day of my mother’s funeral. I’d just flown in from Denver, and I hadn’t slept in days. My brother was in the hospital, and he was refusing visitors.

My aunt, who’d driven in from North Carolina for the funeral, and I had tried to find the cause of what we assumed was another overdose for my brother. With him stabilized in the hospital, we looked through his hundreds of keys, his boxes of glasses and knives he’d collected, to find the one to his biggest safe, where we assumed we’d discover one of my mom’s hydrocodone bottles squirreled away. His safe had some photos, a watch, some cologne. We thought maybe he’d attempted suicide, which was honestly unlike him, but grief does wild things. Maybe, we decided, he’d gotten the drugs from a girlfriend who’d pawned my mother’s remaining jewelry for the goods. It wouldn’t be the first time.

My aunt and I called his cell phone, left at home when the ambulance took him. We searched the house in frenzied precision, looking for an explanation to one narrowly avoided death to distract from the real one, my mother’s. We heard it buzz from the basement. We searched the insulation between exposed rafters, hoisted up on step ladders and a beat-up futon. It wasn’t there. We heard the buzz through the wood. It was upstairs. We ran back up and found it hidden under chip bags, inside a blanket folded, behind an empty gun case, in my brother’s bedroom. We searched his messages, but there was no proof he’d bought any drugs. As we later found out, he’d suffered acute kidney failure after not drinking any water, in grief.

He and my mother were inseparable; they loved each other fiercely, debilitatingly. They were tumultuous, but they’d saved each other’s lives again and again, over the years. He didn’t know how to live without her; he couldn’t care for himself when it wasn’t a byproduct of caring for her. He ended up missing our mother’s funeral because he was in hospital, and he never forgave himself for it.

When I walked into the funeral home, there were more flies around the single standing spray of flowers than people in attendance. One now-deceased cousin showed up in neon-yellow socks and gym shorts, and when asked, he said, “Sandy would want me to be comfortable.” My uncle, his father, would not speak to me because he’d told my mother she should abandon me because of my sexuality, but I was told his showing up was his version of respect for me, and I should be happy with that. People told me I looked great, in a blazer my aunt had bought me for job interviews. “Harvard looks good on you,” they said. “We loved that obituary you wrote. We could tell you wrote it; it was poetic-like.” Even there, when I couldn’t afford to bury my mother, they saw me as my education, as my profession.

I paid the singer–preacher my mother loved, who consoled the audience by saying she succeeded in being a woman of God. It offered me no consolation. This funeral wasn’t for me. This funeral was for the people who, judging my mother an addict, never showed up to mourn her. At least, I thought, in the Charleston Gazette, I’d show my mother for the intelligent, complicated woman she was in the obituary I wrote. It was, of course, maudlin, but it was honest, and it cost me $400 to publish. I’d used my education, my grad student stipend, to give her that much.

Read more: Literary Hub

On International Dog Day

Georgia O’Keeffe with Chow, 1975 (Photo by Juan Hamilton, via Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

When the two weeks were up, there was a very very slight movement in the tail almost nothing. So again I called the vet. As he looked the dog over, he said that it would be hard for the dog to drag those legs always. You were there. We talked a little and decided to put him to sleep and call it his end. He had had a good life. He looked so beautiful as he sat there with us. When I think of it now I even get an odd feeling in my stomach. He was given a shot and lay quietly down. He was put in the back of the car.

It was all that a man could do to lift him in.

We drove out into the White Hills—dug a hole under a small sized cedar bush and put my beautiful dog into it and covered him with earth and many rocks. I like to think that probably he goes running and leaping through the White Hills alone in the night.

Georgia O’Keeffe
Letter to Todd Webb
20th November 1981

via Letters of Note newsletter

How Much Brian Bilston Hates The Daily Mail (and I concur)

 

Jack Kerouac's Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road (1952)

He wrote this letter to his potential publisher to explain why he preferred to use his own cover art:

Dear Mr. Wyn:

I submit this as my idea of an appealing commercial cover expressive of the book. The cover for “The Town and the City” was as dull as the title and the photo backflap. Wilbur Pippin’s photo of me is the perfect On the Road one … it will look like the face of the figure below.

J.K.

More: Open Culture

"Sleeping in the Forest" - Mary Oliver

"I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better."

When should you admit you hate a book - a flowchart

You’re reading, and starting to realize that this book is not for you. Whether it’s the bad characters, the bad plotting, or the plain old bad writing, you’re getting ready to close this book for good and donate it to the library.

Literary Hub

This veep likes books

Earlier this year, in honour of Reading Month, Governor Walz placed a Free Little Library at the Minnesota state capitol. The gesture, produced in cahoots with the Little Free Library organization and Minnesota public librarians, was a pointed response to the hundreds of attempted book bans that have been running roughshod over America’s stacks.

(Literary Hub)