Chronicle

The Black Scarab

Once, I turned a black scarab beetle upside down. Then gently, I flicked him and watched him spin in circles. I could’ve gone into my mother’s pantry, found a jar and kept him in my room, but I wanted him to be able to go. I flicked him again. This time I left it to chance to bring him back to his feet, but it didn’t happen and I decided to leave him like this on the balcony. The next day after school I visited him, he was still there and I lamented his condition. The day after too, and then he died.

That Saturday, my grandmother came over to babysit me. We were on the balcony working on her crochet napkins when the phone rang. We put down our yarn and needles and hurried inside. It was her sister Rosa. Their eldest sister had been murdered at the train station, she was stabbed more than 19 times on her back. My grandmother fell to the floor. I called my father. I remember nothing of the next few days.

At that time, I already had a dreamlike habit of extending stories in my head. I liked listening to music lying on my back on our living room carpet. I’d play the same song on repeat stopping to relisten to each line. Once I had converted the entire song—each line, each melody—into a seamless sequence of images, I’d let myself listen to the whole song uninterrupted. It was a constraint I adopted in my experience with reading. Until my fifth grade teacher taught me to check-out books from the library, the only book I read was the Bible; when I made my first library card I spent my school breaks reading Nancy Drew on a red leather bean bag in the hallway. I couldn’t rely on my parents for new stories: we rarely went to bookstores and we never went to a library. So I read the Bible, the only book on my nightstand, and when the stories became insufficient, I dreamed of Abel’s life had there been no Cain or of Noah’s ark sinking in the sea.

The week after my great aunt died, during one of these afternoons, I had a reflux sensation where something started gargling in my throat. I felt like I was choking and the only way out of it was to get what was choking me out. I ran to get paper. Lying on that carpet I spat out whatever it was that was sitting there, and it went something like this:

Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam (Beethoven’s 5th symphony)
a baby is born
Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam (hospital machinery)
a woman is dying

My mother chose my name because it means rebirth in Latin. She converted the year I was born. Her born-again experience took such proportions she decided to name me on its behalf. Her rebirth was my paralysis, when I was born she transformed into my child. Like the scarab under my hold, I existed only as far as the limitations of her existence. My nature had no power before her, and I too had no place to go.

There was a time when the Egyptians believed in many Gods, when they believed Khepri—the scarab-faced God—pushed the sun across the sky each morning, just like scarabs push dirt balls across the earth. Our mothers push us into the world. We are taught, shaped, structured, measured, our barbarian ways are paralyzed. My mother believed in one God, the one that was reborn today to save his children from their sins. Who I was before the world happened to me felt impossibly distant for many years, yet the truth was never far from my reach, I just needed to find the will to turn around and see it.

New Books

Why I’m Reading These Books

Reflections on Exile and Other Essays by Edward W. Said
Because as a child, Edward Said moved many times between Egypt and Palestine, only to settle outside of his home country in America. Having moved back and forth between America and Brazil, and only settling in France, I find solace in his experience and I’m curious to see the impact his upbringing had on his thinking.

The Natural Genesis by Gerald Massey
Because this work on the intersection of Christianity and Ancient Egypt was very controversial when it was published. I’m curious to see why and how Massey became such a polemical figure.

Felix Holt: The Radical by George Eliot
Because it’s said George Eliot’s Felix Holt was based on Gerald Massey.

The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
Because I came across a quote in one of my old notebooks from when I first read this book and it left me wanting to read it again. It’s a short book, an easy read, and it always inspires me.: “it is the law that condemns it [the plant] to immobility from its birth to its death.”

The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Because it’s part of the research I’m doing on Egyptian mythology.

In The Hands of God by Johanna Bard Richlin
Because my experience moving to the United States with an evangelical mother determined my life experience. When a book with this kind of research comes out, I can’t resist it. It’s a strong reminder that I’m not alone.

Saint Augustine Confessions
Because I always wanted to read the Confessions, but I also always wanted to be guided through it. After reading some of the essays Garth Greenwell wrote last year while teaching this book, I felt like I could finally tap into it without feeling alone. I’m looking forward to reading it and listening to his master class Mysticism for Writers.

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
Because I admire Jhumpa Lahiri’s strength as a person. Ever since she moved to Italy and taught herself to write in Italian I have a newfound admiration for her. I’m very curious to see what she says about translation, particularly after having translated numerous Italian short stories. If you haven’t read this The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, it is a wonderful compilation she edited that includes Calvino, Buzzati, Svevo, Moravia, Lampedusa, Ginzburg, the list goes on.

The Visual Library

Ancient Egypt

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Six Articles I Recommend This Week + One Short Story

1. For the Yale Review, Jhumpa Lahiri writes about rereading Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Read

   For decades, I had looked to Hardy as a pillar of realism. On this rereading of Jude, the novel turned into a ghost story, an example of the fantastic.

2. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s I Taught My Son Everything, Except How to Take a Vacation in the New York Times Magazine is a story about motherhood and a compelling critique on what it means to take a vacation today. Read

3. Tamara Sanderson writes about the psychological delusion that tormented many men in the 14th century, when they believed parts of their bodies were made of glass. Read

   The physicians André Du Laurens and Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz independently documented a nobleman who believed himself to be shaped specifically like a glass pitcher. Not merely made of glass, but also contained by it: he slept buried in straw, terrified that he might tip in the night and pour himself out across the floor.

4. The American poet Ange Mlinko reviews Under a Pannonian Sky, a new anthology of female Hungarian poets born between 1922 and 1972. When László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize last year, I was ashamed to admit I had never read any works by Hungarian writers. Mlinko’s review in the NYRB is a great introduction. Read

5. You may have read Merve Emre’s essay The Critic as Friend in the Yale Review last year, or listened to her podcast The Critic and Her Publics, or come across one of several essays she’s written for the New Yorker on Goethe or Milton. If you’ve been following Emre’s work, you might enjoy this brief interview. Read

6. In The American Scholar, Bill Hayes writes about the notes his late partner Oliver Sacks wrote in the margins of books and essays. Read

   In Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Oliver sounded almost comically exasperated as he responded to a rambling critique Kant makes of David Hume (whom Oliver revered): “Immanuel,” he wrote, as if speaking directly to the philosopher across the centuries, “you are totally confused!”

7. Will Hall’s short story Love Language in the Drift. Read

Six Essays I Recommend This Week

1. Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid by Virginia Woolf. Read

   Unless we can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.

2. Why Go Out? by Sheila Heti. Read

3. In Favor of Fear by Clarice Lispector. Read

4. Exile’s Poet by Mahmoud Darwish. Read

5. Good Readers and Good Writers by Vladimir Nabokov. Read

6. A History of Eternity by Jorge Luis Borges. Read

My Morning Read

The Story of Egypt by Joann Fletcher.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

We’re a bit stuck… Vita is reading less than before and I’m hoping it’s just another one of those phases, but being the intense and panicked mother that I am, I haven’t been able to take this lightly. I’ve been doing large amounts of research on finding the right books for her and having them sent from Amazon in America to France (please forgive me, but children’s English bookstores in France are not cutting it right now). Anyway, I think I found a way in, I noticed she’s into stories she can relate to… She loves Jabari Jumps, because it’s about overcoming your fears, and Julian is a Mermaid, a queer story about being whoever you want to be. She’s nearly five years old, and if you have any recommendations I would be so grateful.

What My Husband is Listening To

Jeune Morty Vol.1 by Jeune Morty

A Movie I’m Thinking About

Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog

A Poem

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder by A. E. Housman

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
And went with half my life about my ways.

I was sleeping under a mosquito net in Brazil for the last two weeks. We were in a region I never visited before, on the edge of a national reserve in the Northeastern end of Ceará. Think of South America’s Atlantic coast before Europeans arrived: wild donkeys grazing in green patches between the sea and the sand dunes, black vultures chewing on the remains of a sting ray washed onto the beach, salt water lakes glimmering after high tide, and mangroves covered in crabs and sea horses.

After two airplanes and half a day in the car we landed in a stilt house complex in front of the sea. During the last hour of our trip we crossed a narrow river on a jangada1 and nearly 15 kilometers of sand. We watched our driver contour the dunes to find dry paths where the car could pass without digging its wheels into wet sand. We saw tourists ride buggies2 to the top of golden hills to watch the sun set over the Atlantic.

If the way to heaven is apocalyptic, we were driving to the end of the world. Our journey revealed the most paradoxical nature; a land where grass sprouts from the sand, trees grow sideways, and fish swim between fresh water rivers and the sea. The dunes separate the village from the nearest bank and visitors are spared none of the quirks of this isolation; a possum visited our room each night to steal apples, and on one afternoon, a giant cave cockroach landed on my daughter’s face.

The village, built on sand, feels as lawless as the American frontier in an old Western. We can enter town through the beach by way of two main roads; a path on the northern end or a central street marked by a row of cocktail carts. Both are busy with restaurants, food vendors, and hippies selling jewelry. Every inch of real estate is accounted for here, including in the alleyways that connect the main streets to each other. There are no street lamps, people rely on the moonlight to see where they’re going, and when it rains, excess rainwater floods the sandy roads and disgorges onto the sea. Water cascades from the main streets and through the alleys at a speed so high it’s impossible to walk until the storm settles and the water drains completely. Several times, during the day and at night, we tried to follow the main road to the opposite end of town, but found ourselves walking into an abyss. It was the most uncanny sensation, and we decided to limit our circulation to the proposed network.

Here, time had either stopped a long time ago or was wildly ahead. Something had turned this community against the present. There were no newspapers, no magazines, no banks, no institutions, no post office. The main timekeepers were a lottery house and a very kind old man exchanging crossword puzzles for charity donations. I wanted to perceive this place as a modern hinterland where ordinary people live in a bewildering desert, a place of repose with unexpected quirks and phenomenons of nature, but everything we looked upon felt like a pastiche of different times. It was unsettling, as if we were vacationing inside a parallel, dystopic world where the order of things was being kept from us.

We couldn’t find any signs to reveal the way this reality was organized. The only remnants of history were an abandoned catholic church, dry boats anchored on the beach, and elderly women passing town with baskets full of fruit—we were told they once crossed town bearing fresh fish. We encountered zero policemen, yet it’s the safest I ever felt in Brazil. I wore jewelry, we carried all our money in our wallets and consistently forgot our documents tossed around our beds. It was nothing like taking my family to Rio. The community wanted us to trust them, to believe in their goodwill, yet there was nothing upholding their behavior and guaranteeing our safety. The moral systems that ensure ethical behavior elsewhere, aren’t the same as the ones sustaining this village. People are autonomous. They fend for themselves, raise families with their own codes of conduct. Some children go to school, others play at the beach, and several are already working. They have a different sense of duty, they act free from rules, yet there’s still some sort of social order in governance.

One of the only instances when I was able to break through to someone, go past this immediate need they have to portray goodwill, was with the manicurist in my room, and it was accidental. First she asked me if I was really Brazilian, I didn’t answer. I asked her to stop calling me patroa, which is Portuguese for a lady boss, and offered her a coffee. It was as if this short interaction was a silent agreement for her. What ensued were two hours of pure talking, she was a gossip magazine, my very own marker of time. She told me about Virginia’s affair with Vinny Jr., about the cast in Big Brother Brasil 26, about the commission the hotel charges on her pay, about the Brazilian women staying in this room during Carnaval. She asked me about television in France and if my husband was helpful with my child. Then she started going on about the helicopter that flew a man to Fortaleza after he broke his dick with a prostitute. I was in disbelief, not at the story but at the crude language, at the importance she gave this news and how normal it felt to her. I thought she was talking about the kind of gossip that comes from those distant relatives in another city. It was only when I realized it took place at the luxury hotel down the street from us that all lightness lost its humor. His escort was so embarrassed she flew back to São Paulo without her belongings, she laughed. And then she revealed more: there’s always something going on there, the owner was running for mayor but the feds came knocking and he dropped out of the race. After she left I looked at my nails and thought, there’s great fear in feeling too safe.

Brazilians have grown used to life under the shadow of an unjust government incapable of providing hope. The teenagers gathered by the cocktail carts each night didn’t frighten me. I discarded any threatening thoughts as inherited paranoia and continued to live with my guard down. Even when one of the teenage boys walked past us with his leg covered and stained with blood, I didn’t question our safety. I only decided to poke around the day we saw three teenagers sprint up the main road in tantalizing speed with panic in their eyes. Not because of them, but because when it happened everyone around us carried on with their business, acted as if it didn’t happen. Had my husband not seen it too, I would’ve thought I fabricated this sprint. People around us looked like zombies, they looked possessed, they were paralyzed. It was so strange, were we the only ones not under this spell?

The hippies, the business owners, the women selling lace tablecloths and dresses, they all brushed off my roundabout questions. I knew then that something was at play, they had closed the curtains but forgot to cover the gap. We could step into their reality now, into the dimension where order was operating. After the alarm cleared, and a sense of normalcy returned to the minds of the people, I started poking around again. Finally someone agreed to answer by discreetly guiding my eyes to the “CV” initials painted in red on the wall. When we were walking back to our room we noticed them everywhere, they stand for Comando Vermelho or in English, Red Command. And then it hit me: we were vacationing in the den of one of Brazil’s largest factions.

If once Brazilians associated criminal factions with urban city centers, the Red Command with Rio de Janeiro, now we were starting to do so with small coastal towns. What was once a fisherman village ruled by nature is now governed by the Red Command, the nation’s largest drug cartel. The Red Command isn’t just at war against the police, it’s at war for expansion. The Northeast’s proximity to the United States makes drug transportation by sea easier and quicker. To the townspeople, living here means that even petty crimes fall under the delegation of this faction. Robberies aren’t solved by the police force but by kids responsible for maintaining order in the affiliate. If you rob once you’re warned, twice you’re disciplined, three times, you’re dead. Only three weeks ago a local addict was murdered in the dunes. There’s only one system governing this society’s behavior, it’s the death penalty.

Between lunch and dinner tourists usually have coffee and a snack at the dessert shop in one of the alleys. They brew the best coffee in town and their desserts are delicious. My daughter’s mouth watered for the different brigadeiros3 displayed on their glass vitrine. The hubbub inside often encourages strangers to interact. I had my Brazilian identity questioned there almost every day. At times people told me point blank after I ordered that they’d never imagine I was from Brazil. On one instance a teenager pointed out to her father that we were French, and when they made a kind remark about my daughter and I replied gratefully in Portuguese, they were in complete disbelief—jaws dropped to the ground. So it was in this environment, in this crowded shop that we saw Brazilians, Americans, Germans, and French tourists come together. It was also the first place where we heard people speak Hebrew.

As our trip carried on, we noticed more and more people speaking Hebrew and concluded it was a popular holiday spot for Israelis too. When we ate lunch at the sandwich shop in the north part of town, there were several Israeli kids in their twenties sitting at the table smoking weed, eating sandwiches and açai bowls around us, and although the menu on the counter was written in Portuguese, there was a white board propped up on the corner with a tiny drawing of the Israeli flag, followed by something written in Hebrew. Before I could point it out to my husband, a local woman with a small child asked me to purchase a bracelet so she could buy a slice of cake at the shop for her daughter. As I reached for the change I made at the counter, shuffling the coins to make sure I had enough for a slice, I asked the man what the sign read. It offered a ten percent discount to Israeli customers.

As if this village had not already portrayed to us a condensed image of Brazilian narco-politics, it was also bringing center stage questions about global political alliances.

Later, when we were driving to the airport, I asked our driver about the man who owns the sandwich shop. As it turns out, when young Israeli soldiers finish military service, the Israeli government offers them paid holidays in this village. They pay for their flights and lodging, the kids are responsible only for what they eat.

The day we visited the sandwich shop was February 29, the day after Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran. I’m still left trying to discern why America’s greatest ally, with the most advanced intelligence agency in the world, is sending soldiers on R & R to this village. I think we can all stipulate the same answer to this question.

Something about leaving this place tells me I’m not leaving the haven I thought I was coming to visit. I’m relieved to no longer be under the governance of the Red Command, yet this freedom is obviously just an illusion.

As an expatriated Brazilian, I feel responsible for their supplication for help and guilty for my uselessness. On two occasions married men with children confided in us their hope to escape this country and take their families abroad. It’s not that they’re not proud to be Brazilian, but they understood they’ve been neglected by their own people; by the government, the rich, and their neighbors. The desperation in their discourse is brutal to hear, disturbing to witness, and real: their only hope is another system altogether, because this one oppresses them and keeps them from the basic right which should be owed to each human: freedom. It’s incredibly naive for me to say this, but I wish I could help them. In a community this desolate, it’s too easy to foresee the catastrophic atrocities to come, the moral sacrifices the innocent will have to continue making to survive. A fine line keeps their tomorrow from an apocalypse of biblical proportions, and the threat is so imminent I can smell the bloodshed, hear the massacre all the way from my bedroom in France.

Book and Film Recommendations

What follows is a compilation of the works that came to mind while I was in this village and thinking about telling this story. It is in no way an extensive research of the works around the themes I address in this piece, it’s simply what came to mind in my feelings.

Books

Iracema by José de Alencar (1865)
Iracema is a classic in Brazilian literature, and tells of the mythical birth of Ceará. The protagonist, a native Brazilian woman named Iracema, has since become an important symbol in Brazil’s mythological history. José de Alencar was born in Ceará and is until this day one of Brazil’s most important literary figures. Read

The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel (2024)
Winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature this novel tells the story of an illiterate homosexual man who decides to learn to read and write at 71 to read the letter from the man he encountered in his youth, and was prohibited to see after his father discovered their sexual relationship. The story takes place in Ceará. Read

Films

Black God, White Devil (1964)
A Revisionist Western directed by Glauber Rocha in Bahia. It was nominated for an Oscar as a foreign language feature. It tells the story of an outlaw who joins a religious cult.

The Oyster and The Wind (1997)
A movie filmed in the village I described in Ceará. It was directed by Walter Lima Jr. and based on a novel by Moacir C. Lopes. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival and competed for the main prize. One of the main actors in the film was Fernando Torres, the father of Fernanda Torres who was nominated for an Oscar last year for her role in the Brazilian film “I’m Still Here” by Walter Salles.

Bacurau (2019)
A Brazilian surrealist movie directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho that takes place in a small town called Bacurau in the Brazilian sertão. In 2019, it won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Chronicle

My Protagonist

You can feel when people have lost faith in you. When their words aren’t as gentle as they once felt, when they look at you in despair, unsure which eye to fix their gaze upon. When you speak, they stare at your lips. Your words aren’t void of meaning, but they do weigh less on their minds.

I don’t dream, I don’t have stories to tell, I have no convictions. I’m failing at my own perceptions. I tell myself, it’s not for me to worry about the other’s regard, it’s for me to look further out, so far beyond to a place where their gaze cannot meet mine. It is for me to catch my own shadow, the one I’ve lost faith in, to watch it, tie it away next to me.

Certain days I remember my head resting on my little pillow and you moving into my dreams, casting yourself in front of the light. You remind me of chalk, you are large and round and you chased me in a diagonal line, dust balls rolled around us. Now you chase me in plain daylight, when I think I’m most awake, when I leave my desk to drop off the dry cleaning, when I leave my desk to pick-up veal and ham from the butcher. During the day, when the alarm stops sounding you appear.

I believe I’m coming closer to you now, step-by-step, like a cat hunting rabbits in the grassland. This is the fight you want. When I catch you I discover you’re dry. I find clarity when you feel lost. I’m here, I exist and you don’t, and I know what it feels like to be you, to cross the streets, to get in the way when I’m reaching for something greater than your answers can provide.

Even if I’m blind to your beauty I still see you, so I’ll write you into something. How I’d like to see your eyes shrink when the sun gets too bright.

I’m strong enough now to push you to the side and watch you from the center. Today I become your shadow and you my protagonist. I will torture you, I will turn you around like a beetle in the grass and watch you move your legs back and forth in despair. I’ll make you face agony and I’ll ask you to recover. You will forget yourself, you’ll let me walk between you and the sun now. You will lie there dry as sticks, but I am not God, I’m not in control, you are. You do as you will, with your will and your reason, I give you only conditions. You are a woman. I will not show you what that means, you will discover it.

Why do I want to abuse you? Why do I want to torture you? Are you worthy of something better? Will you lose faith? At the end of this, I will be but a name and you will have inherited the world. You will want to go back to the blackwater river and paddle the Amazon looking for everything you’ve lost, but the forest won’t give it to you. You will have to find something new. We regenerate like dry trees, but never do any of us return to seeds.

New Books

Why I’m Buying These Books

Rhyme’s Reason by John Hollander
Because I read an article this week (which I link below) where the American poet Carl Phillips refers to this book as his introduction to poetry. Although I love poetry, and came to it by way of a Stéphane Mallarmé poem that touched me profoundly, I never studied it and I don’t understand its mechanics. I’d love to discover what he discovered in Hollander’s guide.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
Because I listened to a 1990 lecture (which I link below) by the American philosopher and historian Richard Rorty, and I identified with his perspective on contemporary society’s moral and social progress.

The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch
Because she deals with humor in both a literary and entertaining way, and I find this to be a difficult combination to achieve. She’s also concerned with religion and I’m interested to see how she deals with spirituality within this context. To be honest, I had forgotten all about her until someone on Substack (I’m sorry I forgot who it was) posted a note about her and it prompted me to read her again, it feels like the right time for me. I listened to several interviews with her on YouTube, and I found she has a very unique perspective on literature and philosophy.

The Great Wave by Michiko Kakutani
Because I really enjoyed reading her book reviews and I went looking to see what she was working on recently and came across this book. I’m fascinated by the idea of the outsider and I’m curious to see how she places them as influential people in contemporary society.

Democracy and Education by John Dewey
Because I’m invested in constantly learning about the state of literary education and I’m curious to read John Dewey’s perspective from the early 20th century. Everything I’ve read by Dewey feels extremely contemporary and relevant to the issues we’re facing as a society today and I undoubtedly believe this is the case with this work:

As the American population appears increasingly subject to rhetorical manipulation and ideological extremism, Dewey imagines the possibility of education cultivating "habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.

The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom
I already own this one but I think it’s time to reread it. It has come up numerous times this year, and I think it can help push me forward. Each time I read this book it’s as if he was sitting in a room talking to me and helping me get over whatever hurdle I’m undergoing at that moment. There’s so much instruction inside that I couldn’t possibly not revisit it multiple times throughout my life. Each time I discover something else that enlightens my creative process.

The Visual Library

Portraits

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Seven Articles and One Podcast I Recommend This Week

1. Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time used to be my favorite radio show/podcast. I was genuinely scared the show would come to an end when Bragg retired last year, and I’m relieved it’s continuing this year with a new host, the author and historian Misha Glenny. The first episode came out yesterday (February 12) and looks into John Stuart Mill and his landmark work On Liberty. Listen

   + upcoming episode topics include The Mariana Trench, The Roman Arena, Henry IV Part 1, and The Code of Hammurabi.

2. After 22 years as a NYT columnist, David Brooks writes his final op-ed. The result is a profound understanding of American identity and the value culture has on shaping its future: “We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.” Read

3. The poet Carl Phillips opens up about teaching himself to write poetry, his first encounter with William Carlos Williams, and the impact Williams’ poetry collection had on his life: “A poem seemed a space to store a secret, and I had plenty of secrets. I began then to write the poems that would become my first book—though if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have written them.” Read

4. The Harvard scholar Mark Ray Lewis recently translated A Tale Told to the Darkness, a short story by Rainer Maria Rilke about being present. Read

5. In light of Namwali Serpell’s upcoming book On Morrison (to be published by Hogarth Press on February 17), the Nation has published an excerpt of one of her essays where she offers a new reading of Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye. Read

6. Bella Freud’s cousin Emma Freud also has a story to tell. In the Observer, Emma remembers how a plant brought her closer to her great-grandfather: “So there I was, moving from apathy to disbelief, holding the same plant my great-grandfather Sigmund had nurtured nearly 100 years ago.” Read

7. Hermione Lee reviews Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife for the New York Review of Books. Read

8. After a three-year break, the investigative journalist is back on Substack. I’ve been following Greenwald since Edward Snowden handed him the confidential documents that would lead to the global surveillance disclosure by the Guardian. Greenwald later co-founded the nonprofit news organization The Intercept, which he resigned from in 2020 after a dispute with its editors. I’m pleased to see him kick-off with a video on Howard Lutnick and the Epstein files. Watch

Four Essays and Two Lectures I Recommend This Week

1. Jung’s View of Christianity by C. G. Jung. Read

2. Ethics of Principle versus Sensitivity by Richard Rorty. Watch

3. Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida. Read

4. The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. Read

5. The Generation of Postmemory by Marianne Hirsch. Read

   Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance.

6. Sublime & the Beautiful Revisited by Iris Murdoch. Listen

My Morning Read

I’m not sure my therapist was being ethical (and neither was he) when he told me to read Doris Lessing more than ten years ago. Regardless, I never did. Let’s see where The Golden Notebook takes me. Every time I start on a new author I hope to find romance (I’m very often disappointed, I’m as much of a picky reader today as I was a picky eater more than thirty years ago). I hope I fall in love, and if I don’t I still win—there’s nothing like starting the day with a woman’s voice.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

Vita is letting me read to her in French again, and this book is on repeat. La Cabane sous le cerisier tells the story of two cousins who build a tent in their grandmother’s backyard but struggle with the ants, cats, and chickens invading their set-up. The story ends with a sweet lesson about respecting nature.

What My Husband is Listening To

A Movie I’m Thinking About

The Wind Will Carry Us by Abbas Kiarostami

A Poem

The Art of Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness—such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Chronicle

Our President (Nosso Presidente)

In the beginning there was no silence. It was loud, far too loud, far too crowded. The line was long. Every person wanted to say something. Something about the President. Something about who they wanted to be President. Something about the war. In their speech there was no trace of not saying anything, of not thinking anything. Of not having an opinion or a disagreement or an agreement.

Existing for them had meant drafting slogans and wearing comfortable shoes to march on the streets for or against anything. They were anything they wanted to be. Being, just being something, anything, made them belong. It was the force of the great majority you see. The voice of rebellion. We want. We need. Give us. Stop this. Start this. Criticize that. Speak up. Fight. They had all entered a place of importunity. But all their remarks were reactions. When you gave them a question: sir, madam, are you blue or are you green. These people felt that either green or blue was the answer. There was no other color outside of this question.

So when the time came to answer the right question. Is it this President or that President, you see, they felt the need to answer. Is this President corrupt or honest, the answer mattered little, because that is the President they were picking. And they were picking this one President over the other President. And soon what mattered to these people was not the grains that were missing on the tables of their neighbors, or the teachers that no longer wanted to present themselves in school, or the policemen who weren’t getting paid, or the entire identity crises of the nation they lived in, it was just the fight between Presidents. What mattered to them was not rather it was right for a man to pee in the mouth of another man in public. It was not rather it was right for a man to chop down the world’s largest natural reserve. What mattered was who won. What mattered was who was right. What mattered was if their vote counted, if they mattered, if they could be agreed on, if they won the argument that night over a beer at the table of the bar. One opinion. One shared desire. One common people. One, unanimous, one answer, one solution, one question, one cognition, one education. One of the same.

New Books

Why I’m Buying These Books

In America by Susan Sontag
After listening to Susan Sontag’s 1999 interview with Charlie Rose on the publication of her novel “In America,” I realized I had never read her fiction, and I became curious to see how she approaches the process of storytelling. At the time, she called “In America” her best work yet.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
I’m still reading Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady.” In the introduction, James writes about Turgenev’s influence on the novel, and it isn’t the first time a writer I admire has made reference to the Russian novelist. Virginia Woolf also praised him, notably in a 1934 essay titled “The Novels of Turgenev”, and both Leo Tolstoy and Jorge Luis Borges recommended him as a lifetime essential read. I feel inadequate, as though I’m missing a piece, having never read his work.

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
Not too long ago, I was speaking with an Italian couple about the novels of Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, and Italo Calvino, and they recommended Dino Buzzati.

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
It seems strange to know Willa Cather, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf but not Eudora Welty. After watching this 1974 television interview with her I decided to start where Harold Bloom recommended we start, with her novel “Delta Wedding”.

The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
It seems more timely than ever to read Theodor Adorno’s study on the psychology of authoritarianism.

Rethinking Postcolonialism by Amar Acheraïou
This book was recommended by a friend during a conversation about colonialist discourse in modern literature.

The Visual Library

Portraits

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Nine Articles I Recommend

1. On December 31, the New York Times published Robert Draper’s profile on the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican party’s newest critic. Read

2. The Louisiana Museum’s video channel interviewed the textile artist Sheila Hicks talking about her work and her thinking. Watch

3. Rachel Aviv recently wrote about Oliver Sacks for the New Yorker. Sacks’ biographer, also a former New Yorker writer, Lawrence Weschler reacted to Aviv’s approach with a post on his Substack . Read Aviv and Read Weschler.

4. In Harper’s Magazine, Rosa Lyster writes about two men who chopped down an old Sycamore tree in England. Read

5. David Marchese is still one of our greatest living interviewers. At the end of the year, he interviewed the writer, lawyer, and activist Raja Shehadeh on what peace between Israel and Palestine might look like and how to get there: “Start teaching about the other, teaching the literature of the other, teaching that there were times in Palestine when the Jews and the Arabs lived together amicably and peacefully, and they were important times.” Read or Listen

6. For the NYRB, Kevin Power reviewed David Szalay’s new novel Flesh. Read

7. Inside a scientific research that sent four artificial intelligence models to therapy: “Chatbots put through psychotherapy report trauma and abuse. Authors say models are doing more than role play, but researchers are sceptical.” Read

8. Stephanie Wambugu interviewed Brandon Taylor in Bookforum on the occasion of his new book Minor Black Figures. Read

9. Ruth Scurr wrote a fascinating review of the new book The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death by Joanna Stalnaker for the Wall Street Journal. Stalnaker’s book looks into the writings of Enlightenment thinkers as they approached their own death. Read

Six Essays I Recommend

1. What Are Master-Pieces? by Gertrude Stein. Read

2. Black Magic and the Academy by Kelly E. Hayes. Read

3. They All Just Went Away by Joyce Carol Oates. Read

4. A New Refutation of Time by Jorge Luis Borges. Read

5. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown by Virginia Woolf. Read

6. Corn-pone Opinions by Mark Twain. Read

7. Writing a Novel by Elizabeth Hardwick. Read

My Morning Read

I’m still reading The Portrait of a Lady in the mornings.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

Vita is having a hard time digesting my French accent, so our reading time has taken a small turn. I think this is a normal progression in her development and I know she’ll come to accept my funny accent soon enough. Most of the books she’s obsessed with at the moment are in French and no matter how hard I try to read them to her, she ends up frustrated at the slightest pronunciation mistake. She’s even tried to argue with me that her mispronunciation of the film KPop Demon Hunters, which she came home from school pronouncing in French, was correct. Luckily, her father is here to save us and has been reading to her more. So, according to Dad, her favorite books right now are Le Bus Fantastique and The 101 Dalmatians.

What My Husband is Listening To

Antigone by the Japanese musician Eiko Ishibashi.

A Movie I’m Thinking About

The Others by Alejandro Amenábar (which seems to be inspired by Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw)

A Poem

Lieu Vague by Anne Carson

1

breakfast is ready Dad
happy birthday to you
it’s not my birthday
you better get a move on
sit down Dad
who’s been using my razor
you don’t have a razor
why don’t you just bugger off
sit down eat your eggs
that’s a hot mess
I know you don’t like the yolks so eat the white okay eat the toast
too late too late
Dad don’t cry
you been using my razor
okay yes I got up early to shave off my lips

Read the entire poem in the London Review of Books (published December 25)

The first time I read Marguerite Duras was ten years ago. It was her last book, a meditation on the process of writing, a gift from my husband who I’d only known for a couple of weeks. He lived in Paris and I lived in New York. I read it because I felt like I had to, because I was in love with him. I was consumed with desire, a longing for him, and I wanted this moment between us to burn inside me, I was entirely submissive to the choice he made for me. I’ll never forget that day. I propped a pillow up against the wall on my bed, it was a cold and sunny Sunday morning in New York when I started reading. For the next hour or so I wouldn’t come up for air. Duras took over, stole me from him and showed me what there was to be for a person like me.

When I see Duras in pictures or interviews I feel there’s only her, as if she was in my house. When I’m with her, I’m with her in her solitude. It all stops around me and I’m there in her room, her house, at night and during the day, in her madness, her sentences, with the women she writes into life. I see her, I love her like a lover would have loved her, it’s impossible to leave her, to let her be, to put her down, to forget.

There’s not a week I write when I don’t think about her words, her sincerity, her pain, her indifference, her becoming her person so she could write. I think of the silence she created for me and the madness I trail when I follow her steps. “To be alone with the as yet unwritten book is still to be in the primal sleep of humanity.” Wake up, WAKE UP she says.

Right now something called for her and I chose to listen, to read, reread, rewatch, feel again the solitude she brought into my life. She, who showed me the way to loneliness and silence, to the irreparability of pain.

Novel

The Lover (1984)

I began the week at the end, with The Lover, her greatest success. Published in 1984, translated into more than 40 languages, adapted into a film Duras detested. The novel recounts the coming-of-age of a teenage girl in 1930s Saigon, then part of French Indochina. Living with her impoverished family, she starts a romantic affair with a wealthy Chinese man.

In many ways autobiographical, The Lover wasn’t the only time Duras drew from her own life. The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema, and The North China Lover do the same, as do most of her works. But The Lover feels uniquely porous, her life seeps through the text with particular urgency.

The story’s different from how I remembered it. The tense relationship between the girl, her mother, and her brothers is still there, and the affair remains central, but I realized Duras uses the man to escape something, to leave her childhood. So painful was life with her family, that only through this man could she find the pleasure and hope to live on, to learn about the woman she was and assume her individuality. The structure follows the girl’s flow, Duras carries us past her limits and then pulls us back again and again, like a wave. The narrative voice shifts, we have mostly an I, occasionally a she, but the tone remains steady, a beautiful and sincere confession.

Film

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)

Watching Hiroshima, Mon Amour after reading The Lover feels like falling asleep on Duras’s lap only to relive our greatest pain, her greatest pain. With restraint for words and a meticulous use of language, Duras still manages to say too much. How beautiful it is, she makes us feel without saying, without writing, her words are as dead as she, there is only pain, she surpasses language.

She wrote the screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour for the French director Alain Resnais (who later directed Last Year at Marienbad). Resnais wanted to make a film about Hiroshima and approached Duras for the screenplay. It tells the story of a French woman’s love affair with a man in Hiroshima 14 years after the war. It’s a story about love, death, memory, and reconciliation. Duras was nominated for an Academy Award for her screenplay.

Documentary

The Places of Marguerite Duras (1976)

I could never have imagined that a place could have such power, such force. All the women in my books have lived in this house. All of them. It’s only women who inhabit places, not men. This house was inhabited by Lol V. Stein, by Anne-Marie Stretter, by Isabelle Granger, by Nathalie Granger, but also by all kinds of other women. Sometimes, when I enter the house, a feeling comes over me, all of a sudden—the feeling of a profusion of women. This house has been inhabited by me, too. Entirely. I think it’s the place in the world I’ve inhabited most fully, and when I talk about these other women, I believe these other women contain a part of me, too. It’s as if me and these women, it’s as if we’ve been endowed with porosity.

Across the two hours of this documentary, we see Duras within the confines of her home, the property in the Yvelines where she was at her most prolific. We hear her talk about writing, about the house, about what it means to be a woman alone inside her home and in nature, in the park, in the forest. We witness the perilous image she keeps of nature, the violence she senses in it, the violence from her childhood, and the desire to escape, to propel oneself into the unknown.

Film

Nathalie Granger (1972)

Unlike Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Duras wrote and directed Nathalie Granger. In it, a mother and her friend feel a child’s violence seep into their home and into their lives. The violence saturates the silence of the house, haunts its rooms, just like it did Duras’s life.

It’s interesting to observe Duras’s relationship to music in this film, something I only grasped after listening to her speak about it in the documentary I mentioned earlier. She loves music but can’t bear to listen to it. As a child she could, but as an adult it becomes too much, too overwhelming. In the film, while the child practices her scales, the camera lingers over the scattered sheets of music spread across the floor, never touching them. Duras analyzed the scene in this way: “the distance covered here, from the scales of children, the scales of childhood, or the childhood of humanity, all the way to this language we can’t decrypt, the language of music—this distance overwhelms me.”

Novel

The Garden Square (1955)

When Samuel Beckett first heard The Garden Square on the radio, he called it “overwhelmingly moving.” The story unfolds as a dialogue between a girl and a man who meet for the first time on a bench in a public square. The only moments in which Duras uses narrative descriptions in this work is to describe changes to the weather—if the sun has come out from behind the clouds, if there’s wind—serving only to position each character’s experience with nature.

The girl is asleep, waiting for something to happen in her life. She’s incapable of experiencing the present, thinks only of the man she hopes to meet at the local dance hall, a marriage she imagines will jumpstart her life. The man is disillusioned by life, has accepted his fate, lost hope for change, and carries on travelling between cities and selling things no one needs to afford himself lunch. He can only think as far as his next meal.

Yet as they sit together, talking, something changes. We see them step into the present for the first time, unaware of the force their meeting holds. In that brief encounter, they share a moment outside their limits, one entirely at odds with the constraints that define them.

Novel

The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964)

She’s incapable of reflection, Lol V. Stein, she stopped living before the time of reflection. Perhaps that’s why she’s so dear to me, that I feel so close to her, I don’t know. Reflection is a tense, a time that I’m suspicious of. Yes. Which bores me. And if you look at my characters, they all come before this time, or rather the characters I love most. It’s probably the state that I try to get into when I’m writing, a state of intense listening, you see, but in its external form.

Lol V. Stein is a character who is completely haunted by the experience of S Thala, by the ball. It’s an ugly word, le vécu, experience, but what can you do. I don’t know what other word I might use. She’s haunted like a place is haunted. That’s Lol V. Stein, someone who remembers everything for the first time, everyday of her life, and this remembering is repeated every day, she remembers it every day for the first time. As if for Lol V. Stein there were these unfathomable chasms of forgetting between each day. She can’t get used to memory, or forgetting for that matter. She waits outside the casino, she is asleep on the beach, half dead. Her fingers are half buried under the sand, she has a bag next to her, a bag that I think looks like a little girl’s. She’s dressed all in white. Half dead, asleep. There, I see her, but alive.

There’s no sense to get from Lol V. Stein, you see, no meaning. Lol V. Stein is what you make of her. Without that, she wouldn’t exist. I think I’ve just discovered something about her, from what I’ve just said. She began to have a sense for me, a meaning, after she came from. After I came upon her, rather, you see...

Essays

Practicalities (1988)

In these essays, Duras is at her boldest. She is a woman, a woman in relation to a man, a woman in the house, a mother, a writer, an alcoholic, a provocateur, and unapologetically herself. Alongside Joan Didion, she’s one of the rare authors whose voice I hear clearly in my head with every word. Practicalities reads as a confession, a sequence of everyday thoughts and pure, unfiltered gossip.

“I became an alcoholic as soon as I started to drink. I drank like one straight away, and left everyone else behind.”

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.”

“One reason, perhaps the chief reason, why houses are flooded with material possessions is the longstanding rituals by which Paris is regularly submerged by sales, super-sales and final reductions.”

Film

Aurélia Steiner Vancouver (1979)

In Aurélia Steiner Vancouver, part of the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection, Marguerite Duras revisits a recurring character in her novels through a letter she once wrote to her parents. She repurposes footage from an earlier film to build this work, and illustrates the mysterious story of the woman’s past.

*Duras also wrote several profiles for Vogue. In the mid 60s she profiled Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, and Melina Mercouri.

Additional Resources

Duras is my intruder. She arrived without asking and I’ll never let her leave again. I’ll continue to revisit her, as I have since I first encountered her. It would be impossible to let her go.

Here are some other books, films, and readings I recommend.

Books
There are more, many more. Duras was prolific. She wrote constantly, stopping only when she was making her films. She published over 40 books in her lifetime, burning each of her manuscripts once they were published. These are the ones I recommend. Her early works are less experimental and I’m less interested in them, but I’ve never read them and in not doing so could not opine.

Moderato Cantabile
The North China Lover
The War: A Memoir
Emily L.
Blue Eyes, Black Hair
L’homme Atlantique
Détruire Dit-Elle
The Malady of Death
Suspended Passion
Me & Other Writings (Summer ‘80)

Film and Theatre

India Song
La Femme du Gange
Jaune le Soleil

Essays and Articles about Marguerite Duras

1. Edmund White writes In Love With Duras for the New York Review of Books in 2008, where he also reviews her books The North China Lover and The War: A Memoir.

2. Michel Foucault talks with Hélène Cixous about Marguerite Duras in Cixous’s book White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics.

3. An essay by the historian and film critic Robert P. Kolker on Duras’s films, The Cinema of Duras in Search of an Ideal Image in the 1989 French Review.

4. A 1961 article by Jacques Guicharnaud, Woman’s Fate: Marguerite Duras, in the department of French studies at Yale.

5. The Life and Loves of Marguerite Duras, a 1991 article in the New York Times by Leslie Garis ( she also profiled Georges Simenon, Rebecca West, John Fowles and Harold Pinter)

6. If you can understand French, RadioFrance did a piece on Duras in 2019.

Chronicle

Summertime Ghosts

There are ghosts that haunt me, ghosts from people who are still alive. They visit me at daybreak and at dusk, at night they hold me down. The night hag terrifies me, she keeps me bound to my bed, when I open my eyes she’s there. At dawn I move through my rooms, I place this in the right drawer and that on the left shelf, nothing moves forward with surprise. The days are paralyzed. I don’t feel my hands. I don’t feel my torso, my legs. I am entirely possessed by the ghosts of these people who are still alive. What will happen when they die?

The houses I lived in were sealed in white voile curtains. The windows were kept shut and only a sliver of light shined inside. The wind seeped through these windows as freely as air flows through a sand castle. She carried me to the patio where I sunbathed each morning. I fell and the muffled thud sunk, I cried and I was quieted. I can hear my sobs shrinking into ripples, soft small wrinkles opening on the shore.

Not all homes built of sand disappear. The water seeps through the towers, melts the sand, but the imprint, the memory, dense and rigid, will never seize to exist. From a cliff I plunge into the sea, into a dull roar where there is no human life, when my hands, my arms, my head pierce through its waves back into fresh air, I’m still here. My body floats to the top and into comfort, I find solace in the sea.

Blue waves, green waves, they can’t exist without that breeze, even the fish in mid-stream need to breathe. From the room I hear a bird sing, and then another bird, and another bird, they sing different, they sing random, but their song travels through the trees. And when the gardener turns on the string trimmer, they blow away towards the blue sky and their chorus falls broken, buried. I now see the beaches where big waves crash, I see windows open without curtains and hardwood floors flooded with wet leaves and rain. I see a woman standing, her child breathing, but she is haunted by the ghosts of these people who are still alive.

New Books

Why I’m Buying These Books

Renunciation by Ross Posnock
Because I watched Ross Posnock’s lecture at Yale, On The Pleasures of Self-Misunderstanding, and I’m interested in knowing more about his theory on the need for great thinkers to renounce the institutional framework.

Letters to Friends, Family & Editor by Franz Kafka
Because this volume includes a selection of the conversation slips Kafka used to speak with people at the end of his life, when he was advised not to talk.

Untimely Meditations by Friedrich Nietzsche
Because one of the essays in this collection is Schopenhauer as Educator.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
Because I’m interested in how the philosophers Labatut observes dealt with their own existence while grappling with difficult existential questions, some of them made important discoveries that came to change how we perceive human life and many became isolated and mentally ill people.

The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach
Because I’m curious about Feuerbach’s humanistic approach to religion. It was an important book for Leo Tolstoy, and it was translated by George Eliot.

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks by Susan Sontag
Because I want to see how she was writing about her influences in the fifties.

For a New Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Because I have yet to read his theoretical approach to the novel, although you can deduce a lot about his approach in all his writing.

Suffocating Mothers by Janet Adelman
Because Adelman’s reading of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays feels pertinent to my own research and work around the absence and presence of the mother.

The Visual Library

Portraits

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Seven Articles I Recommend This Week

1. Adina Hoffman is fascinated by ancient Greek figurines, so much so that she’s writing a book about them: “The uncertainty that hovers over the origin of these “Keros” objects makes them not so much outliers as something like emblems.” Read

2. For the past few weeks, several critics have reviewed ’s new book Against the Machine, where he warns about technology’s war against nature, and human nature. In a video interview with the New York Times for the opinion section, Kingsnorth talks openly about his perspective on how detrimental technology can be to our spirit. Watch

3. In the Wall Street Journal, James Campbell takes us through Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein only to ask us an important question: “What stands in for modernism in our own era?” Read

4. New Directions published a series of new stories, A Certain Lucas, by the late Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. In Martin Riker’s review, he offers a new way to read Cortázar and reminds us of the importance of artistic freedom over popular success. Read

5. In The Mysteries of Love, offers a new approach to reading Alice Munro. Read

6. Robert Pinsky reviews the The Poems of Seamus Heaney in the New York Times. Read

7. Carl Rollyson revisits Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Read

Six Essays and Lectures I Recommend This Week

1. Thinking and Moral Considerations by Hannah Arendt. Read

2. The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read

3. Of Experience by Michel de Montaigne. Read

4. The Struggle of the Artist by James Baldwin. Listen

   The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t, statesmen don’t, priests don’t, union leaders don’t. Only the poets.

5. Unspeakable Things, Unspoken by Toni Morrison. Read

6. Translating Truths by Nadia Abu El-Haj. Read

My Morning Read

It’s my first time reading The Portrait of a Lady, I’m coming to it after The Wings of the Dove and The Turn of the Screw.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

Vita is fascinated with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, we’ve been reading it over and over again. I’m hoping this is going to open the gates for Hansel and Gretel, The Twelve Brothers, and so on. In French, we’re reading Toc Toc Zinzin, where each planet in this galaxy has a zinzin, and when one planet’s zinzin goes missing, we need to visit all seven planets to find out who took it. When I read this to her she said it’s for babies.

What My Husband is Listening To

Cryptophony by Reeko and Jonathan by Yung Lean

A Movie I’m Thinking About

Arco by Ugo Bienvenu

A Poem

The Flowers by Stéphane Mallarmé

From golden showers of the ancient skies,
On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars,
You once unfastened giant calyxes
For the young earth still innocent of scars:

Young gladioli with the necks of swans,
Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream,
Vermilion as the modesty of dawns
Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;

The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright,
And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose,
Hérodiade blooming in the garden light,
She that from wild and radiant blood arose!

And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily
That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends
Through the blue incense of horizons, palely
Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends!

Hosanna on the lute and in the censers,
Lady, and of our purgatorial groves!
Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer,
Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love!

Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom,
Formed calyxes balancing the future flask,
Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam
For the weary poet withering on the husk.

The Canon Wars

No one person in their lifetime would be capable, even if they tried, to read the entire Western canon. This is partly the reason why the late American literary critic Harold Bloom wrote The Western Canon in 1994, where he lists more than 800 titles in Western literature preceded by a defense of 26 canonical writers.

It’s true, our human physiological condition limits our ability to read everything written throughout history during our lifetime. We have no choice but to make concessions on what we read, and in effect, what we teach. The concessions we make when we choose to read a book are as much a decision in the type of knowledge we’ll absorb and the kind of pleasure we’ll feel, as are the choices the academy makes in determining the works students will learn, the knowledge they’ll absorb, and the impact they’ll have on the future of literature, inside and outside academia.

In the '70s, with the arrival of French theorists Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault into American thought, New Criticism, the formalist movement in literary theory that dominated our teachings at the time, was urged to revise its aesthetic approach to reading. There came to be an imminent demand to restructure the syllabi of literary studies, to expand it to embrace a pluralist American perspective.

The American literary critic John Guillory, influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory cultural capital, studied the initial impulse that called upon the canon’s revision. In Cultural Capital (as he consequently titled his work), Guillory ascribed the need for change to a growing need for representation of social minorities in American culture:

In retrospect it was only in the wake of liberalism’s apparent defeat in American political culture that such agendas as “representation in the canon” could come to occupy so central a place within the liberal academy. The new curricular critique made it possible for the university to become a new venue of representation, one in which new social identities might be represented more adequately, if also differently, than in existing political institutions of American society.

This phenomenon was the onset for a centuries-long debate around the academy, which would come to be known as the canon wars. On the one side stood the aesthetes wanting to center the curriculum on literature’s classic works, and on the other side the multiculturalists, wanting to rebuild the curriculum to comprise a more socially inclusive criteria.

It was a decisive period for the future of American education. And with the 1987 commercial successes of E.D. Hirsch’s book Cultural Literacy and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, it was clear that an end to the war was near. By the '90s, multiculturalists had won and universities were reforming the canon to include noncanonical works.

For years to come, progressive and traditionalist critics would continue to do profound work around the controversy.

In her 1989 speech Unspeakable Things Unspoken, Toni Morrison questioned the constructs of quality as the central criterion for greatness in the canon, and affirmed the presence of Afro-American literature as essential to raising the standards of both culture and literary studies in America:

What is possible is to try to recognize, identify, and applaud the fight to and triumph of quality when it is revealed to us and to let go the notion that only the dominant culture or gender can make those judgments, identify that quality, or produce it.

Harold Bloom lamented the future of the humanities, “literature is not an instrument of social change or an instrument of social reform,” he said, “it is more a mode of human sensations and impressions, which do not reduce very well to societal rules or forms.” In An Elegy for the Canon, his introduction to The Western Canon, Bloom would refer to the reformers as the school of resentment1, and was determined to maintain an aesthetic approach to teaching and reading the Classics:

A poem cannot be read as a poem, because it is primarily a social document or, rarely yet possibly, an attempt to overcome philosophy. Against this approach I urge a stubborn resistance whose single aim is to preserve poetry as fully and purely as possible.

As the journalist Rachel Donadio pointed out in Revisiting the Canon Wars, the outcome had presented us with a sort of ironic reversal in literary studies:

[John] Searle also noted a “certain irony” that the Western canon, from Socrates to Marx, which had once been seen as “liberating,” was now seen as “oppressive.” “Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,” Searle wrote, “the ‘canon’ served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. ... The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

It was true, the very works that taught us to think, were the works we were now being asked to reconsider. And with the academy restructuring the concerns of literary studies, making less space for aesthetic conversations in classrooms, it became nearly impossible for critics to contest the “balkanization of literary studies,” as Bloom would put it, without backlash.

The Education Wars

Today, we’re seeing the canon wars turn on its fold.

In April, President Trump’s administration canceled 85 percent of grants to the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H.), placing staff on leave in preparation to redirect its resources “toward supporting Mr. Trump’s priorities.”

In August, the administration announced funding for 97 new projects, many including “work on papers relating to the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution and the Founding era,” reported the New York Times:

Shortly after the grant cancellations in April, the agency also announced that, in keeping with executive orders by Mr. Trump, it would not support projects promoting “extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.”

These series of executive orders were later used by state schools to justify book bans across the nation, including the removal of nearly 600 books—Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner for example—from a school run by the Department of Defense.

According to a report by the PEN America organization, which has been tracking book bans in America for the last 14 years, during the 2024-2025 academic school years, 6,870 books bans were recorded across 23 states and 87 school districts. A great majority of these bans were initiated by conservative parents.

Today, any progressive book or work that doesn’t conform to a particular ideology is subject to censorship. A study conducted by researchers at Cornell University found “liberals and conservatives both oppose censorship of children’s literature – unless the writing offends their own ideology.”

So far, 11 schools have banned Toni Morrison’s Beloved and five Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. There are 11 instances where I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou was banned, and three where Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was removed from school libraries. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was at one point mandatory reading at my middle school, was banned in four schools.

The federal government has demonstrated a willingness to exert excessive influence over our institutions and universities in order to serve their power agenda with a partisan national narrative. They’ve found support not only in American citizens with conservative ideologies, but in weakened university systems, which, at the first strike of a federal blow, withdrew into their academies with big plans for policy change and payoffs tucked between their legs.

The academic freedom American education was founded upon is at stake on the false premise of indoctrination: “President Trump and his allies have focused their attacks on elite universities, which they say are bastions of antisemitism and ideological indoctrination,” wrote the reporter Alan Blinder in How Universities Are Responding to Trump.

If we add the decline of our intellectual capacity to the government’s attempt to penetrate our universities, we find an entire education system on the brink of major change, one that will once again reshape our canon.

Our ability to think, speak, articulate, to understand people, to understand the differences between people, between our various natures, they depend on our capacity to read and to retain what we read.

Children and teenagers are exponentially less interested in reading. and recently observed technology’s impact on a child’s capacity to acquire early language skills, and reported that only 41 percent of parents read books to children aged five and under, a crucial period for the development of their memory and vocabulary:

Knowing more words helps students process information more quickly, because prior knowledge of vocabulary lightens the load on working memory. The breadth and depth of a student’s vocabulary moves in tandem with their capabilities for abstract thinking. Each new word opens up a new pathway and leads to better expression of their own thoughts, as well as understanding others.

A survey by the National Literacy Trust in 2025, reported that only 18.7 percent of children and teenagers read in their free time, as opposed to 38.1 percent in 2005. If we account for the population increase in America in the last 20 years, which is approximately 44.6 million, this still means we’ve lost 48.92 million readers, that’s almost half the amount of leisure readers we estimated in 2005.

We’re not only limiting our children’s exposure to literature at home, but we’re also choosing not to stimulate their interest in books at schools. Most elementary schools in New York City have adopted a new literacy curriculum that excludes reading books cover-to-cover from the syllabi. The coursework relies on a text compilation called myBook, built on the premise of reading excerpts in order to answer questions. Since it’s the only curriculum (out of the three offered by the state) that integrates Spanish, two-thirds of schools have opted to teach it.

How are our youth supposed to use reading as recreational and educational tools, if we’re not giving them opportunities to read? In The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, Rose Horowitch reports that only 17 percent of educators for 3rd-to-8th-grade students teach whole texts.

The Common Core, a multistate education initiative that provides the curriculum for schools in 41 American states, recently added more nonfiction readings to their syllabus because universities are prioritizing informational texts over literary ones. By 12th grade, 70 percent of assigned readings are nonfiction.

Reading is no longer taught as a tool for thought and expansion of the mind. It’s offered as prompts for answering the questions we’re asked. In other words, we’re not teaching our children cognitive skills, we’re teaching them to follow the rules, answer the questions, and not create new ones.

By the time students are ready to start their higher education career, it’s far too late to convert them into passionate readers. How can we teach them the rewards of solitary reading? If we’re not invested in creating passionate readers, does it come as any surprise that literature departments across the country are seeing a drop in enrollment?

In The End of the English Major, a 2023 article in the New Yorker, Nathan Heller reported that between 2012 and 2020, humanities enrollment declined by 17 percent in American universities:

The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.

It seems like the cultivation of the mind is no longer as much of a priority as the quest toward lucrative positions in our economic world:

At Columbia University—one of a diminishing number of schools with a humanities-heavy core requirement—English majors fell from ten per cent to five per cent of graduates between 2002 and 2020, while the ranks of computer-science majors strengthened.

Students enrolled in Columbia’s humanities program are “bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester,” Horowitch reported. Having never been asked to read an entire book in secondary schools what else could we expect: “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.”

Literary Renaissance or Literary Doom2

Is this reversible? Will there be a moment in time when we will see a renaissance in literature? Will our society find the passion to read deeply again? Will we acquire the knowledge needed to understand and retain literature?

These are the questions some of my contemporaries are trying to answer.

In The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, Times columnist suggests we’re living through a counter-revolution to the reading revolution that turned the 18th-century population into prolific readers. Marriott takes us through what he terms a post-literate society, all the way to the end of democracy. Like many other critics, he attributes our dying interest in literature and reading to excessive screen-time, which he in turn equates to people’s growing incapacity to think critically.

I’m also disappointed by the present state of intellectual thought in literature. We’re no longer living through the exciting times of the canon wars, arguing between aesthetics and diversity. Yet, it’s shortsighted to attribute the state of our literary landscape to the reduced attention-span caused by technology, and it also doesn’t move the conversation forward.

If we had succeeded at inspiring our children to become passionate, deep readers, and encouraged teenagers to seek out cognitive power over social and economic power, perhaps today we’d have a larger cohort in favor of reading over scrolling. The data only highlights how American society continuously fails their children in literary instruction.

We’ve failed the literary discipline as parents, as instructors, and as institutions, but also as writers, publishers, and critics. It’s hard to admit, it’s easier to transfer this responsibility to Silicon Valley CTOs and Wall Street fat cats. I’m not saying they’re exempt from responsibility, but until we can admit our own fault, and attempt to educate and inspire people with audacious work, change cannot be imminent.

Our Collective Failure

Perhaps the canon wars were such a prominent literary phenomenon in the '90s because they foresaw today’s crisis.

It’s impossible to estimate whose approach was correct, but it’s also impossible to ignore that restructuring the literary canon to reflect identity politics did little to engage our society to read anew.

On one side, aesthetes aimed at a wider audience by focusing on form, beauty, on the sophisticated experience of reading. We can’t say today that their elitist approach would’ve avoided the mass indifference we see toward reading, but we also can’t say the progressive approach was effective.

Above sophistication and inclusion, above the elitist and the democratic, general education today ignores an important part of reading, which is the pleasure, the transformative possibilities it holds when a reader is connected to the otherness of a writer.

Morrison and Bloom were both right to believe the canon wars put at risk the future of literature. In the midst of this battle, the American writer lost purpose and instruction, we failed as a collective to inspire our society to widen their outlook. We felt compelled to engage in political discourse, to be partisan, and reading became a way to reinforce and propagate individual rhetoric. Once upon a time the author was the mind of the American nation, when the author could observe society from afar, experience social constructs from the bleachers, measure the present against the past. That was when they told powerful stories.

It’s not the writer’s job to belong, yet here we are succumbing to the pressures of contemporary demands, writing what’s in, publishing what’s agreeable. Today, we are no more than another piece working in the nucleus of the world. After all, we have been instructed to fit in, to answer the questions, not to create new ones remember? It is a misfortune, the federal government isn’t taking us toward the expansion of thought, they’re taking us to the place where they can define it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” Haven’t those of us who’ve read Shakespeare, Dante, Woolf, and Proust (to name a few) experienced those moments when what we’re reading surpasses our capacity, our own nature?

Not everyone passionate about reading is reading to find a masterpiece, not all our readers are looking for innovation, for the sublime. But there is a chance, that if a reader falls upon a book that has these qualities, their approach to literature may forever be changed.

Those established in literary culture, the critics, look at literature as a medium, look for excellence, it’s their job to praise great texts so passionate readers can encounter the other, connect with the other, perhaps even feel enriched by the other. The motivations for reading are countless, and all experiences are valid. Yet, without the dance between writer and reader there’s no longer a literary body, when one fails the system fails, when all fail the system no longer exists.

It’s been 140 years since the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé criticized 19th-century writers in the verses of Le Vierge, le Vivace et le Bel Aujourd’hui:

Un cygne3 d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.

“A swan from another time,” Mallarmé laments the loss of beauty, the loss of the writer and the word’s capacity to go beyond its environment. He was urging writers to go deeper, to transcend traditional narrative forms to achieve a higher aesthetic and symbolic experience in their works. His approach heavily influenced James Joyce, who went on to produce works of great value about the complexity of the human experience and identity.

Like Mallarmé’s contemporaries, we have also become overly literal, concerned primarily with the representation of reality. We’ve lost touch with our nature because of our preoccupation with individual politics. Our literature today is permeated with social commentary, they mirror everyday life, rarely do they inspire a mystical experience.

As a group of literary thinkers and writers, we have succumbed to the power fame feeds us, to the validation success brings, to social commodities, transactional feats, to the pressures of politics. We’ve let these forces envelop us, validate our anxiety to influence and have an impact. The quality of contemporary literary fiction reflects this very climate. We’re anxious about our status:

When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise,—and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things that are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson on Nature

As literary fiction writers we must take risks with confidence and confront the very system we’re conforming to. David Brooks offered a refreshing observation of the artist’s role in his recent New York Times op-ed When Novels Mattered.

Given the standards of their time, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and James Baldwin had incredible guts, and their work is great because of their nonconformity and courage.

Most important, if you don’t have raw social courage, you’re not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what’s going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America.

I’d like to offer some exceptions to my critique, but it’s impossible, only time can reveal them to us. I can however present a case study around the early literature of Sally Rooney.

In Conversations with Friends, she observes the possibilities for intimacy vis-à-vis social constructs, how the transactional nature of our society, among other factors, may weigh on people’s capacity to be passionate. Yet Rooney’s novels are hardly criticized through this framework. Alexandra Schwartz, a staff writer and literary critic at the New Yorker, reviewed Rooney’s novel primarily as a love story and affair, which it is, but the urgent messages that needed to be extracted from this novel and communicated to the reader, were much greater than this simple narrative.

In the few instances we publish literary fiction with strong theory, our critics aren’t able to grasp the philosophy deepening the work. They are stuck in the multiculturalist reading, unable to read for the form, for the aesthetic values.

How can criticism serve our passionate readers, pressure our greedy publishers, or inspire our writers, when it’s become candy with no taste? “It is not ‘literature’ that needs to be redefined; if you can’t recognize it when you read it, then no one can ever help you to know it or love it better,” Harold Bloom said.

The canon wars gave rise to a new library, a moral one that teaches us great values—empathy, inclusion, compassion—but too few of those books teach us how to think about creation.

Readers have stopped reading writers who go beyond our limitations, not because they want to, but because there aren’t many new ones being offered to them, and the ones that do exist, are presented to the public as metaphors without meaning. Emerson wisely concluded, “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”

American publishers in their concern for financial success, have failed to connect reader and writer. They’ve resorted to entertainment, they’ve let pass a marginalia of text that do no more than underestimate the reader’s capacity.

The defiance in our practice must rise alongside our determination to form deep and passionate readers. We need to confront the publishers who don’t consider writers without a social following. We need to rescue our youth from dwindling institutions. We need to review the concessions we’ve made because we thought conforming was a priority.

Literary Renaissance

Where is the genius sleeping?

Our literature departments have grown so small, identity politics have eaten such a large slice of its pie, perhaps the study of the Classics is not as far away as we once imagined.

In Ignore the Pessimists — we are living through a literary golden age, observes the rise of nonliterary readers revisiting the Classics, and encourages us to adopt a more optimistic outlook toward the future of literary fiction.

observes that historically, most renaissances happened outside of academic institutions, he also believes a literary revival has been set into motion.

Even Harold Bloom wasn’t so pessimistic about the future:

I do not believe that literary studies as such have a future, but this does not mean that literary criticism will die. As a branch of literature, criticism will survive, but probably not in our teaching institutions.

The future of literature is certainly not in the hands of our academic institutions. We’re already seeing this shift. Among the writers teaching literature outside the traditional academic environment is , who takes on Western giants like Augustine’s Confessions in a private Substack course. studies Tolstoy and Kafka with his readers. And there’s the Catherine Project, a five-year-old digital initiative offering seminars on Homer, Plato, and Aristotle.

Many of us have continued to read despite the widespread use of technology, and we will continue to do so. “The common reader is still out there,” Oliver says, and I believe him. Now it is up to them to decide how they’ll engage with literature, if it’s in the context of aesthetics or social justice, and it’s up to our literary critics to properly orient us all.

I don’t believe all writers are created equal, nor all readers. To those instructed in Shakespeare, contemporary fiction entertains, to those instructed in contemporary fiction, fantasy entertains. What happens next?

The future is in the hands of the writer, and writers capable of genius can emerge, they will emerge, but they must come with nerve, it’s a vicious undertaking to confront convention today.

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Chronicle

What’s a Chronicle Anyway?

A long time ago in New York City, I dated a writer who kept associating me with Clarice Lispector, particularly with her crônicas. Not because of my work, but because we were both Brazilian women (except she was born in the Ukraine, I was raised in America). Each time he asked me what I was working on, I fluttered, wavering between the stories I was writing at home and some sort of cuticle cream article I was working on for the paper.

It was hard for him to imagine how a girl writing backstage beauty reports for the fashion desk could aspire to write anything other than the latest trends on mules, and I think he leveraged my ambition into something obvious for me to do: follow in Lispector’s footsteps by going where she left off, to chronicles. Everything about this annoyed me. I didn’t need to be prescribed a genre, I didn’t need him telling me night after night, over rounds and rounds of gin and tonics, that this was how I’d make it. I would’ve needed someone who believed in my capacity to find the right symbols for my thoughts and to turn them into something new. If I didn’t do this work I was going to shrivel inside, I depended on my ability to understand myself through words.

Years have passed since, and Lispector’s chronicles are now safe and out of exile (yes, I put them away for a long time). When I started conceiving this newsletter, and the type of stories I was willing to share, the New York writer, the guy who sat alone at skater bars reading Homer and telling me what to do, came briefly back to mind. I finally came around to the chronicle, but out of my own will and in my own way, all while keeping the round-ups I had become better at creating, and the short stories I worked on quietly at home.

A chronicle (as I’m calling it on my newsletter) is a literary genre where writers use poetry and fiction tools to recount a reality. They’re often published as weekly columns in newspapers, except chronicles are to newspaper columns what op-ed pieces became to objective journalism. Or what the New Yorker’s stories in The Talk of Town would be if writers were offered more creative freedom.

In the late nineteenth century, chronicles in Latin America became somewhat of a phenomenon. Many newspaper editors invited writers to break from the daily news with a weekly chronicle. Gabriel García Márquez wrote several political chronicles, as did the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, the Cuban José Martí, and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges.

What distinguished Lispector’s and Márquez’s chronicles from the other writers, and from the other pieces in the paper, was their take on the truth. Márquez believed embellishment was sometimes necessary to help convey the truth: “If to speak the truth you need to add one more tear, then what’s the problem?” he said to one of his students. He built on existing realities with his own truths, turning objective material into subjective, and some times fictional work.

Take for example the chronicle Márquez wrote about the Colombian man who survived a shipwreck. The editor didn’t believe he could add anything to a story the paper had already successfully covered, but Márquez insisted on speaking with the victim, and when he returned the next day with a four-part series that shared a colorful, detailed survival story, the paper’s sales grew tremendously.

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

— Gabriel García Márquez (1981)

If chronicles are an extension of a writer’s work, daily insight into their perspective, and a way for readers to fix the author onto their imaginations, then the writer really is the greatest character of all. To me, it is only by reading all of Lispector’s chronicles that we can begin to understand the woman who invented the protagonist G.H., who eats a cockroach in her maid’s bedroom.

The same phenomenon we see in Márquez’s approach to the chronicle, we also see in Lispector’s, except she went further. She had a great desire to dissociate from the form, to create something that could really obfuscate the author by blurring the truth, hiding what’s real with the unreal.

In an early piece from June 1968, she wrote: “Is the crônica a story? Is it a conversation? Is it the summation of a state of mind?” Three years later, in May 1971, she mused, “Let’s be honest: this isn’t a column at all. It barely is. It doesn’t fit the genre. Genres no longer interest me. Mystery interests me. Do I need to have a ritual for mystery?” This is exactly what the crônicas became.

— Jared Marcel Pollen in The Yale Review

Her chronicles read like an unrepentant confessional, her language is opaque and it’s impossible to understand why. That’s the beauty in them, what makes them even more relevant today. In a 2017 article for The Paris Review, Gabrielle Bellot positions chronicles in our current media landscape, “There is a pressing sense that we need definitive, well-sourced reporting to combat propaganda—including that of the current administration.” Bellot is referring to the early days of Trump’s administration and the rise of fake news, a time that gave rise to op-ed columns, a tool used by the media to heighten emphasis on its objective and factual content. “Partly because of this, some critics have declared that the confessional, as well as the personal essay more generally, no longer should define writing in the era of Trump,” Bellot continues. She goes on to refer to an essay Jia Tolentino wrote in The New Yorker where she comes to condemn personal stories, “individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.”

How impersonal and withdrawn can anything we write be when we’re all our each accumulation of our experiences. The truth in all nonfiction is inherently fraught. Our columns, our reported pieces, our essays, what we call factual, rely on our personal failures as much as they do on our successes, they’re founded on our individual perspective, whether intentional or not. To this idea, Lispector’s and Marquez’s confrontation with the truth becomes liminal both to the arts and to the many forms of nonfiction narratives.

As much as I wanted to call my writings on here chronicles I thought I couldn’t. I couldn’t find my chronicles in their crônicas. The period in my life from which I extract my realities hold more time than Lispector’s and Márquez’s, and it is after all the chronicle’s proximity to the present that allows them to exist in the paper. What’s more, my memory can’t be a reliable source even when I’m telling the truth.

Although my use of time separate me from their chronicles, I still share something primordial with them as cronistas. I need a place to hide. I live with apathy toward telling the truth, I’m not capable of confessing like Neige Sinno and Edouard Louis. Perhaps because it’s impossible for me to know this truth, perhaps as much as I search for it I still won’t find it, perhaps I need to keep the real and the unreal colluded. What I’m sure about when writing this newsletter is the process, that like Lispector I can discover something new when I’m writing it. This is the freedom this newsletter purports to give me. There are truths that are easy for me to share, there are others that are secrets I cannot reveal, what I make of all of this is what I like to call chronicles.

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The Visual Library

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Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Nine Articles I Recommend This Week

1. Solange Knowles launched a digital library, Saint Heron Community Library, that gives people access to an important roster of literary works. The library process is entirely digital, which is in itself a brilliant idea. People can reserve and check-out physical copies of these works for free and have them mailed to their house. Beyond making reading even more accessible, what stands out about this project is the titles Knowles curates and emphasizes as required reading. There’s great education to be had in a curated library. (Lithub)

2. is collaborating with the French bookstore Shakespeare & Co. to publish transcripts from conversations they host with international writers. Guests have included Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sheila Heti, Emmanuel Carrère, , and . The first collaboration launched with Neige Sinno, author of Sad Tiger, an autobiography about the abuse she suffered as a kid in the hands of her stepfather.

   When I studied literature, I wasn’t interested in autobiographical genres. I didn’t think that would be the path for me. For some strange and unconscious reasons, I convinced myself, later in life, to do something I hadn’t wanted to do in the first place.

   — Neige Sinno

3. I didn’t read BOMB Magazine until someone sent me an article from their September issue where Björk interviews Ocean Vuong about his new novel The Emperor of Gladness. Who was the brilliant person that thought of this? I didn’t know they were friends! I also didn’t know Björk took weekly qigong classes. What emerges is a conversation about the simplicity of experiencing life without conforming to the pursuit of the American dream, being present can be fulfilling enough, no grand narrative arc needed, neither in the book nor in real life.

   I wanted to write about kindness without hope, where people know that kindness will make no significant change in their lives and yet they commit to it anyway.

   — Ocean Vuong

   also had Ocean Vuong over on her podcast Fashion Neurosis.

4. David Trotter writes about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for the London Review of Books. He looks at the ways in which academics are celebrating the centennial of this particular novel (through four publications each offering a new reading of Woolf’s masterpiece).

5. A few weeks ago I told you Garth Greenwell was teaching an open course on Augustine’s Confessions. Last Friday, in his most recent newsletter, Greenwell gave us a taste of what sitting in that class might be like. His reading is detailed and pointed, he goes down to the bone. He looks at Augustine’s work and intention, at all its entry points, examines its construction in detail and extracts the parts that make us think differently not only about the work itself but about our own approach to writing.

   This is the characteristic move of the Confessions: Augustine is constantly trying to turn around to face the self, to catch the self out, to investigate anything we might take as given about ourselves. Augustine can never merely think a thought or feel a feeling: he has to examine the act itself of feeling and thinking. He has to figure out everything, especially the most obvious things, from scratch. He has to become a problem for himself.

   — Garth Greenwell

6. I got a teaser on Instagram for Rosalind Krauss’s October Magazine issue 191, for the essay Women on Walls: Projection, Anonymity, Envy, and Eileen Gray by the culture theorist Anne Anlin Cheng. I haven’t received my copy yet, all I can tell you is Anlin Cheng will be analyzing a collage made by Eileen Gray:

   I bring to bear on Gray’s collage two other, seemingly separate stories, each with its own secrets and surprising revelations—Melanie Klein’s work on reparation and the creative impulse, on the one hand, and Le Corbusier’s fraught relationship to Gray’s architectural creation E-1027 on the other—and trace how the specters of female creativity, Baker, and racialized femininity haunt all three. By triangulating Gray, Le Corbusier, and Klein, we see not only the ghosts of women of color in the machines of modernist innovation but also how the tensions of fame, anonymity, envy, and projection (congealed through the figure of the Black woman) fuel the theorizations of the artist, the architect, and the analyst.

   — Anne Anlin Cheng

7. In Close Readings, a podcast by the London Review of Books, Jonathan Rée and James Wood discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. I didn’t know about this particular work of Beauvoir’s, but I’m compelled to read it after listening to them summarize her perspective on the individual will to be free and what one asks themselves in order to arrive at this freedom. In this work Beauvoir talks a lot about childhood, memories, and how our values are shaped and formed and later emancipated, which is a topic I’m very curious about in my own work.

8. In ’s newsletter, he shared a list of his favorite YouTube videos out right now. One that stood out and that I hadn’t seen before in all the coverage of the Nobel Prize in literature was László Krasznahorkai’s reaction when the Nobel announced his win over the phone. If you want to dig a little bit further into Gioia’s Substack, I recommend this post: Hamlet Is the Gen Z Story We Need Right Now.

9. ’s piece on a YouTube education includes some fantastic recommendations: Kenneth Clark’s documentary Civilisation, John Berger’s series Way of Seeing, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker on evolution, the philosopher Bryan Magee’s BBC show, and more. Also, staying true to my pessimistic perspective on the future of the humanities and of our society’s literacy, here’s a great essay: The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.

My Morning Read

I cannot put down Susan Choi’s new novel Flashlight. I’m not a big contemporary reader but I decided this year I’ll read every book on the long list for the Booker Prize. This is the first one and I’m immersed in the way she depicts the lives of this family after the Korean war, their establishment in the U.S. and relocation to Japan. It reminds me a lot about Toni Morrison, about her ideas of generational trauma and its dimensions, about Marianne Hirsch’s work around postmemory. It’s a bold, complex novel that so far, I highly recommend.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

A book by the Chinese writer Yue Zhang: La Meilleure Boulangerie du Monde, that tells the story of a wolf and a rabbit who are at first scared of each other but end up making the best bread together. We’re also reading a lot of Richard Scarry. Her favorite read in english is The Cave Downwind of the Cafe by Mikey Please which was published on September 5.

What My Husband is Listening To

Boccaccio Life by Age of Chance

A Movie I’m Thinking About

La Graine et le Mulet by Abdellatif Kechiche

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A POEM

Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

HENCEFORTH, please God, forever I forego
The yoke of men’s opinions. I will be
Light-hearted as a bird, and live with God.
I find him in the bottom of my heart,
I hear continually his voice therein.
horizontal dotted line
The little needle always knows the North,
The little bird remembereth his note,
And this wise Seer within me never errs.
I never taught it what it teaches me;
I only follow, when I act aright.

I used to live in New York. Anyone that knew me then can attest that I was never home. I was one of those people with a bottle of sparkling water in the fridge and maybe a bag of chips. In fact, it was my job not to be home (you can read more about that here). When I wasn’t at the office from eight to eight researching stuff on my computer, I had to be out and about meeting people, going to art openings, lectures, book launches, screenings, fashion shows, beauty appointments, parties, and press dinners. I was that girl that kept shoes under her desk, vitamins in the drawer, eyebrow gel next to the office plant. I think even my checkbook lived at the office. It really felt like home.

Fast forward to today when I live in Paris, I’m married with child, and I don’t work at an office anymore. I’m writing a book, and as it turns out I spend all my time at home. The same people from New York can probably attest to this too because they never see me (and yes, many of them have moved to Paris). In the beginning staying home wasn’t easy. The part of me folding fitted sheets at eleven o’clock in the morning thought I was going to rage against this house. Now I don’t fold sheets anymore. As it turns out, if you do what you like to do it’s nice to be home. The only thing that’s really different now is that I go grocery shopping several times a week, I even buy fresh fruit.

—

If finishing the book is my main objective and I’m sitting at home doing other things, I consider myself to be stalling. I do spend time writing chronicles and doing some in-depth reading, to me that counts as writing my book, but all the other research really is procrastination at its finest. I can’t help it, it’s a part of me, I need to know what people are saying and doing. After all, it was this exact curiosity that provided me with that sparkling water and bag of chips for years on end, it would be strange to abandon it now. What’s more, I love discovering new things and sharing it with people.

For a long time I felt that writing my book and being an editor were at war with each other, doing both in parallel has brought me peace.

Rue de Chabrol is a weekly newsletter where I share a curated version of my doom scroll, so that you can doom scroll a little bit less and use your time to do those things that bring you pleasure (whatever that is really). I get into the nitty gritty to find you the gold.

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What do I research?

#1. I sift through the news to find articles, essays, and short stories I want to read. I keep bookmarked folders on my browser that I rummage through every day.

#2. I visit libraries and look through books to find photos I’ve never seen. When I need a break, I go to several libraries in Paris to look at monographs. I have a big image archive on my computer from these sessions.

#3. I supplement my work with readings, lectures, YouTube videos, and essays. I like to study. I enjoy picking an author and diving deep into their world. I’ve done it with Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, Dante, Clarice Lispector, and now I’m doing it with Ralph Waldo Emerson. This means I read everything around what they wrote, I watch every public lecture, research essays, articles, papers, I read their biographies (and of course all their work) until I have a proper understanding for them and their work.

#4. I round-up design auctions to find objects I think are worth buying. I’ve been going to flea markets since I was a teenager. I love finding things. At first I went for the clothes, now I go for furniture and objects. I’m on the auction websites all the time.

And when I’m not researching?

If it’s the morning I’m probably reading something contemporary.
If it’s the evening I read to my daughter.

If it’s the weekend I’m listening to whatever my husband is playing.

If it’s late at night I’m watching a movie.

And when do I see other people?

When I want to connect with people, find out what they’re into, and know what they’re thinking about I invite them over to Rue de Chabrol or we just go ahead and have a brief conversation.

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The Rio Negro: A Chronicle
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I veered the canoe out of the stream into the blackwater river. Behind me, the water rippled outward, revealing each curve of the flooded forest painted softly upon its surface. With each push of the paddle my voyage expanded ahead and I emerged from the canopied tributary into the boiling sun, my temples dripped with sweat and I waited on the bank for the heat to subside. I watched the remains of the forest rot into amber freshwater. The Rio Negro, a river unfit to decompose its past, each night I saw it die only to reemerge in the morning.

Earlier that day I was swinging on the hammock, my legs dangling over its frayed edge while I counted leaves on the glass ceiling of the veranda. For years my family spent summers in this house, where I was content to roam outside, to put my hands on the trees, let the ants crawl up my arms, and to crush them on my skin to keep the mosquitos away. I read the books we kept next to indigenous artifacts. Bows, arrows, headdresses, coconut bowls were carefully placed next to monographs of faraway cities like Prague, Sydney, and Bogota, books my father collected as souvenirs at airport gift shops. At the time everyone visited the Amazon to find something. Scientists sought miracles, artists sought awakening, environmentalists searched for reasons, miners for ore, executives for power, and we just wanted to be near my father. I read those books to forget the singular landscape that had become the jungle over the years, where the fruits tasted stale, the radio and birds sounded redundant, the walks in the forest became tedious.

After sundown I paddled again. This time to the smell of a rotting river, a sour stench that grew stronger with the night. It didn’t take long before I crossed over and north to the western side. Once I reached the floodplains I hid my paddle in the canoe and lugged everything up to land. I took the path I knew so well at daytime, when I left home to buy tapioca or post letters to our family. The lights and the chatter of the local people paved the way. This was the settlement that connected us, where we could leap from home to the unknown. This is the frontier, where we’ll be forced to go far into our thoughts, into our memories, where what we describe, what we see, and where we are is not what we write until we’re home.

It was infinite: the trees, the trampled grass, the sound of people, it knew no bounds and it was vast. I was as much a foreigner in this clearing as I was on the hammock in the house. I walked and walked, past the locals on white plastic chairs drinking cold beer in short glass cups, past the woman from the newsstand on a bench holding a bag waiting for her grandchildren, past the men playing canasta for a couple of bucks, past young couples holding hands, televisions tuned to soap operas, young children eating popcorn, and grown children playing ball. I kept walking until I reached another glade. I couldn’t make out what was ahead, the village backlit the way and my steps turned darker and darker. I could not rush the order of the world. Out there in the forest, surrounded by the wilderness, one step from the jaguars and another from the poisonous frogs, I was finding something, a thought of my own.

I turned around and paddled back to my house. The horizon was black and I saw only as far as myself. I was sweaty, I smelled of guava, my hair was messy, and it was hard to paddle against the current. Water moved in and out of the canoe, my boots got wetter. My palms were covered in blisters and my stomach growled. I breathed a new air up my nostrils, my own mannerisms started to feel alien to me, and there was a shift happening. I would come to experience this shift once more in my life, and when I did I would know what to expect, but here the air was entirely new, it was strange, and I didn’t know I wouldn’t find that self again, the one that stayed on the other side of the river like the old skin of a shedded snake.

I tied the canoe around a wooden stub on the dock. I wondered if the fruits would taste the same, if the cracks on the walls, the floor, the ceiling would still be there. I looked for that careless feeling when we arrive at home, when we can kick our shoes off, open the refrigerator and sit, but it wasn’t there. The house was dim, neat, and the glass ceiling had been wiped clean. The hammock had been folded down.

The house was cold. I saw it in ruins, shattered and demolished into the ground, but I couldn’t move forward without it. There was no room, no floor, no shelter, all that existed was a hallow space from which things moved without order. I had to do what was most important, look forward and remember.

I forgot a great part of this house. I forgot who they were and what I found. There I was just moments ago on the canoe, between now and then, where all was clear but dead, as dead as the leaves on the riverbank.

How little one knows what only nature can explain, how a river so mysterious can resound with such clarity. It is far too obvious to look up and see, far too light, but to look down, into the depth, into the decay of the forest, where the past and the present are crippled in time, that’s where we find truth, and in honesty lies beauty.

A Visual Library

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Looking at Richard Prince’s book collection: when I lived in New York I always ran into Richard Prince at the antique book fair, and I was always very curious to know what he was buying. I don’t think he’s documenting his entire collection on his website, but it’s interesting to look at some of the works he’s got in there.

What my daughter is reading right now: all the “Matous Filous” books by the Japanese author Noriko Kudoh. Translated by Alice Hureau into French.

What I’m reading in the morning: Alice Munro’s short stories in “Too Much Happiness”. I wish I had read them before she died, before her daughter accused her of doing nothing to stop her abusive stepfather. Knowing what we know now, it’s difficult to read her depiction of abuse, her questions about justice and morality. Were these stories her way of expressing her feelings about the issue?

Five articles I read this week:

1. Brian Owens wrote about the chatbots claiming to be Jesus Christ and offering people a chance to speak with God online. (Nature)

   “None of the chatbots he studied were developed or endorsed by any church, and it is not clear what religious texts they were trained on. Four of the five were created and managed by private companies — with names such as Catloaf Software, a mobile-development company in Los Angeles, California — whereas the fifth is run by a Christian group in South Korea with no official connection to any church. All are free but supported by advertisements, with one offering an ad-free premium subscription.” — Brian Owens

2. Edmund de Waal’s essay How Mrs. Dalloway Began about Virginia Woolf’s sentences and the creative process that led her to write Mrs. Dalloway. De Wall originally delivered this essay as a talk at the Charleston Festival in Sussex. (The Yale Review)

3. Maggie Nelson’s interview in the new issue of the Paris Review. (The Paris Review)

4. Last fall, Michael Krimper translated Walter Benjamin’s 1939 paper “Notes on Baudelaire’s Parisian Tableaux” originally written in French. It was published in October, Rosalind Krauss’s academic journal that specializes in criticism and theory and is published by the MIT Press. (October)

   “What is the writer’s social role in the twenty-first century, when we seem to be caught in the same antagonism between democracy and fascism, albeit one aggravated by the ever-expanding and totalizing reach of capitalism? Perhaps the afterlife of the “Notes” can shed new light on the aesthetic and political stakes of Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire at the intersection of numerous unfinished projects and struggles in 1939, as well as his many still reverberating encounters and affinities with insurgent constellations of literary, social, and critical theory in twentieth-century France and beyond up to the contemporary period.” — Michael Krimper

5. The New York Times reporter Scott Reyburn decided to follow the assignment of a Harvard professor and spend three hours in front of an artwork. He chose ‘Las Meninas’ by Velázquez. In this article he shares the notes he took during the immersive experience. (The New York Times)

Movies I’m thinking about:
The Castaways of Turtle Island by Jacques Rozier

A Poem

Banish Air from Air
by Emily Dickinson

Banish Air from Air -
Divide Light if you dare -
They’ll meet
While Cubes in a Drop
Or Pellets of Shape
Fit -
Films cannot annul
Odors return whole
Force Flame
And with a Blonde push
Over your impotence
Flits Steam.

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Notes From the Lockdown (April 15, 2020)
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

I have taken a backseat to watch the lonelyhearts spread outside their doors into others, onto floors in foreign countries. They rattle on the streets and inside airports, they soar like torpid ghosts under the city’s chestnuts, mingling over taped-off benches, whispering invitations to sold-out evenings. Now flagrant, they glare together in daytime below our windows. One day we shall hang in our museum’s most meditative wings portraits of those who’ve chosen to charge their homes with their own demons, their own existence, their own thoughts—those brave ones who swore allegiance to their solitude for the sake of those who haven’t.

I write to you from my living room in Paris. In this room politicians have placed both hands on the table to pour the new rules before us, to urge us into the new order; earnest scientists from around the world have confided the urgency of our times, begging us to confront our fingerprint; and quiet, concerned voices have supplicated that we abstain from partisan play-offs.

During the last centuries we have let metastasize an empire in dissonance with our own nature. For our comfort we have made cities more prosperous than the country. Amazon warehouses sprout where fields once stretched, new skylines rise above history. Our dictionaries and encyclopaedias are obsolete; we value power over quality content, entertainment over freshness of thought. In the greed for more and easier we’ve made blind sacrifices. We’ve been too distracted to see the monsters we feed: executives gloating over quarterly profits, wellness gurus selling collagen pills, platforms designing feeds to addict us to the endless scroll. They build systems coated in pleasure and dipped in promises—an upgrade, a subscription, a like—raising walls of algorithms to keep us from looking at the truth, at nature. We are imprisoned by unreal needs, by our own consumption, and we have agreeably made our homes here.

Yes, I’ve been distracted too. Each year I watch more libraries shutter while our screens multiply, and I wonder if I’ve also let my own reasoning atrophy. We have lost our capacity to reason, for we reason not out of what we’re told, but with what we teach ourselves. What if we started to look nature directly in the face? Now more than ever we must trust in how we see our own God.

I’m unconvinced at the costs that come with our freedom to move, my freedom is nothing but an illusion. We were born rowing across the freedom nature afforded us, we were frightened by greater, more savage powers; today we move within systems, frightened by our own kind. We walk to the doctor to treat the diabetes we bred in aisles of processed sugar, the lungs we blackened in cities designed for cars, the minds we fractured by wiring them to screens. I’m consoled to know that the freedom taken from me during this pandemic isn’t real freedom. True freedom can’t exist in our times. We live in the freedom within the structures we’ve built, freedom provided by surveillance cameras, border controls, and paywalls.

A Visual Library

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

What my daughter is reading right now: The Detective Dog by Julia Donaldson and Sara Ogilvie.

What I’m reading in th emorning: Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Norton Critical Edition)

• Things I’m listening to and reading while I read Walt Whitman: Melvin Bragg’s In Our Times episode, The American Scholar address by Emerson (which inspired Whitman to write “Leaves of Grass”), an essay by Jorge Luis Borges “Walt Whitman: Man and Myth”, and this lecture by Harold Bloom filmed by Electric Literature.

What I’m putting in my September and October calendar in Paris:

• In conjunction with the publication of the book “From Graphic Design to Art” (MIT Press, 2025) Thomas Hirschhorn speaks with the American art historian Lisa Lee about the genesis of his work. On September 30.

• The Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, opens on October 17.

• When my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year I thought it would be nice to have him pick out a book for me on French history (he’s French). But it turns out it’s a bigger task than we imagined, or at least that’s what the librarians at the history bookshop he visited told him. Truth is I need to sharpen up on all my French history knowledge. So we ended up figuring out a starting point that was chaotic and interesting enough to me: Napoleon. All to say the Louvre opens their fall exhibition on Jacques-Louis David, who painted the French Revolution, on October 15.

• Meriem Bennani’s exhibition “Sole Crushing” at Lafayette Anticipations, opens October 23. I’m a fan of all her 2 Lizards films (on her instagram).

• Maurice Pialat’s retrospective at the Cinematheque running through September.

• A debate between the critic Nicolas Bourriaud and the artist Christian Jaccard on Tuesday, September 23, at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris.

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Nine articles I read this week:

• Niela Orr’s profile of Jamaica Kincaid in The New York Times Magazine:

  “I have this theory that you are who you are at 7,” Kincaid told me. “When you reach 7, that’s your life, and that you just repeat until you’re 100. Until you die, you’re 7. I find great comfort in that.”

• For the last 26 years Melvin Bragg has changed radio with his BBC show In Our Times, possibly one of the only radio shows I’ve listened to regularly for years. In early September he announced his retirement, leaving behind a very interesting last episode on Civility.

• Mike Kelley profiled by John-Baptiste Oduor in the New York Review of Books.

• Chandler Fritz writes about the American education system for Harper’s Magazine and I couldn’t be happier to read someone that synthesizes what we may expect out of private and public schools in the years to come.

• Joseph Kaplan Weinger, a doctoral candidate at UCLA researching the history of Israeli colonial settlements in the West Bank, wrote about the death of his friend Awdah Hathaleen for the New York Review of books.

• Annie Ernaux’s essay “The Other Girl” about her dead sister is penetrating in its honesty, it was translated into english for Granta by Alison L. Strayer:

  In the twenty-five years I’ve been visiting the graves, I’ve never had anything to say to you. According to the civil registry, you’re my sister.

• It’s in French but France Culture’s podcast series on Maurice Pialat.

• Anna Wintour in conversation with David Remnick for the New Yorker (video version). And then Chloe Malle’s interview with Vanessa Friedman for the New York Times.

• I’m also being a journalism geek and reading Mark Warren’s feature for Esquire: “Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy” which won him a Pulitzer this year.

What my husband is listening to:

A movie I’m thinking about:
Limite by Mário Peixoto

A Poem

Morning Street
by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Colchie)

The splashing rain
unearthed my father.
I never imagined
him buried thus,
to the din of trolleys
on an asphalt street
giant palm trees slanting on the beach
(and a voice from sleep
to stroke my hair),
as melodies wash up
with lost money
discarded confessions
old papers, glasses, pearls.

To see him exposed
to the damp, acrid air,
that drifts in with the tide
and cuts your breath,
to wish to love him
without deceit
to cover him with kisses, with flowers, with swallows,
to alter time
to offer the warm
of a quiet embrace
from this elderly recluse,
discarded confessions
and a lamb-like truce.

To feel the lack
of inborn strengths
to want to carry him
to the older sofa
of a bygone ranch,
but splashes of rain
but sheets of mud beneath reddish street lamps
but all that exists
of morning and wind
between one nature and another
yawning sheds by the docks
discarded confessions
ingratitude.
What should a man do
at dawn
(a taste of defeat
in his mouth, in the air)
in whatever place?
Everything spoken, drunk, or even pretended
and the rest still buried
in the folds of sleep,
cigarette stubs
the wet glare of streets
discarded confessions
morning defeat.

Vague mountains
greening waves
newspapers already white,
hesitant melody
trying to spawn
conditions for hope
on this gray day, of a broken lament.
Nothing left to remind me
of the seamless asphalt.
Abandoned cellars
my body shivers
discarded confessions:
abruptly, the walk home.

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The Exorcism: A Chronicle
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

“And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.” ― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

I sat on horses twice before, once inside a corral where a cowboy towed me around in circles, and another on a trail on the back of a mare who kept grazing, I had to nudge her belly with my ankles. The sort of riding I did this day was new to me and I didn’t dare command this horse do anything other than what he was already doing.

When we came out of the woods the boys were already off their horses. The morning rain had filled the stream and the water was warm and clear. We looked at the rocks on the river bed, grabbed them, threw them, jumped and splashed each other around on the grass. The sun was burning our backs and when we sat near the edge of the water our calfs were itchy.

On our way back to the house we rode so fast I couldn’t see the boys in front of us or hear my brother behind me. I felt like Jane Bennet riding in the rain, or Marianne at last galloping on her mare. I was not to be out riding with or without breeches, but it was precisely trespassing on this prohibition, propelling my life into danger that felt so liberating. I felt peace, I shouted ‘aye’ as we broke through the sticks and sped past the leaves that stuck to our clothes.

By the time we made it back to the house the sun was setting and our mothers came to greet us with worry. We felt such joy galloping on that hot afternoon that their cries didn’t phase us, we kept riding toward them, turning our ears away from their concern and hanging onto the bliss we had just amassed.

The house was as wild as the woods. It had high cherrywood beams, few windows, the furniture was plain and there were bats hanging above us when we slept. It was one of those places I couldn’t point to on a map, built in the middle of nowhere for no specific reason. My mother sat us down on the bed and picked the ticks out of our bodies. She picked them one by one, turning us in circles. Each time she squeezed one we grabbed it from her fingers, we collected them on the palms of our hands as if they were treasures we found in the woods. When she was done there were little holes all over our bodies, squashed animals lay scattered on our hands.

Except for this particular day I remember nothing from this weekend trip. I have a vivid image of the boys out in the field shooting birds with BB guns, but I don’t know what I did all day, perhaps I watched them play, perhaps I walked around foraging. I used to like disappearing into the forest to collect seeds, sticks, and flowers and put them on the stove, often a tree trunk I designated the kitchen area, part of a place where I lived alone, where I fetched water to make tea and built a bed for my doll. Everything in the woods had a replicated duty.

Daytime unfolds slowly and is easily forgotten but the night falls quickly and ravishes our memory. As the sun fell over the house and my mother picked out the ticks, her friend settled for a nap with her boys. It was that crucial hour for a house guest when a certain malaise falls upon them, the reminder they’re not home, it’s not their pantry to shuffle around in, not their water to drink even if they’re thirsty. We felt confined to our room, we circled around each other looking for anything we could find, and then we settled on the bed with our comics. Our mother kneeled on the floor folding the clothes into our suitcases.

It was common to see her rearrange our affairs when we traveled, she took pleasure in folding each t-shirt, each underwear into perfect squares, patting them down flat on the floor, brushing off any dust from the fabric with her hands and picking tiny pieces of leftover thread or lint before placing everything into neat, segmented piles inside our bags. For at least one hour each afternoon she made sure everything we brought with us was orderly, and these were the hours we looked forward to the most, when we could expect her to crack a joke or sing a naughty song she learned at the military housing when she was our age. But today she was consumed by a frantic sort of duty, she whispered to herself, rolled the t-shirts instead of folding them, forgot the luggage straps between the layers of socks, which caused her to take everything out and put it back in; she jerked her hands with the energy of an entire department store on Christmas eve. There was something unsettling in her mannerisms, a sort of distress. And just then, she looked up and asked us to wash off in the bathroom.

She waited outside the shower with a towel. As soon as we plopped the last dollop of shampoo on our head she took the bottle and dried it off. She did the same with the bar of soap which she placed hurriedly inside a plastic case, and when it was time for us to dry off she wiped the blood out of our vessels, ‘something bad will happen’ she said, ‘we need to leave’. God gave her this message, just that and nothing more, and we did as we were told because for as long as I can remember we had learned when God intervened we best follow the new order, it would be senseless not to fear him, to steer clear from his decree. And we knew well by now that if we hesitated she would go on to remind us:

Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil. 1 Ecc. 12:13

By the time we were dressed and out of the bathroom it was already too late. The boys were running to our bedroom door: something was the matter with their mother. We ran to the building next door. A narrow corridor led us to their mother’s bedroom where the ceiling was high and pointed, where there were no windows, and where it was barren save for two side tables and a carved wood bed with floral motifs. Their mother lay on her back asleep, her eyes closed, her hands shaking. My mother sent the boys to get help at the garden keeper’s house and called for me to kneel next to her and pray.

In the minutes that followed I watched my mother perform her first exorcism. I am sure this recollection belongs to me, for years this memory was so tangibly my own, her story in many ways mine. In my rebellion I will come to abandon her beliefs, but on this night, her perspective was still my truth.

We kneeled, we closed our eyes, we prayed. We invoked the presence of Jesus Christ, we glorified the power of his blood, and we asked him to take the devil back to where he belonged. We repeated several times the blood of Jesus has power and asked Jesus to bring his army of angels into this room with his wide-eyed fire swords, and begged, implored him to burn the devil with his mighty fire. We said it loud, with conviction, we told him we were tying him in Jesus’s name. Then the mother spoke. In a coarse voice she said it’s burning, and my mother continued in prayer, it’s supposed to burn Satanás. The mother opened her eyes, they rolled to the back of her head. We kept praying, commanding the devil to leave. Jesus was in command and we weren’t scared we said. The mother yelled, she was sweating, and then something happened again. I don’t know whose memory this belongs to, but in time I was reminded that her stiff body lifted high above the bed and she fell back down in a seated position. She opened her eyes and everyone in the room was silent. Did you see that my mother asked me, I don’t remember I did.

The kids arrived with the garden keeper and just as quickly left to fetch a glass of water for their mother. I left the mothers alone in the room. When my mother came out she put us in the back seat of our car, loaded all of our belongings in the trunk and we drove away, without saying a single word. It was nighttime and we made our way to a small town with a few small houses that sat on the edge of a dirt road. People I’d never seen before waited for us down a short set of stairs. I was hungry but we didn’t eat. My mother tucked me into the lower end of a bunk bed and said now go to sleep.

A Visual Library

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

What my daughter is reading right now: Funnybones by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

What I’m reading in the morning: Specimen Days by Walt Whitman and his poem: O Captain! My Captain!

What my husband is reading: Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Six things I want to disclose this week:

• A sober household.

• A guesthouse one hour outside of Paris, La Minotte, and the small towns around it, and the National Farm where Vita got to milk cows, feed rabbits, play with goats and eat farm-made strawberry ice cream.

• Playing Lake Swan for Vita and coming up with ballet steps to perform to dad when he’s home from work (our pillows double as theatre curtains).

• These Ludwig Reiter boots I saw when we were skiing in Austria last year, and this Hanro bra.

• E.Dehillerin in central Paris for stainless steel pots and pans.

• Something about Garth Greenwell teaching an online class this fall on Augustine’s Confessions without institutional backing is very appreciated: starts in November.

What my husband is listening to:

A movie I’m thinking about:
Throne of Blood by Kurosawa

A Poem

The Seekers of Lice
by Arthur Rimbaud

When the child's forehead, full of red torments,
Implores the white swarm of indistinct dreams,
There come near his bed two tall charming sisters
With slim fingers that have silvery nails.

They seat the child in front of a wide open
Window where the blue air bathes a mass of flowers
And in his heavy hair where the dew falls
Move their delicate, fearful and enticing fingers.

He listens to the singing of their apprehensive breath.
Which smells of long rosy plant honey
And which at times a hiss interrupts, saliva
Caught on the lip or desire for kisses.

He hears their black eyelashes beating in the perfumed
Silence; and their gentle electric fingers
Make in his half-drunken indolence the death of the little lice
Crackle under their royal nails.

Then the wine of Sloth rises in him,
The sigh of an harmonica which could bring on delirium;
The child feels, according to the slowness of the caresses
Surging in him and dying continuously a desire to cry.

PS:

Thank you for being patient while I was with child this summer. She’s now four but every year is so different from the other that I don’t know how available I’ll be in July and August when she’s off school, and I tripped over myself here.

I’ll leave you with a little bit of her, climbing her first tree in the Greek mountains, in the region that, according to Greek Mythology, was the summer residence of the Gods of Mount Olympus and the homeland of Centaurs, it was where Hercules and Achilles learned music and virtue.

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Two Worlds: A Chronicle
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

My mother didn’t leave the bedroom until the early evening. When she left she wore a knee-length skirt and a button-down shirt, she tied her hair back and tucked her Bible under her arm. She arrived at a simple building where a hand-painted fabric sign read God is Love.

I was delivered into two worlds, the two worlds my mother lived in.

In the beginning, I saw the world as it was intended for me, where my mother watered the garden, where her silk scarf smelled of patchouli, a world where she made coffee with our housekeeper each day at three. It was where my father rushed to the office after lunch, and where my brother hid from us his swarms of magazines.

On the other side of this world, my mother lived alone in a world imperceptible, a world with no smell, a world with no taste, with no color or carnal satisfaction as I would later come to see. It was a world that kept us at shore. No matter how close we arrived to it each week, no matter how deep we threw our anchor into its sea, we could only touch its passageway.

Until I was an adult I existed in the two worlds she introduced to me. For a long time, I would rest my head on a pillow and wait for someone on the other side to come talk to me. I had to try hard not to fall asleep. I’d ask for protection. I’d ask for deliverance from evil. I’d ask God to fix my crooked bottom teeth. I’d ask for the things my mother wanted: my father to stop drinking, my brother to stop lying, for harmony at home. It wasn’t until I heard myself saying the prayer’s final words, in Jesus name Amen, that I let myself drift into sleep. Each night as I closed my eyes on the other side of her wall so did she together with me. Her path took her closer to the world of flying cherubim. Mine took me further away from any world at all, from any form, any definition. She chased the imaginable, she had become everything she knew she could never be.

Each evening as I turned off my light and stretched my body in bed this world was going mute for me. I asked to see it, to feel its presence, but while it spoke to my mother in the language of angels it was silent with me. And while they visited her at night, they were but imaginary phantoms lying next to me. She promised me they were there, saying I perhaps needed to have more faith. Often, when we questioned my faith, she’d take me to visit Celia, her friend from church, who had adopted her fiftieth child. The eldest was married and had children of his own, and the youngest was a newborn found by a waste collector. The first time I met one of Celia’s daughters, I don’t remember her name, she had just testified in church to seeing an angel. I have to admit this gave me hope.

At night my mother saw everything but angels. When it happened, we’d find my father on the sofa or in my brother’s bedroom the next morning, and by the time breakfast came around he’d confess to not remembering anything at all. When he left for work she’d confide in us that in the middle of the night she woke up paralyzed, she couldn’t move her body and had access only to her eyes. She could blink, look up and down, left and right, and before she knew it she’d feel a presence over her body. She’d talk about the gruesome creatures she saw; figures with arched backs, long nails, horns, slimy, and dark brown. I always pictured the devil to look like shit.

Sometimes the demons would choke her until she’d be nearly dead. Once, when she started praying, invoking the power of the blood of Jesus, which she was told by the church was the only way to exorcise demons, the demons turned into bats and flew around her bed. She repeated these stories with a level of detail that to us children they were unquestionably true, after all we had been indoctrinated, and they felt no different from what we saw Thursday evenings at the liberation sermon. Beelzebub, Pombagira, Lucifer, legions, this was the language we heard at church each time we saw someone exorcised on the altar, each time the audience prayed and chanted to transfer their faith and help the pastor’s deliver that soul from the spirit that possessed it. When their bodies twisted and turned into arcs, when their hands cracked in disgusting directions, they’d announce legions.

These were the spirits she spent her life fighting off in church, at home, and even in me, in objects, in absolutely everything. My mother was at war with the devil.

A Visual Library

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Four things I’m into this week:

• The New York Times has a new feature called the Poetry Challenge. The idea is to memorize a short poem a day.

• I’m very fond of my new Repetto ballerina flats in this powder blue that I’ve been wearing every day for the last two weeks.

• Looking through some old notebooks and thought I’d share some pages with you. I love what Plutarch said about Simonides: “he called painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks.”

• This entire album, which I can only find on YouTube, by Os Tincoãs, a Brazilian band from the 1970s. Their music was heavily influenced by Bahia’s Candomblé tradition.

What my husband is listening to:

Four things my daughter is into this week:

• It’s finally warm in Paris and Vita is blossoming in her pink short sleeve wardrobe she’s been wanting to wear all year.

• Someone at school has lice, she hasn’t caught it, so this morning I sent her off with wet slick back hair, a tight braid, and an anti-lice lavender spray. (she didn’t catch it).

• She still asks me to play Marisa Monte’s Amor I Love You nearly every day.

• Oh, and how could I forget, she has a boyfriend. His name is Arlo. He managed to get her in a Batman costume. I could go on for hours about the two of them, but let me just end by saying she whispered into his ears: you are my real love (or at least that’s what she told me she was going to whisper), he shared his chocolate with her, and they kissed.

A movie I’m thinking about:
The Adventure by Michelangelo Antonioni.

A Poem

Exile
by Hart Crane

My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, —
No, — nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell',
And with the day, distance again expands
Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.

Yet, love endures, though starving and alone.
A dove's wings clung about my heart each night
With surging gentleness, and the blue stone
Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.

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You can read the first two parts of my short story here: The Amazon I and The Amazon II.

The Amazon III: A Short Story
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

The table was festive with flowers, champagne, fine silver, and chatter. Nina wiped the corner of her lips, and as she did so smiled at my mother and thought, ‘I reckon you needed someone to make you happy.’

She let her mind take her to that place she often visited when she came across a new person she couldn’t quite place.

‘Yes, it’s no secret,’ Nina thought, everyone can see she’s hiding behind her simplicity, her delicate gestures. Next to her timidity is certainly a certain elegance one hardly sees elsewhere in this room. Yet there’s something distrustful about her. Behind the smile there’s something in hiding, perhaps it’s pain and sadness, but it does come across as judgement. ‘That, oh no,’ Nina continues in her thoughts realizing she’s most definitely not a jealous woman. She went further now. She was thinking of my mother’s style, all fortune or misfortune aside, she thought it came from the interior and in that sense she was not a proper part of the picture. To all the other women, Nina included, style was an exterior force. Nina thought of my mother as a strong-willed confrontation, someone who thought it important not to conform to their standards, or at least not to show that weakness, and here she thought of the other women too. Maria also came from a modest family, but my mother seemed to be fighting for something. While Maria fell for the gossip around the table, my mother ignored all conversations around her, the main event was certainly in her mind. Nina was now bothered by my mother’s poise, realizing that at one point she too had fallen for it all as quickly as Maria did. Nina was beginning to feel all too different from her now, and she felt as though she’d lost, so she used her privilege to corrupt her guest.

‘Ana, do you want to join us next weekend at our country house? It will be just us women,’ she said to my mother.

‘She would love to,’ my father answered in her place.

Meanwhile, Nina herself was being observed by her very own husband. He listened to her as he filleted his fish. Now this was an option nearly all other guests had forgone for although they loved to eat sole not one of them learned how to fillet it except for my father, who followed his boss’s lead on the option and sitting in front of him opened his fish, a skill he learned with his mother in France. He considered Nina, agreed that she was still the most beautiful woman on the table, that she was sensitive and kind, but something about my mother’s presence had made Ana do something strange, and he felt uncomfortable by her new demeanor. And as he ate his fish he meditated on his own life, he had married Nina because he held her father to great esteem, he wished to be him one day. Now he was condemned to spend his remaining years with a woman whose novels weren’t nearly as poetic as he one day thought they would be, and although she had harbored a certain acclaim in the papers, the reviews were just as trivial as the stories she wrote and read aloud to him day and night, empty of sincerity, filled with certainties. His ideal woman was still Nina, but he wished for a woman who read the classics, who could understand beyond herself the subtleties at this dinner. Nina would quickly turn all of this into gossip and he would have to hear her plots when they were home readying for bed, time at which he wanted to sink into his pillow with Edmund Burke. Yet he feared nothing of what he did, for he was not a religious man, he followed not in the steps of great thinkers, and at least his wife didn’t judge him, and they were rich, which after all was more important than his desire to be someone else.

‘Do you prefer the sole this evening or the pirarucu this morning?’ my mother asked Nina. This wasn’t a trick question, there was no malicious intention behind it, she herself preferred the fish this evening for she had a strong aversion to fresh water fish which she often said tasted like chicken.

‘The sole don’t you think?’ Nina turned to my father, who after taking a sip of wine answered diplomatically that yes, the sole was delicious. Diplomacy had never been one to abandon him in moments like these, he knew it to be his strongest weapon, and like my mother, they saw this evening as one of the many battles they’d face before they could declare victory upon their lives. And along with the answer, my father brought to the table some knowledge about fishing. He told of the night he couldn’t sleep and walked to the port where he found two fishermen. He asked if he could go catch shrimp with them, which he did, and told of how they returned with buckets full, some of which they deep fried at the bar across the street to a shot of cachaça early that morning. The look on every man’s face, they dreamed of doing something this brave when they were kids but had never had the opportunity to do so. And then he went into another foray about eating raw shrimp, and the conversation quickly made a turn into mining trucks, and businessmen, and negotiation tactics.

‘I’ve never been to Japan,’ Nina told my mother. And as they tried to find some sort of common ground, desert had come to an end and a select few people got up to leave. And although my mother would’ve liked a small glass of sweet liquor, she thought the one glass of champagne had been enough for her and the baby and she prepared to excuse herself from the table. And as she did my father also got up, and he was also happy to retreat early from what would soon be the end of the night. He placed his jacket over her shoulders and they set off on a slow walk to their rooms.

Down she looked again into the depths of the mines. An abyss formed by the nine concentric waves of torment, red and ashy as if something had burnt through the earth and into the ground. It was warm, violent, and full of sin: the gluttonous, the violent, the insincere, the greedy, the treacherous. To their eyes, only the miners sat on the edge of these embankments, men who congregated at church with their wives, and of this she was sure. But to her eyes it was the guests at dinner that would soon inherent this wicked hole and swim in its hot fire next to Satan and his legions. And at that moment she decided she would go to church tomorrow to deliver her soul from all that which she thought was evil in her.

News Briefing: A Man Held Hostage

I read in the news the story of a man who was held hostage by his father and stepmother for 20 years. When he was 12 years old they took him out of school and locked him up in a small room. At 32, and weighing 68 pounds, he set the house on fire; it was the only way he saw to survive.

Inside the ambulance, when fire fighters noticed a strange smell, the man told his story: he hadn’t showered in over a year, he had never seen a doctor, and his teeth were crumbling when he bit into food.

Is he a boy or a man? How could this happen in a house with a family of four: the stepmother, the father, and their two adult daughters.

A boy locked up in a room. Not a drunk. Not a criminal. Not a bum. Not an animal, not an insect, not a thing. A boy and then a man. And the girls that became women, and the father, and the stepmother, they all woke up and kept going. For 20 years they kept going. At first the school was worried about this boy who ate from the trash can at lunch. They called the house, social services, the police. Then for 19 years they all stopped calling. No one fell asleep thinking about him. They woke up too and they kept going. And the boy stayed locked in this room with nothing and no one.

Isn’t it the father’s responsibility? The stepmother? The mother? The stepsisters? The police? The school? The neighbors? What do we have anything to do with this?

And the boy, and the man, set his room on fire at 32 and 68 pounds. He set the room on fire said the news. And it’s not our responsibility. Let the man die in the room with his disintegrated teeth, with his scrappy clothes, with his books. Yesterday he sat fire to his room. The man or the boy, he set everything on fire.

A Visual Library

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

What I’m reading in the morning: in English I’m reading Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, and in French, a friend recommended me Simone de Beauvoir as an easy read, so I’m going to try out Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.

What my daughter is into: Vita loves chocolate and hide-and-seek so she’s naturally got only one thing on her mind and that is the easter egg hunt happening next weekend at her grandmother’s house in the South of France. We’ve also been working on her school attire because it’s getting warmer in Paris and all she wants to wear are ballet flats, which aren’t very practical when they go to the Jardin de Luxembourg with her class. She’s very into her long hair and I’m trying to convince her to get her first trim. She’s into singing out loud in the streets and screaaaaaming instead of talking.

Five things I read and saw this week:

• Lucas Arruda’s exhibition “Lucas Arruda. Qu'importe le paysage” at the Musee D’Orsay, which marks the first monographic exhibition at a French museum by a Brazilian artist. On view until July 20, 2025.

• This profile piece by Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker: “The Brazilian Judge Taking On the Digital Far Right” about Alexandre de Moraes.

• I also purchased two books I want to read this weekend, one in French and one in English. In English I’m going to give “The Cost of Living” by Deborah Levy a go, and in French, a friend recommended Simone de Beauvoir as an easy read, so I’m going to try out “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter”.

• Lauren Groff’s short story “The Ghosts of Wannsee” published in the Atlantic on September 2024.

• I’m still on board with Paul Krugman’s substack, where the economist is laying out for us the ins and outs of Trump’s tarrifying decisions.

What my husband is listening to:

A movie I’m thinking about:
A Woman Under the Influence by John Cassavetes

A Poem

Inferno, Canto I
by Dante Alighieri

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,
Vested already with that planet’s rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.

Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart’s lake had endured throughout
The night, which I had passed so piteously.

And even as he, who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes;

So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.

After my weary body I had rested,
The way resumed I on the desert slope,
So that the firm foot ever was the lower.

And lo! almost where the ascent began,
A panther light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered o’er!

And never moved she from before my face,
Nay, rather did impede so much my way,
That many times I to return had turned.

The time was the beginning of the morning,
And up the sun was mounting with those stars
That with him were, what time the Love Divine

At first in motion set those beauteous things;
So were to me occasion of good hope,
The variegated skin of that wild beast,

The hour of time, and the delicious season;
But not so much, that did not give me fear
A lion’s aspect which appeared to me.

He seemed as if against me he were coming
With head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger,
So that it seemed the air was afraid of him;

And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings
Seemed to be laden in her meagreness,
And many folk has caused to live forlorn!

She brought upon me so much heaviness,
With the affright that from her aspect came,
That I the hope relinquished of the height.

And as he is who willingly acquires,
And the time comes that causes him to lose,
Who weeps in all his thoughts and is despondent,

E'en such made me that beast withouten peace,
Which, coming on against me by degrees
Thrust me back thither where the sun is silent.

While I was rushing downward to the lowland,
Before mine eyes did one present himself,
Who seemed from long-continued silence hoarse.

When I beheld him in the desert vast,
“Have pity on me,” unto him I cried,
“Whiche’er thou art, or shade or real man!”

He answered me: “Not man; man once I was,
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
And Mantuans by country both of them.

‘Sub Julio’ was I born, though it was late,
And lived at Rome under the good Augustus,
During the time of false and lying gods.

A poet was I, and I sang that just
Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy,
After that Ilion the superb was burned.

But thou, why goest thou back to such annoyance?
Why climb’st thou not the Mount Delectable,
Which is the source and cause of every joy?”

“Now, art thou that Virgilius and that fountain
Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech?”
I made response to him with bashful forehead.

“O, of the other poets honour and light,
Avail me the long study and great love
That have impelled me to explore thy volume!

Thou art my master, and my author thou,
Thou art alone the one from whom I took
The beautiful style that has done honour to me.

Behold the beast, for which I have turned back;
Do thou protect me from her, famous Sage,
For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.”

“Thee it behoves to take another road,”
Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
“If from this savage place thou wouldst escape;

Because this beast, at which thou criest out,
Suffers not any one to pass her way,
But so doth harass him, that she destroys him;

And has a nature so malign and ruthless,
That never doth she glut her greedy will,
And after food is hungrier than before.

Many the animals with whom she weds,
And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound
Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain.

He shall not feed on either earth or pelf,
But upon wisdom, and on love and virtue;
'Twixt Feltro and Feltro shall his nation be;

Of that low Italy shall he be the saviour,
On whose account the maid Camilla died,
Euryalus, Turnus, Nisus, of their wounds;

Through every city shall he hunt her down,
Until he shall have driven her back to Hell,
There from whence envy first did let her loose.

Therefore I think and judge it for thy best
Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide,
And lead thee hence through the eternal place,

Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations,
Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate,
Who cry out each one for the second death;

And thou shalt see those who contented are
Within the fire, because they hope to come,
Whene’er it may be, to the blessed people;

To whom, then, if thou wishest to ascend,
A soul shall be for that than I more worthy;
With her at my departure I will leave thee;

Because that Emperor, who reigns above,
In that I was rebellious to his law,
Wills that through me none come into his city.

He governs everywhere, and there he reigns;
There is his city and his lofty throne;
O happy he whom thereto he elects!”

And I to him: “Poet, I thee entreat,
By that same God whom thou didst never know,
So that I may escape this woe and worse,

Thou wouldst conduct me there where thou hast said,
That I may see the portal of Saint Peter,
And those thou makest so disconsolate.”

Then he moved on, and I behind him followed.

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You can read the first part of my short story here: The Amazon I.

The Amazon II: A Short Story
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

After lunch, which grouped the couples around a whole pirarucu seared in coconut milk and manioc flour, my mother sat courtside watching the wives play tennis. In court the women played doubles, they lacked talent but not costume, they filled the court like a fresh spread in their white pleated skirts, strapless rompers, and red lipstick, giggling like they played this game together many times before. She felt alone, but she was used to not feeling a part; it was often the case in these dynamics that she struggled to find her place. She didn’t like to blabber and when she didn’t have a facialist to recommend, or a hotel in Rome that was close to this café or that boutique, the only other country she visited was Argentina, she tended to close herself off further away, leaving for others a locked, awkward grin on her lips.

So, when the time came for the women to climb into the helicopter to tour the scenic rivers of the Amazon, my mother decided she’d abstain, and the women supported her. “It’s true dear, it’s the best you can do for your baby, you should rest.”

She walked back to her room, past her husband who sat on the terrace with the men, past a table with fresh fruits and juices, past the chestnut tree Princess Diana planted in the garden just a few months prior, and into shelter.

She was too heavy to find comfort in bed and took refuge on the sofa. She left the windows open and welcomed the rain; a light sun shower drizzled on her hairy arms. The wind brought in the smell of wet dirt. She wondered about her son. From inside her purse she pulled a picture of him. His complaisant demeanor, his complicit eyes settled any urge to hear his voice. She dropped the effort and relief took over her countenance.

She thought only of the hours to come, she dreaded the minutes the moon would weigh above her window and she’d have to go to the cocktail reception. She wanted to disappear into the trails that led into the forest, but the laws that reigned over her decisions obliged her to comply. My father was surprised to find her asleep when he came into the room late that afternoon. He expected her to be with the other wives, pursuing the sightings of jaguars and toucans in the forest. He smelled of whiskey and cigars and she despised him, despised herself for tolerating him, for being bound by him. She got up and started an orderly routine around the room which she performed with hastened gestures. She folded her clothes, washed her lace bra and underwear in the sink, fluffed the pillows on the sofa, re-arranged her toiletries, and sorted through her small bags. She showered, dried her hair, put on a minimal amount of mascara, and slipped into a simple black dress to which she added only a pearl necklace. He followed her every move; chased after her like a headless mantis.

Anything he said was remediable that evening for she was at her most vulnerable and dependent when in society, where his charismatic demeanor was her vital companion. When they walked past the women she held his hand tighter, squeezing it a few times before looking up at him smitten, a gesture that implied forgiveness, but he refused to grant her a response and as quickly as she made a move at him, he let go of her hand to latch onto a glass of champagne, and then another one for her. He was not one to withhold cordiality in public, but he knew just the place before intimacy made an appearance. In the bedroom she had wound him with the fervor he needed to spin the room around, even if she wasn’t going to dance along. A few steps in and he already felt full to the brim with the gaze of the ladies, who pivoted their shoulders left and then right to see if he was watching; shame could not abash them.

Waiters in white smokings paced across candlelit halls and salons with silver trays of foie gras and smoked salmon canapés. The guests tiptoed around the salon, treading lightly past the dinner table with gold slingbacks and shiny tuxedo shoes, looking at the seating arrangements from the corner of their eyes and then gathering to discuss them by the fountain. Imported perfumes impregnated the curtains. Plumes and crystals sparkled on crevices of Louis XV sofas. Gold buttons, silver buckles, stone bracelets, and watches affronted the night, and the evening grew brighter and brighter as the company’s swanky guests flocked to the reception.

My mother smiled as she moved toward the piano, her steps delicate and quiet, one hand on the crystal flute, the other playing with the pearls around her neck. She had no trouble recalling the hot February afternoon when my father pulled over in a light blue Chevrolet Chevette. It’s not that the song the pianist played reminded her of the song my father played in the car that summer day, but so rare are the moments in her life when she listened to music, that any song could capture her attention and transport her to another time. It was the roar of an entire nation she heard from his car’s window; Brazil vibrated to the noise of trumpets and tubas, to the showers of confetti that blew through its large avenues where everyone jumped Carnival in wigs, leis, and glitter. My mother and her sisters were waiting for the bus when he pulled up and offered them a ride to the fair. Her sisters were quick to push her onto the front seat, and for the days to come this stranger would lure her into his own.

Soon this impression would fade, the music and murmur of the room would return. She watched him now, surrounded by the grandchildren of bankers, politicians, and important imperial families; businessmen with last names of whom she read only in the papers, in headlines that praised the expansion of this port or the construction of that road.

Certainly she was now ready for a walk; her legs had sunk into the ground and she felt a part with the wallpaper, it did her no good knowing she was just a thread in this room. She got a hold of herself and roamed around the salon. The choreographed mannerisms in people’s hands, the meandering of the staff, the out of season peonies, she felt far from home. In a distant place, south of the Amazon, in the sparse mountain ranges that protected her hometown, she pictured her sisters huddled around a game of cards, worried only about the livestock outside. As for the success of the evening, the significance it had for my father, she thought little about it, on her mind was only how trivial it had all been thus far, and the little effort everyone had put into making her feel wanted. She had no desire to partake in it. She was always so certain of her perspectives, of her interpretation of their perspectives, not once did it occur to her that she might be wrong. She saw only what she wanted to believe in, a people living between hair salons and dinner functions, relying on the poor to prepare their affairs and regarding with kindness only those few doctors and lawyers they’d come to rely on.

A cold front brought a small crowd back into the main hall. The prospect of fresh air made her even more contemplative. “Can you please open the door?” Her tone, crass and impolite, was just as shameless as the men who ventured in wearing a cashmere scarf, mingling with senior officials.

She wrinkled her nose. At night, when the air was thin, the wind brought to the summit a reminder of the sedulous miners: a metal and carbon stench. From the terrace she saw for the first time the iron ores where very bright lights exposed the depths of the holes Vale was digging into the Amazon; their glow outshined the moon. It was as close to hell as she could imagine.

She was the only one outside, no one else had come to look at the sky, and she thought about the magnetism that beckoned her into my father’s arms, how it was nothing but a plot against her reality, and she kept circling around these inferences until she heard Nina’s voice.

“My grandmother never wanted a fountain here.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say she was very strong willed,” replied my mother turning her head slightly toward Nina.

They smiled at each other as they stepped back into the main hall.

“Now where are we supposed to sit,” said Nina.

“Ana!” said my father.

“We’ll know soon enough,” she insisted.

My mother withdrew from her lone soldier stance and moved back into conformist wife. She wrapped her hand around his arm. He took them around the table while they poked into the empty seats to see if one of them read their name. In the distance she tried to find someone to guide them, but help was out of her reach. It was a relief when a man signaled from across the table pointing them to their seats. There they found their names calligraphed on porcelain plates, where, in the middle of the Amazon, they would taste the six-course French dinner; gougère with oysters, salmon mousse, sole meunière or coq au vin, salad, beaufort, and a demitasse with a slice of tarte tatin.

You can read the end of this short story here: The Amazon III.

A Visual Library

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Five articles I read this week:

• My therapist recommended I read Neige Sinno’s memoir Sad Tiger earlier this year. I read it in French because it wasn’t translated to English. I left the book feeling like it was an urgent reflection on abuse; the perspectives around abuse and what it means to try to understand your abuser. It’s now out in English.

• Ezra Klein invited the economist Paul Krugman to talk about tarrifs.

• An In Our Times episode about Pollination, accompanied by an excellent reading list (screenshot below). If I could add one more title to this list it would be The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck.

• David Cole reviewed two books about the relationship between politicians and universities in what feels like a timely moment, all for the New York Review of Books.

• The New Yorker posted a series of notes Joan Didion wrote to her husband John Dunne before he and their daughter passed away. The notes are a sort of recap from her sessions with her therapist. They will be published as a book called Notes to John later this month. And here’s a beautiful picture to remember Didion by this morning.

What my husband is listening to:

What my daughter is into: a friend at school making milk with yoghurt and water, looking at herself in the mirror, short sleeve dresses because it’s getting warmer in Paris, and my ultimate favorite, using my eyebrow gel to brush her eyebrows down.

A movie I’m thinking about:
La Notte by Michelangelo Antonioni

A Poem

A Glimpse
by Walt Whitman

A glimpse through an interstice caught,

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner,

Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,

A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,

There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

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The Amazon I: A Short Story (in three parts)
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

It is a curse disguised as a blessing when a woman finds her life commanded by faith instead of complete self-possession. She converted three months before she found out she was pregnant with me, I was born a few days before summer on the eastern end of the Amazon.

She hoped I’d arrive after her trip to the Carajás Mountains, but during church service that evening she felt a tightening sensation spread across her stomach. My brother’s delivery was in a maternity ward between the lake and the beach in the south zone of Rio, it was long and sterile, and she found pleasure when she held him in her arms. My birth was harsh and her pregnancy pathetic, the many interventions she suffered while carrying me had marred any glory in birthing a child. Each time the doctor reached inside to detach her uterus from her cervix, she regretted me more. Having children was a torment.

Later in life she’d often maintain this certain contempt toward me. When I touched on her serenity, she’d dream out loud of a life happier had she chosen to spend it with another man; she could have built her life along the main avenue of the botanical gardens having done without pregnancy, without me, without you.

In this old photograph you gave me I can see outside the room. Cicadas sing in the canopies and the croaking of the frogs grows steadily. Macaws announce the coming of the night in their rah-rah-rah flight over the blackwater rivers. The midwife pulled me from underneath the soiled sheets. She brought me closer to the cries of the night until your calloused hand reached for me. In your other hand you held the wax vestiges of a candle still waning, pain flickered briefly in our eyes.

They say I was precocious, I opened my eyes the moment I arrived. I saw your broad fingers, your ridged and discolored nails and I cried. You say my cry swaddled the sounds of the frogs, that my ongoing shrieks pierced the clicking ribs of the cicadas, but only in the light did tears drip down my cheeks. The midwife placed a steaming cup of water next to her. She wrapped me in her arms and we drifted into our first night. She coddled me so tight that when I woke up my cheeks were flushed and sticking to her breast.

Now I see you outside in fresh air, you can’t find harmony in nature. No matter how many times the sun rises, no matter how bright its rays seep through the stained glass; purple rays, red rays, green rays of light spreading across the nave, unfurling the splinters, you still can’t see. Light could melt on you, like it did the morning after I was born, and you still wouldn’t see. You watched the parrots make their early calls, you saw them fly to the top of the palms, dip their beaks in the spear leaf puddles, but on their flight you found only function, you forgot to dream.

You say the room was musty, that it smelled of petrichor, and that her skin was damp when the pastor came to see us. He rested his hand on her greasy, thick chestnut hair. I kept my eyes closed, I met her in the dark. He pressed his thumb onto my forehead and amid many words of gratitude I was consecrated to the Lord. There was no altar call for me. I arrived promised to all the worlds that surrounded me, to outlive the anguish and punishment of one sole soul, the one who was cast down to earth to live among us through life’s droughts and miseries.

Nothing can strike me that nature can’t repair.

Carajás was an isolated, company town west of the Araguaia River. There lived the miners who worked on the open pits thirty kilometers south. The overabundance of metals in the area had starved the soil dry. Bound by a deep green forest stood a vast rock complex whose deposits were drilled to fill haul trucks with iron ore. Miners braved the red sediment like bees, hovering over the ramps to the benches and pits with Japanese dozers and hydraulic shovels. From Parauapebas, the city north on the bank of the blackwater river, the Carajás Railway ran, east past the indigenous people of the Mãe Maria territory and the community of Marabá, from Açailandia across the many steel mills on the outlands of Piquiá, to the Santa Rosa dos Pretos quilombo, all the way east to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Iron left Carajás raw and docked at the Port of Shanghai refined. Under the flights of the harpy eagles the trains travelled back to the range of the swelling mountains to deposit miners and their families.

Just a few months before, you worked a managerial job at a national railroad company overseeing the transport of biochemicals between seven brazilian states. You had a stable job, but much too low for your ambitions, and when one of the company’s clients, the national mining giant Vale knocked on your door with a promising offer, you worried rejecting it meant stalling your career, or so you explained the prospect of change to her, and she was quick to agree. It was the late eighties and you joined what had become in only four years Latin America’s most profitable mining company.

Traveling with the company’s leadership marked a stepping stone in your relationship with its seniors. Ultimately it was leisure, and the wives, who for the most part were kept away waiting for their husbands to leave a fancy dinner or late-night drink, were for once invited to partake in the establishment.

She wasn’t looking forward to visiting Carajás when you arrived there that morning before lunch, she did it out of mere obligation, a sort of religious dedication to you. Feeling as though she’d fulfilled one of your demanding requests, and knowing that without her accordance this trip would discredit your stature to your principals, she felt the urgency of her decisions upon your triumph. She found purpose in her subservience, she sought solace in God. Her duty was above all else to His laws, which she carried out and complied with only when she complied with you, her husband.

She worked with you toward your fellow ambition and she enjoyed the upper hand her discordance could bequeath you as a couple, for to you both, no fortune or misfortune was exclusive to individual man or woman, but always dispensed on you together as one family. To know she held some assertion over your will didn’t console her that morning, she, who could no longer bear her eight-month-old unborn child.

You can read the next parts of this short story here: The Amazon II and The Amazon III.

A Visual Library

A Prayer
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

How to tell the truth, the kind that incriminates the people I love. I have nothing without truth, and nothing without pity and compassion. I’m desperate to love anew, I can’t not love at all. Their faults are my truth. The frontiers we crossed, it’s ours, these ties, it’s my guilt. We soar like torpid ghosts. Wake me from this night, make me come to my truth and be brave to utter it now.

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Five articles I read this week:

• In an article for the New York Review of Books, Adam Shatz reviews Anouar Brahem new album After the Last Sky (above). The composer describes it as a “cry of anguish for the people of Gaza”. It’s beautiful. I can’t stop listening to it. The title comes from a verse by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, where he asks “Where should the birds fly, after the last sky?”

• The Paris Review told me it was Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday this week and I decided to read this celebratory article by Jamie Quatro, who I had never heard of before (I’m living under a rock). This led me to one of her short stories called Yogurt Days. I’m hooked, I ordered Two-Step Devil.

• I have not moved on from last week’s news about Columbia University. This essay in The Nation was written by Grant Miner, another expelled student. Also if you haven’t seen the Tufts video yet, I think you have to.

• Savannah Walsh’s feature on Elizabeth Tabish for Vanity Fair had me asking a very genuine question: who has been watching this show and how come this is the first time I hear about it? For those of you who’ve never heard of The Chosen, like me, it has 280 million international viewers… to give you a sense of how huge that is, the season finale of Game of Thrones averaged 44 million viewers. What is going on? I really am living under a rock.

• The Believer published a new poem by Ocean Vuong. What Vuong said on Insta about it: “wrote a long poem about the strange yet capacious condition of being 16 years old that—inevitably—devolves into the equally strange condition of being the 16th president.”

What my husband is listening to:

What my daughter is into: children’s magazines. We don’t have a subscription but when we’re at the airport or we walk by a newsstand we’ve gotten in the habit of buying her one and it usually helps us get through the flight. Now, every night when we put her to bed she bypasses reading an actual book for one of her French zines Les Belles Histoires.

A movie I’m thinking about:
Aquarius by Kleber Mendonça Filho

A Poem

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
by Stephane Mallarmé

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui !

Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.

Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée à l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.

Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.

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Sea Burial: A Chronicle
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

The sea at Olinda was briny and salty. And I did what I would always do in the future: I put my hands together and plunged into the waves, swallowing a little water as I did: I so wanted to be a part of the sea that I drank from it every day.
— Clarice Lispector

When I die I want a full body sea burial. I’ve pictured my body bandaged with thick black tarp, my neck and my legs wrapped in white tape to hold the plastic together. My loved ones bring the package to a cliff. They hesitate to choose the right angle; head first, feet first, or do they just hold me by my ends and swing me into the air? Flowers would be romantic, but I would prefer if they threw rocks into the water.

I doubt they’ll wrap me in plastic. Navy canvas, even a casket would be more romantic, and I’m told we must travel far into the sea before it’s legal to celebrate a funeral. This need, to have our final resting place be the water... the womb is filled with water, it bursts, we’re born, water flows back into the womb, the body jumps back into the womb, eyes closed, rest. Did you see that?

For now, I have kept myself alive. When I was born we closed an envelope together, but you slashed it open and left it in a pile. You placed it on your desk by the window and the wind blew away the thin, frail letter you wrote. I was helpless without that letter. I touched your skin and you touched mine, I smelled the black beans cooking in the pressure cooker, and I crawled around our apartment to touch the rugs, the walls, the appliances. I did before I could think and I started to see my skin as something other than you, other than me. I liked taking baths, I felt contained and protected.

Paul Valéry said: “Nothing is deeper in man than his skin.” My skin is my boundary, the outside will one day be inside. Time passes. I see my self. I walk out of the kitchen but you bring me back. I open the refrigerator but you tell me no. I won’t know when I’ve shed your skin.

It was too early when you slashed the letter open. Now I don’t know what belongs to me when I touch. When your friend is over and I run around, take off my dress, dance, jump, bring my dolls to the living room and scream, I wish you’d teach me how to feel. I wish you could name the animals on these magnets, show me how to hold hands. I wish you let me jump out of the crib and waited to kiss me after.

You were supposed to be my shields, my second skin, but your egos, your grand desires to assert yourselves, made me disappear. You told me not to smile, and you said my smile was ugly. You repeated, less less, when you thought I was getting out of hand. You told me not to touch, not to go, not to cry, not to talk. Later you told me hell was waiting if I deviated. You told me this about sex: once you start, you don’t stop. It was too close to me, for me. Your egos became my ego.

If only I could dive into the sea and come back out over and over again new. My name means reborn. I hesitate to tell you that here so soon because I haven’t told you what’s a lie and what’s sincere.

You pealed off my skin, chipped at my carapace and invaded me. I heard you when you told me who I am and what I was to be. I abandoned my ego and you told me who you saw: an intense, a wild, a relentless and fun little girl. A toast to your description. I skipped when it was calm, I shouted when you all hummed. I touched nothing.

Remember when you looked at your face in the mirror and were surprised? I look too but I say ‘my skin is there’. I look again, I look with my face inside, and now I see your inscriptions. My friend came over. I jumped, I screamed, I was naked. It really is true, I’ve kept myself alive.

A Visual Library

The Anxiety of Influence

Two works that changed my life.

1. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: When I feel I’m veering too far away from myself, or when I’m lost, or when I need to get through some sort of stuck thinking phase, when I need to move on, when I’m overwhelmed, or when I need someone to explain to me something about what I’m feeling I go to this book. It’s challenging to apply his theory; I understand it, I feel it, but to do it is hard. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do anything close to what this theory demands, but I’m also at peace with doing nothing, as long as I spent my life trying.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature: It’s in the public domain but here’s an excerpt:

   When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Note Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.

The Modern Woman

by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

The modern woman quit smoking and now she smokes again. Not outside, but inside her house facing the window that gives out to a horrid scaffolding. I tell the modern woman, “few things give me as much pleasure as smoking on the sofa while watching a movie”. From the way she tightens her eyebrows I can tell the modern woman will smoke tonight, on her daybed and to a movie.

The modern woman has a cat at her vacation home that she visits more often than not. The cat had babies, but they’re wild cats, so she wonders what will be of these kittens. She doesn’t want the kittens to stick around all day, if they reproduce again they’ll be too many kittens to care for.

The modern woman reads Joan Didion.

The modern woman is mad about the way the electricity was wired in her apartment. The generator exploded when she was taking a bath. She’s made phone calls, but no one came to fix it.

The modern woman is scared a bat will land on her hair. When bats sit on your head they don’t let go, you have to cut the strands of hair off to release them. When she was in India she walked down a street lined with old trees. Half way down the street she heard a subtle sound, when she looked up there were as many bats on those trees as leaves. She liked eating naan every day for two weeks.

She orders three glasses of wine.

She grabs a girl’s hand and says let’s have lunch this week. The modern woman can be scary, but she’s not anymore, she’s nice.

The modern woman groans at the girl sitting next to her. The girl puts something near her coat. She grabs her coat and moves it.

The modern woman thinks the waiter is an idiot for running a marathon without any training.

The modern woman does not understand why so many people were texting her when the Notre Dame caught on fire. She lives in France but she personally does not feel any attachment to the church.

She wants another glass of wine.

She was never able to get into Twin Peaks. She tried.

She hates the woman next to her with the jacket, they keep growling at each other.

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Four articles I read this week:

• Salmon sperm facials are the new, hot anti-aging treatment. I heard this on two separate accounts, actually three if we count this article in the Financial Times: HTSI that a friend shared with me.

• The way Professor Howley defended Mahmoud Khalil in this speech at Columbia. Also from the upcoming April issue of the New York Review of Books this piece written by Christopher R. Browning: “Trump, Antisemitism & Academy”.

• Kanye released a new album Tuesday night on X called Bully, which he dedicates to his son Saint, who in fact stars in the video. Kanye raps in Spanish, he samples a bunch of people including the Supremes and the Carpenters: here’s Variety’s take. Meanwhile, on the same day, the Shade Room leaked a phone call between Kanye and Diddy; at some point Diddy tells him to “chop up them samples”.

• Italo Calvino is having a moment. Here’s Anthony Doerr talking about him on Lit Hub, and here’s BBC’s In Our Time podcast by Melvyn Bragg about Calvino. And if you’re really feeling like a podcast, I recommend Bragg on Socrates in Prison.

What my husband is listening to:

What my daughter is into:
Lollipops.

An interview I’m thinking about:
An interview with Harold Bloom on YouTube:

A Poem

Canção do Exílio
by Gonçalves Dias (english translation)

Minha terra tem palmeiras,
Onde canta o Sabiá;
As aves, que aqui gorjeiam,
Não gorjeiam como lá.

Nosso céu tem mais estrelas,
Nossas várzeas têm mais flores,
Nossos bosques têm mais vida,
Nossa vida mais amores.

Em cismar, sozinho, à noite,
Mais prazer encontro eu lá;
Minha terra tem palmeiras,
Onde canta o Sabiá.

Minha terra tem primores,
Que tais não encontro eu cá;
Em cismar — sozinho, à noite —
Mais prazer encontro eu lá;
Minha terra tem palmeiras,
Onde canta o Sabiá.

Não permita Deus que eu morra,
Sem que eu volte para lá;
Sem que desfrute os primores
Que não encontro por cá;
Sem qu’inda aviste as palmeiras,
Onde canta o Sabiá.

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Summertime Ghosts: A Chronicle
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

There are ghosts that haunt me, ghosts from people who are still alive. They visit me at daybreak and at dusk, at night they hold me down. The night hag terrifies me, she keeps me bound to my bed, when I open my eyes she’s there. At dawn I move through my rooms; I place this in the right drawer and that on the left shelf, nothing moves forward with surprise. The days have become paralyzed. I don’t feel my hands. I don’t feel my torso, my legs. I am entirely possessed by the ghosts of these people who are still alive. What will happen when they die?

The houses I lived in were sealed in white voile curtains. The windows were kept shut and only a sliver of light shined inside. The wind seeped through these windows as freely as it flows through a sand castle. She carried me to the patio where I sunbathed each morning. I fell and the muffled thud sunk, I cried and I was quieted. I can hear my sob shrinking into ripples, soft small wrinkles opening on the shore.

Not all homes built of sand disappear. The water seeps through the towers, melts the sand, but the imprint, the memory, dense and rigid, will never seize to exist. From a cliff I plunge into the sea, into a dull roar where there is no human life, and when my hands, my arms, my head pierce through its waves back into fresh air, I’m still here. My body floats to the top and into comfort, it finds solace in the sea.

Blue waves, green waves, they can’t exist without that breeze, even the fish in mid-stream need to breathe. From the room I hear a bird sing, and then another bird, and another bird, they sing different, they sing random, but their song travels through the trees. And when the gardener turns on the string trimmer, they blow away towards the blue sky and their chorus falls broken, buried. I now see the beaches where big waves crash, I see windows open without curtains and hardwood floors flooded with wet leaves and rain. I see a woman standing, her child breathing, but she is haunted by the ghosts of these people who are still alive.

I was twenty-three that summer and entirely selfish. The sand, the nudity, the salty air were a place to manifest something impulsive, a disinhibition. We spent hours on the sand, frying in the sun, our skin bubbling without sunscreen, until the sea would call out to us. The water was warm. I would sit on the shore and watch the small waves ebb and flow on my legs while I dug my hands into the ground and dribbled wet sand drops on my blonde thigh hair. You liked to lay on the stretcher, comb your long hair, brush the sand off your toes and order drinks.

When I walked back to the chair I was looking at you. You were looking at the girls sitting next to us. Looking at summer. I feel connected to strangers when I’m at the beach. I like to listen to them. I begin to feel the drinks you ordered, and I think about you. To tell the truth I’m happy you’re often misunderstood, that people can’t get past you. It means the best part of you is only for me, for our time together. I can read you. The night before you told me about your past, about all the secret ways you find to squash this past, I admire your courage.

I have the urge to do something now that we’re drunk. We go swim in the water and we meet an older man that’s staying at our hotel. He liked you. I looked up at the sky and the sun was going down and I told you I was cold. Really I wanted to be alone for a while. I swam out into the sea, far, very far, all the way past the buoys. I couldn’t stop. When I looked forward the sun was melting into the sea. There was no one between us and I thought if I kept going I’d finally arrive somewhere. I didn’t think about the boats, about the animals, about the danger, I lay there floating in the middle of the sea. I was looking at you now, you were so far away and so worried. You sent the older man to swim after me.

We were together the first time I snorkelled. We were on a small boat with a bald man that had just left prison. I woke up that night scared someone was coming for us, you were awake and you hugged me. The reserve the boat docked on was vast and you were addicted to swimming over the reefs. You spent hours looking at the turtles. I had a panic attack and you held my hand back to the boat. If it wasn’t for you I would have drowned. I have pictures of you eating mangos off the trees, orange fibers stuck between your teeth.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” written by Edgar Allan Poe
click on the image below to access the full story.

“And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.”

“The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what he was.”

“An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.”

Claude Debussy & Edgar Allan Poe

It was Charles Baudelaire who translated many Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems into French. In the early 1900s, Claude Debussy started writing an opera based on “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Devil in the Belfry” which he would never finish, the former coming closer to completion. You can listen to Georges Prêtre’s realization of Debussy’s opera below:

Many French writers and poets were inspired by Poe’s work, including Stéphane Mallarmé who considered the poet one of his masters and learned English only to better read Poe’s work. In the late 19th century, Mallarmé translated many of Poe’s works into French collaborating with Édouard Manet on the illustrations. Because Mallarmé translated Poe’s verse into prose he decided it was important to integrate visuals into the work; the decision was accompanied by intertextual references to Poe’s first translator Baudelaire.

One of the original Mallarmé translations of the poem “The Raven” into “Le Corbeau” published by Richard Lesclide in 1875, was sold at auction by Christie’s in 2022 for 56,700 euros, and by Artcurial in 2018 for 50,550 euros. Below are some of the book’s images featured during the Artcurial sale:

A Note on Pineapples
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

The first known illustration of a pineapple was sketched by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés sometime in the sixteenth century. He had a butt chin. He was lying on a hammock looking at the bromeliads when he drew it. I’m not certain if he ate the pineapple after. Christopher Columbus was still the first white man to see the pineapple. It happened one century before in Guadeloupe in the West Indies. Please note Christopher Columbus did not invent the pineapple. The Portuguese royal court also did not invent the pineapple. The Portuguese royal court, after Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived in Brazil instead of India by accident, imported pineapples from the West Indies to Spain, and from Spain to Portugal. When the royal family moved to Brazil two centuries later they brought pineapples with them. They also brought the royal court. Pineapples are not from Brazil. The Portuguese royal family was also not from Brazil. They ran from Napoleon to Brazil. At Lisbon’s port the Portuguese Royal Family forgot sixty thousand books from the National Library. Someone found the crates swimming in mud. Also found covered in mud at Lisbon’s port were several boxes with silver treasures. The Royal Family did not forget their wigs. Mademoiselle Carlota Joaquina of Spain, the future Queen of Portugal after Queen Maria I died, had many wigs. She threw all her wigs overboard. She sat on a wet bench scratching her head throwing her wigs overboard. A legion of lice also thrown overboard. Queen Maria I was possessed by other legions. Legions of demons. Red demons. The brown comes after the horse. The legions could be from Brazil. Mademoiselle Carlota Joaquina arrived in the port of Salvador bald without wigs.
People buy pineapples in France.

In 18th century England a pineapple cost £60. Today’s equivalent: £11,000.

A Visual Library

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

What my husband is listening to:

What my daughter is into:
Making lists with all the names of her friends, everyone she’s going to invite to her birthday party in June. Last year she only invited girls, this year I’m starting to see some boys crawling onto the list. She makes a fresh list every day at school with pink and purple markers. I realized it was a trend when I caught three of them making their own birthday lists right before school pick-up. Too cute not to share with you.

A film I’m thinking about:
A Geisha by Kenji Mizoguchi

A Poem

Sonnet 104
by William Shakespeare

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.

FYI: the holding image for this post features work by French artist August Rodin.

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For the last eight years my days have been a complete mess. I jump between writer, mother, editor, handweaver, reader, classics enthusiast, wife, listener, good friend, bad friend, researcher, essayist, therapy patient, alcohol enthusiast, shopper, homeowner, journalist, I mean the list goes on. Yet, no matter how many characters I fluctuate between I am still a stranger to myself.

Inside it’s a tug-of-war between a sense of myself and a reflected sense of myself. I find in no place a concrete and foundational idea of who I am and could abide by. In this paradigm I forget myself, I am daunted by the prospect of constructing myself, and I am paralyzed by becoming. I am incubating inside my own experiences.

The coffeeshop owner downstairs confides in me his business problems and I leave with a latte and his struggles. My upstairs neighbor offers an opinion on my parenting skills and it torments me for days. A friend wants advice and their problem becomes my occupation. I’m as malleable as marzipan.

In order to materialize what I create I have to prepare, to be ready to find a new confection. This moment, of personal knowledge, has finally arrived. I am now in safety, I have survived, I have built and destroyed, and now it’s time for me to become, to understand. My personal knowledge is in my feelings, my instincts, my opinions, and I’m putting all of those here.

At home on Rue de Chabrol I am sifting through my dirt to give you all the things I find are gold, all the words that are changing me, and everything else I spend time on instead of writing my book.

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In this week’s newsletter:

1995, The Broken Vase: A Chronicle
by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

The vase broke on the fifth try. It was mottled amber with an iridescent embossing of a castle by a lake. It was signed near the foot in cameo ‘Evelina’. She knew she would have to hurl it many times against the curb before it shattered into pieces over the gutter. At first, she mounted her arm high above her head, mustered all her force and thrust the vase toward the pavement, but the vase rolled down the street intact. With each throw she lashed out more, aimed more strategically, but it was clear that neither strength nor design would break this vase. When the fifth try came around she lifted the vase in front of her like a crane, hoisting the handle with her fingers. When her arm was fully stretched she let go of her hold and the vase broke at once into pieces.

We were a standing army on the backstreets of Rio de Janeiro, just meters away from our house. She collected the pieces, trees and lake shards in one hand, the castle and sky shards in another, and with her bare hands placed them on the bottom of a plastic bag. There was no blood, she left no evidence of her doing, and on the way back to the house she buried the bag under a small slab of concrete inside an orange construction dump.

“Didn’t I tell you,” she boasted. “It wouldn’t break on the first throw.”

Existence as she presented it to us was solely spiritual. The magnitude of her imagination led us down ethereal paths where there was no grass on the ground, no shade, no sun. Where all that moved us came with another time. We were surprised by the vase’s resilience that morning, any child witnessing such foresight would have registered what passed as an unusual act. Yes, it was quaint, but so were a lot of things about my mother. She’d wake up from a nap and throw away the iris bouquets she had just ordered the day before. She’d tell us the pyjamas we wore to breakfast needed to be thrown out. Sometimes she’d come into my room and take a brown mallet to all my music: Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Madonna all sat crackled on the carpet while I stared at her walking off with relief. To me it was ordinary.

My brother took after her. At first he was aggressive in school, but soon he directed his anger toward me. If I insisted on watching a cartoon next to him after school, he pushed me to the floor and kicked me until I couldn’t feel my limbs anymore. In the evening I’d notice my legs covered in bruises before I showered. My mother never mentioned it. One never knew who drew the blow. When she was irritated, or if she’d ever catch us fighting, it didn’t matter who was in the right or the wrong, she would bring a whip from the kitchen and with the strength she used to throw that vase, she would draw thin lines of blood and peeling skin around our stomachs, arms, and legs.

“Withhold not correction from the child: for it thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thow shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.” She repeated this Proverbs so many times.

It was customary to see her planting the perennials just under the trees with the green thorny rods. When they were ready, she’d clip the leaves off the sticks and keep them in the kitchen. They lay green, brown, and strong in the same fruit basket she kept mangos and papayas and cashew fruits. Sometimes my brother would break the whip so when she would grab it it’d be useless. In these instances she’d turn desperate and be all together done with the impulse. At first it worked well, but after a few days she took to the belt, and then the belt became a household staple. I can still hear those belt whippings. I hear the whooping sound the leather makes as it pushes through the air until it hits surface. There were times when she’d be so overwhelmed she’d lash the belt forward over and over again until it hit us both. It was a savage scene: two frantic children running around the house trying to find or make a bunker before she striked. She wouldn’t even aim. Once, after she hit me on my groin, I stopped seeking refuge around the house and would instead run to my room and put on as many layers as I could find. I looked at her quietly that day though, into her inflamed eyes, and for the first time felt a pain much greater than those lashings ever felt.

Some days, after locking us in our bedrooms for hours after a surge, she would come running to us, arms filled with tenderness. On those nights we ate dinner together, laid next to her in bed, and each got to pick a worship song in her black book of hymns. The gospel was nothing other than our reward, and the only path through which she interacted with us affectionately.

It is for you to decide rather this path becomes something beyond experience, it’s your choice to make it exist. What lies ahead isn’t a consolidation of the past or orderliness of the future, it is the chaos of the present. It’s confused, disorganized, the language isn’t sharp, the product isn’t final, and it attempts only to illuminate the very process of its formation. I am unsure a sense of myself will emerge from this incubation, perhaps it will, but having failed to complete and having struggled to continue, I understand only that the process is most revealing, and I have found no other medium, not in theatre or film, not in literature or essays, to share my work as naturally as this one.

Mexican Folk Art

I keep thinking about this vase, about what she destroyed that day. At some point the story couldn’t progress until I was able to see it whole, to bring this object back to life. It was stronger than me. I remember turning to my bookshelf and looking at the titles to see if anything jumped out at me. Without giving it much thought I reached for a Mexican folk art book I offered my husband a few years ago on his birthday.

The technique Esther Medina Hernandez uses was passed down to her through generations of artisans in her community in Coronillas. Her parents, and their parents, were all potters. Esther took what they had done for years, what they had taught her, and she created something new; a style with an inimitable texture that’s particular to her.

Hilario Alejos Madrigal’s mother taught him to work with clay when he was only fifteen. She was a famous Michoacán artisan known for her Carapan pineapples. He worked in the same style as her but developed a unique appliqué technique that turned him into one of Mexico’s most celebrated ceramicists.

—

There are countless stories in this book. Reading them, looking at the artefacts these artisans make, instilled in me a sense of profound sadness. I was jealous to see how generations of children could preserve such fragility, a vulnerable practice, growing it, transforming it, mastering its beauty, building something together with their parents.

The Evangelical, Fundamentalist Mother

I’ve only recently understood what christian fundamentalism can create. It happened in a session with my therapist who I’ve been seeing for seven years now. During this entire period together I have rarely discussed my upbringing in religious terms. It was such common practice at home that I didn’t think about bringing it up when we were discussing certain childhood events. Yes, my mother was very religious, but I never went too far into what it meant to our becoming that she was religious. Today, I have travelled so far from this reality that I don’t think it would cross anyones mind that by religious I meant fundamentalist.

It was only when I explained that my mother’s relationship to God was premised on her fear of the devil, that we started understanding that I grew up in a sect. It’s very difficult for me to speak about this concept in English because evangelical christianity in America is very rarely interpreted by its believers in the same context that it is in Brazil. In Brazil, it emerged as a reaction to the development of other belief systems like afro-brazilian or native-brazilian religions. Over time, the church instilled in me the primary belief that all other religions, including catholicism, either belonged to the devil or were corrupted by the devil. Under the foundational ideology that Lucifer fell from the sky to dominate earth, evangelical protestants including my mother, were here to subvert and transform the work of the devil. And it was under this reality that she operated.

When my therapist used the word “fundamentalism” to describe this practice I was shaken. I had come to associate the word with other religions, but not with Protestant Christianity. In fact, when I looked up the word in the Merriam Webster dictionary I was surprised to find that the definition refers particularly to Protestant Christianity: “a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching.” It couldn’t be more clear.

I have constant flashbacks to my mother repeating passages of the Bible. It was daily practice in our house, one that submerged any other governing system in my universe including science, history, philosophy, economics, language. The notion that one can justify ascribing pain under these guiding principles is mortal, unpardonable.

Renunciation by Ross Posnock

A tribute to Harold Bloom whose work has taught me everything.

I’m hooked on the Yale University and YaleCourses YouTube channels and have been for quite some years now. I read Dante’s Inferno while watching Dante in Translation on YouTube with the historian Giuseppe Mazzotta, and I can’t recommend it enough.

What comes to mind here is a lecture by Ross Posnock, “On the Pleasures of Self-Misunderstanding: 'How One Becomes What One Is' in Nietzsche and Emerson.” I highly recommend watching the entire lecture, and if you want more he also wrote a book “Renunciation Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists”.

A Visual Library

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Four albums and one single my husband is listening to:

What my daughter is reading right now: Les Aventures de Pépère le Chat by Ronan Badel and La Fabuleuse Histoire de la Poire Géante by Jakob Martin Strid.

A film I’m thinking about:
Under the Sun of Satan by Maurice Pialat (1987)

A Poem

Forgetfulness
by Hart Crane

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, —
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, — or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, — white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

FYI: the holding image for this post features work by Dutch artist Bouke de Vries.

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