"A steady stream of strange short stories spilled from my typewriter, weirder and weirder, more and more breathless and abstract. Reading over them, years later, I can almost picture myself lifting up from my chair, levitating midair, staring off into space, the words that spilled out completely cerebral, not grounded in physical reality, all magical realism, all hallucinatory image, a clear, bizarre progression of stories about women who grew increasingly silent, increasingly pale, thinner and thinner, building to my pitiful literary denouement of that year. I wrote of a woman who disappears into thin air. Then of one who, while walking, finds herself crumbling into a
pile of porcelain dust."
— “Wasted” Marya Hornbacher (via woefultale)
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re-tumble to win a pair!
details on the journal
photo, jeff allen
(via forestgraves)
Bellocq’s Ophelia
— from a photograph, circa 1912
In Millais’s painting, Ophelia dies faceup,
eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp
of her last word or breath, flowers and reeds
growing out of the pond, floating on the surface
around her. The young woman who posed
lay in a bath for hours, shivering,
catching cold, perhaps imagining fish
tangling in her hair or nibbling a dark mole
raised upon her white skin. Ophelia’s final gaze
aims skyward, her palms curling open
as if she’s just said, Take me.
I think of her when I see Bellocq’s photograph —
a woman posed on a wicker divan, her hair
spilling over. Around her, flowers —
on a pillow, on a thick carpet. Even
the ravages of this old photograph
bloom like water lilies across her thigh.
how long did she hold there, this other
Ophelia, nameless inmate in Storyville,
naked, her nipples offered up hard with cold?
The small mound of her belly, the pale hair
of her pubis — these things — her body
there for the taking. But in her face, a dare.
Staring into the camera, she seems to pull
all movement from her slender limbs
and hold it in her heavy-lidded eyes.
Her body limp as dead Ophelia’s,
her lips poised to open, to speak.—Natasha Trethewey, from Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002)
Painting: John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52.
Photograph: John Ernest Joseph Bellocq, Unidentified prostitute of Storyville, New Orleans’ legalized red light district, 1912.
Note: Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, was appointed Mississippi’s Poet Laureate this month.
Friday Fripperies
“This perfume is a collaboration between Julianne Zaleta and Pam Grossman of Observatory Room and Phantasmaphile. The fragrance was created for the group art show, Lunation: Art on the Moon, at Observatory Room (observatoryroom.org).
The Greek goddess, Artemis, who represents the new moon, is portrayed in this fragrance by the addition of wormwood (an artemesia) in the top note, supported by bergamot and petitgrain. Luminous jasmine forms the basis of the heart along with honey and rose, and sandalwood and frankincense form the base chord.”This arrived earlier in the week and was such a lovely, unexpected scent! Most moon-inspired fragances are pale, wan things…and Moonrise is really anything but. I have only tried it once, but upon first application it’s got a really delightful, heavy, old fashioned dressing table sort of feel, but really quite luminous at the same time. Even my sister, a recent devotee of perfumed things, sniffed the air and said “what is that? It is gorgeous!”
