I watched You Can See Everything this weekend and after some thought, I was both impressed and disturbed so I wrote a short critical piece on it. Contains spoilers and serious hot takes that I am willing to stand by!
Read → here | # Conspiracy as Art: You Can See Everything is a magic trick for a liar
Either Holmes is a mastermind who lies, or she is a victim. The audience gets stuck there. But those are not the only two options. Calling her a mastermind hands her a larger-than-life power the film needs in order to feel high-stakes. That is the spirit of conspiracy, and it is the spirit of Trump. A mastermind is more thrilling than a liar.
And who gets the light while we are tired? Tech multimillionaires and billionaires, again. They already shape what we read, how we vote, and what we believe is true. Now they are the focal point of our art. When one of the most talked-about films of the season is about a founder, her fraud, and her marriage, art has become one more of their platforms. Which leaves the question I keep circling. If a film takes conspiracy as its subject and confusion as its form, has it turned conspiracy into art? I think it has.
Sunday! Spooky readin’ with others. 🧟♀️❤️
🌬️ A former student of mine (Hi, Zora!) was just published in 4x4 Magazine and I could not be more thrilled to share their fantastic poem! Check out 4x4 Mag and Zora Day-Friedland’s poem attached
🌬️ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to her literary mentor, Tomas Wentworth Higginson on April 25, 1862:
“I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none — and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.”
Memorize a poem so if you are alone and afraid you have something to keep you company.
Poem I memorized from this week:
Peace | Gerard Manley Hopkins, can listen to it read here
🪄 🐇 I found out last night that The Alliance of Magicians from Arrested Development is based on a REAL group and they host a real and exclusive magic show in LA at The Magic Castle. So, this is a new important side quest for me – if anyone knows a magician in LA please let me know!
A wildly soft, healing take on Matthew 22 from Good Shepherd New York (start ~25:25). Still very Christian, but healing for me as someone who came out of religious toxicity
Smart Funny Anya Liftig as 🦞
🌬️ Elated to be reading poems this Sunday at don’t panic, enjoy, a reading series run by the artistic Joey Healey and Sofia Bagdade / also incredible reading poster made by Joey, name list version coming soon. ✍️ I’m going to wear something spooky and there will be refreshments 🕯️👻 – sunday | 138 w 15th st. | 430pm
Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet (1562)
For love is fearful oft where is no cause of fear, / And what love fears, that love laments, as though it chancéd were
📜 Finished reading: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare 📚 ★★★★ 4.5/5
Last time I read this was in high school, and we watched the Leo adaptation too, during which I took a long restroom break out of boredom and probably went to buy a cup of noodles.
Very romantic and filled with gorgeous moments that we often refer to and that feel cliché to us now, but truly are not. Juliet is the sun, for example.
But it’s not allll romance. It’s a tragedy! & Shakespeare packs a punch. There is much warning and wisdom here, but also so much wordplay and insane metaphors. No doubt Shakespeare is also playing with the idea that words can trap a lover’s fate. But I digress:
“Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but ‘ay,’ / And that bare vowel ‘I’ shall poison more / Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice. / I am not I, if there be such an ‘I’; / Or those eyes shut, that make thee answer ‘ay.'”
Lovers can’t escape language. Juliet hangs three meanings on one sound and a fourth sense that they are wrong, pushing the figurative language into catachresis! There is a whole scene in Act 2 where Romeo does wordplay with his friends. Shakespeare is letting metaphor and multiple meanings do a lot of work: predicative, ontological, and so on.
Now to the main course for me. There is so much wisdom in this play I obviously did not pick up on when I first read it at the bright age of 15 (still older than Juliet, though!).
Throughout the play there is a constant abdication of agency in Romeo’s actions, and in moments when he makes decisions he calls it fate, him being effeminate, blaming the stars, Juliet’s family, and so on. He misses mercy and wisdom at almost every turn. The friar literally spells out a plan to Romeo and tells him to man up (this could be a whole note on masculinity that I won’t go into), make a plan, and recognize he has more options than defeat. When Romeo finds out he has been exiled, he tries to kill himself, out of jealousy that other men will now see Juliet and because he can’t handle being away from her. The Nurse and the friar try to literally shake him straight and make him realize there is still a reality where he ends up with Juliet, and that he should be happy he is still married and alive. Of course, he wallows more. This whole play takes place over four-ish days, and Romeo fails to heed any wisdom from his friends, his father, and the friar to slow down and be wise.
“Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.” — Friar to Romeo
May this be a warning to all the lovers who might let their passion burn everything around them! Mercy and patience.
“But I received mercy for this reason, that… [I] might display [Jesus’] perfect patience…” — 1 Tim 1:16
🌬️ Mark Strand | Orpheus Alone
Highly recommend listening to his reading of it on Poetry Foundation
In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes / Closed, trying to will her return, but finding / Only himself, again and again, trapped / In the chill of his loss, and, finally, / Without a word, taking off to wander the hills / Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken / The image of love and put in its place the world / As he wished it would be
🌬️ In honor of poet Richard Howard’s 97th birthday I was able to attend a remembrance of him / his book library giveaway annnnd though i got many books worthy of mentioning — i nabbed this 1948 Quarterly Review dedicated to Marianne Moore, which came out right before her Collected Poems swept the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and the Bollingen. William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ransom, Bogan, Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop contributed to this edition to write about Moore and Bishop’s tribute poem and As We Like It first appeared here!!! Christmas came early for me!!
🤳 Some recent fav photos 💗🐇🫂
“Where else can God put God?” — Anne Carson
🌬️ Big day for capital P Poetry! Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature 🐐 wahoooo!
“If healing is possible, perhaps it can be best accomplished through an embrace of the grotesque.” Deborah Willis on Titus Andronicus
📜 Finished reading: Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare 📚
Now that I am getting into Shakespeare’s plays, I see that there is going to be a dance I have to do. I saw two adaptations while reading this and they were not equal … let me tell you. That said, I really loved this. A young Shakespeare is writing this one and it’s exciting to see him playing with themes of haunting, humiliation after grief, faking going mad, revenge, and political powers that will come out later in Hamlet and Macbeth. I think ultimately this is a play about psychological and family trauma, masculinity and what happens when a man is too religious to do the “right” thing and how revenge never truly ends. TBH overall I loved it. 5/5 from me. ★★★★★ It was so violent and wild… the hand cutting and the heads and the splitting, but I think it made for such interesting scenes. Taymor rocks it the most, obviously. Using a prop of a giant hand throughout was so much fun. Ugh
🕊️ I just turned 30 and I am thinking so much of my dad this month, his birthday around the corner and coming up on almost two years without him. I was 8 when he turned 30. Here are some pics of us close to his 30th! I remember listening to Tim McGraw, My Next Thirty Years on repeat with him – excited to embody this (silly but true!) song in honor of him. ❤️
Day 1 as a writer in residence at Woodward! Stoked to be among a lovely & very talented cohort and inside such a gorgeous facility. See my fellow cohort here. Grateful for the generosity and excited for it.
Watched: Titus 🎥
I just watched Julie Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Titus and I am in awe. First what an incredible cast: Anthony Hopkins, Alan Cumming, and Jessica Lange. It was gorgeous, zany, and theatrical. TS Eliot said about Titus Andronicus that it was one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all and well, Taymor really disproved that.
You can watch it for free on YouTube here. Milena Canonero did the wild zany costumes. Check out some of them here