The event marked the launch of Marie's collaboration with Sendb00ks, later 200 copies were sent to our network of subscribers around the world.
It was a pleasure to work with Jess and Erik on the curation, and to meet so many US based subscribers who have been supporting the project over the years.
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Here modeled by our friend Fernanda Ballesteros one early morning at the residency Casa Bosques in Mexico City.
The garments are handmade in Paris with hand stitched logos.
These are limited edition. We are so thrilled by the reception and hope to see them worn around the world and hope they grant you access to the shelves of those you have always wanted to visit
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Zora first read one of Marquez' short stories, Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane aloud to her best friend Lua pictured on the sleeve. The two tell me the story when we sit together at Cafe Charlot deciding which book to send. Zora also loves the brilliant Valeria Luiselli, we wanted to send one of her books but the publisher never got back to us. But in a perfect sequence of events, the collage came together which depicts Lua asleep beneath an airplane.
We have a limited amount available, with a separate postcard collage created by Zora availible .
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On Saturday Fernanda Ballesteros read from her brilliant first novel Second Virginity, a captivated crowd joined in the discussion while soothing hangovers with coffee and offerings from the best in Mexico City Rosetta Panderia.
The shelf will be restocked in January, we want to thank the incredible people at Casa Bosques for being so welcoming and allowing us to stay the night in the beautiful residency upstairs from the bookshop.
]]>Yelena read ASS from her upcoming short story collection Horny in the Summertime originally published in The Skirt Chronicles.
She is the author of three brilliant novels and we look forward to stocking her work soon, but for now you can buy our favorite directly from her independent publisher here https://twodollarradio.com/products/door-behind-a-door .
Artwork by Yelena Moskovich.
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No Sex Last Night.
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Michella Bredahl is a Danish photographer whose work gives a voice to the stories, lives, passions and drives of women whose stories may otherwise go untold. Almost one hundred years after Virginia Woolf immortalised the struggles of women around the world with her landmark essay A Room Of One's Own, addressing creativity, isolation and solitude in her writing, we are revisiting how these themes now still strangely affect us all. It is precisely the metamorphosis of loneliness and displacement into connection with the universal human experience that binds the work of these two artists and that we want to revisit in light of the pandemic.
SB
Hello Michella and welcome to Sendb00ks. It's been so great working with you this month. Let's start with the question every artist is being asked at the moment. Have you found the lockdown to be helpful or detrimental to your creativity?
MB
Hello, I would say both! I appreciate time a lot more now, so when I go out to meet people, I feel a stronger connection with them. In Paris, there is a 6pm curfew which can be really frustrating. A few weeks ago I was working on a film outside and it was really stressful to take into consideration that everything around us would close at six. Even the convenience stores. You don’t want to be thinking about shopping, you just want to be immersed in what you are doing and then switch off and buy something on the way home at eleven. It is these small freedoms that I didn't pay too much attention to before but am now really missing.
But saying that, the lockdown has made me more organized which I like. At Christmas I went back home and looked through a lot of old pictures I took of my Mum when I was a teenager. Some of the first portraits I ever took were of her. I could see a lot of similarities in those pictures with the ones I take today that I'd never noticed before and I recently decided to publish it. I think this time has made me look at my pictures with a new depth. I have always felt my pictures were sort of a diary, but I think there is a lot more to it than that, which I am enjoying discovering.
SB
That's so great you managed to get home, especially as this Christmas was so weird for so many people. Talking of home, can you describe your room and how your feelings towards it have changed over the lockdown?
MB
I am fortunate to have my equipment so I can work on my pictures. I am independent, I have an internet connection and was able to access funding that has helped me get by. I don’t have lots of children or have to spend my time looking after a man. Like Virginia Woolf said herself: “I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.” I have a lot of work from other artists in my room. It gives me a lot of energy and peace to surround me with other artists, especially female ones. From my desk on my right I have a painting and books of female photographers that I love like Vivian Maier, Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, and a little painting of my friend’s son too. There are some postcards and printed pictures of people I care for up against the wall. And of course a lot of books.
I moved to a house in Montreuil just outside Paris six months ago. The first confinement happened soon after I arrived. For me it felt so strange that someone could suddenly take away my freedom to walk outside. I still have those feelings about it today. I don't think it’s healthy to be so separate from nature, it brings people together. I feel that we have moved further and further away from nature, and I don't like this. I have a little studio with a kitchen and a bathroom. This really feels like home for me. It gives me a feeling of coming home every time I walk into my room. During this period I feel more grateful than ever to have a space I feel comfortable in, and where I can close my door and feel creative. I often think about what effect poverty and wealth has on my mind in relation to my space, and the lockdown has amplified this issue for so many.
SB
That's what we like to hear. In all the pictures we have of you in your room there are piles of beautiful books, can you tell us about some of your favourites that you keep here?
MB
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin and Out of Africa by Karen Blixen are two really important books to me. As well as The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. I read it recently and it touched me very deeply. My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman is another special book that's never too far from hand. All my books are like treasures to me. I feel very connected to them all. I could never lend them out. They feel like parts of me. Every book I read I keep notes for. I go back and look in them sometimes and reread what I wrote.
SB
I’m very jealous of that. We always talk about taking more notes as we never do and forget everything. Are you missing Denmark or are you enjoying Lockdown in France?
MB
The light is really beautiful in my room so I am very happy here. The light in Denmark is not like the light in France. It falls in through my window like it wants to bless me. There are a lot of sounds from the streets coming into my room. Scooters, footsteps, people talking. And just from listening to it, you can hear what time of day it is. In the morning there is always a dog barking, cars passing, and by the end of the night the noises have changed completely. It is very quiet and you can always hear someone speaking bambara. There is a building at the end of my street where only Malians live and at night they all spill into the street with these magical words I don’t understand. I recently learned the differences between ‘ecouter’ (to listen) and ‘entendre’ (to hear). ‘Ecouter’ is active and ‘entendre’ is inactive. You choose to listen, you don't choose to hear. It is sounds that come to you. This is another reason why I like to be in France. I feel like I learn and hear a lot of new words and sounds every day. I like to spend time in my room though too, even now that I am forced too.
SB
Your work centres around the close study of people in such a remarkable and intimate way. Have your feelings of connection to those around you changed over the course of the pandemic?
MB
Yes, a lot. There are a lot of people I haven’t been able to see and photograph for a long time. This has been really hard for me. I have been really worried for some of my friends that have been sick. My work is so entangled in my life. My pictures are people I love and my friends. Sometimes it is also someone I met on the street, but most of the time this turns into a deeper relationship, because I like to return to my subjects. A lot of people I have photographed are still deeply connected to my life. I like to capture special moments in time. It allows me to share them and remember them with those that were there. This has been made much more difficult for me now because I haven’t been able to move around like before.
SB
It’s been tough for sure, everyone has had to tap back into old hobbies to stay sane. Aside from photography do you have any other creative outlets or hobbies that have helped you over the last year?
MB
I love to dance. I like to go to nightclubs, which I’m missing, and I practice pole-dancing. I watch a lot of films. I like old films. Luis Bunuel, Chantal Akerman, Barbara Loden, Jean Vigo, and Fassbinder. I admire actresses like Delphine Seyrig. This era had a charm and a way to make cinema that I don’t feel exists anymore. I like the works of Claire Denis. I recently watched J’ai pas de Sommeil. I often film scenes in films I like on my phone and then I watch it again and again. Like the scene where Richard Courcet dances in the nightclub to Le lien défaitby Jean Louis Murat. These moments I really treasure in cinema.
I have a degree in film directing and I made several short films, but making films takes a lot of work from me. I still need to refine it. I am very critical of my films. I feel I never come anywhere near the movies I admire. I definitely don’t feel as comfortable with directing films as I do with photography. The camera is like a third hand that I was born with as a baby. It feels so natural for me to photograph. I feel so deeply connected to my camera that it is always weird giving it to someone else. It’s like taking my voice from me or my eyes. I also use my phone a lot everyday as a means of creating. I post small videos on my stories. I find it so beautiful how people dress and move and walk around in their own world. It’s like being in a cinema for me to take the metro and walk around the streets in Paris, even though now there are a lot less people.
SB
This month we worked with you to produce a response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own. What was your initial reaction to her writing?
MB
I first read Virgina Woolf’s diaries and they made such a strong impression on me. They are reflections on her works, her process, reviews and other people's opinions about her work. This was really inspiring to me. After this I started to keep a similar record on my work. She was so deep in her work and she was so sensitive to what others thought of it. I feel you could really tell through her writing how much this tormented her, but it made her write like crazy. She wanted to show the world that she was good enough, especially other successful male writers from her time. She had such a sense of grandeur about herself yet she was terribly insecure and troubled at the same time. If only she would have known that she would be one of the most important female voices of all time.
I connect a lot with broken hearts and sensitive people, which is what I first loved about Virginia's writing. I feel that very sensitive people are very creative. I am a Pisces, a water sign. In astrology water represents emotion. I am full of emotions like Virginia was. I am very imaginative and dreamy. I also like to escape from the simple chores of everyday life. When I read Virginia's work I thought to myself, she must have been a Pisces. She was extremely tortured but she found so much strength and solace in her work and her belief in her own voice. I find a lot of peace through my work now that I have found my craft. If you are a very sensitive human being, I think you easily get tempted and can get on the wrong side of the road. I am very protective of my energy, because I know that I get easily carried away with my emotions. For example I don’t drink alcohol or smoke. I make an effort to canalize my energy into my work.
SB
A Room of One’s Own was written almost one hundred years ago yet its messages are eerily applicable to life in 2021. I know we have spoken about how strongly you felt this whilst reading the book, can you elaborate on that?
MB
Today in this part of the world women have more privileges than ever. Obviously there is such a long way to go but there are still other groups of people who are suffering inequality and injustice on such a huge scale. I believe her messages of inclusion are longer applicable only to the subject of sex and gender, but now has to do with race and nationality. I photographed a mum near Gambetta from Nigeria who shared a one room apartment with her three kids. She was working as a cleaning lady during the day and sleeping on the couch at night. The kids were sharing three bunks beds. If she wanted to write poetry or if one of her kids were great at singing, how would she provide access for them to practice their skills? How would she find time to practice her own gifts? Women were not writing poetry in the Elizabethan age because they had no sitting-rooms, they had no money, and they had many children. Today a lot more women from my part of the world are able to take care of themselves. There are still a lot of other groups of people, which also pertains to men, who don't have the same privileges I have. Now there are more hierarchies among people on the basis of their income and nationality. I know that my privilege is borne on the shoulders of other people. We are still so far away from having the same opportunities. Everyday this flushes me with anger watching how we are segregated by class and wealth and race, not just gender.
SB
Which aspects of Virginia’s life or her writing resonate most with you?
MB
There were so many similarities between her and myself. I am very romantic. It can never get romantic enough. I want the comfort and the unknown at the same time. I am always in love with someone new. I am never settled. I recognise the restlessness in her and how it probably came from a deep pain. A pain that I resonate with.
I also resonate with a lot of the stuff that Virginia Woolf says about having a need to create. I come from a poor upbringing. I had no access to books or art during my childhood but I had the desire to find these things on my own. My dad would always ask me, how are you going to make money? Why don’t you want to be a lawyer? The first time I watched a Truffaut film I was twenty one years old. I wasn’t married with three kids. I have had my twenties to concentrate on my work and now I have my thirties to build a family at my own pace. At the Danish film school I attended they only took six students every second year. There were more women than men in my class and many of them had kids while studying. They would bring the baby to class.
I think it is really important to listen to that voice inside you and follow it, no matter what is considered to be normal. And I think that's what Virginia was really trying to say with this book, that you need to carve out your own spaces. Not just women but people from oppressed groups whose voices and rights have long been sacrificed all over the world. Things are here to be changed. Something is only normal until it is not. When you create you often take the roads alone and that is frightening. But it is only those who dare to open the doors that will see what is behind them. For too long women were taught not to open that door, because we were believed to be inferior to men. But now it's time to open all the doors. More and more women are now successful creatively, just like Virginia had hoped over one hundred years ago. We don't settle anymore with what we are told.
SB
Amazing. Thank you so much Michella!
Interview by Katie Brown
Photographs by Gemma Janes
Charles Bukowsi has long been a looming and controversial figure here at Sendb00ks. A few years ago on a holiday, we took and read Women (pictured above) in the bath looking out over the mountains of Morzine. There were more than a few heated discussions about this man, his writing and his language. We would swing from repulsion at his blatant misogyny and disregard for women in his writing to marvelling at his self awareness, his lack of pretence and shame and his shocking self deprecation and dedication to his work. It's a very modern problem that affects most of the creative industries today: can you continue to love and respect the work of an artist when you realise that the person was a bigot? That they were racist? Sexist? Homophobic? When we were younger we figured it best to just stop reading him to avoid all of the anger he would evoke with his writing, but if we did this with every problematic writer, what would there be left to read? With Bukowski especially, we had to think about the way in which he employed this type of aggressive and shocking language in the reasoning behind his style, his honesty, his grim refusal to sugar coat his opinions and his life.
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Despite the grizzly passages of misogyny, the sometimes unreadable descriptions of sex and intimacy, his work is marbled with a dazzling clarity that jumps from the page. There is no degraded description of somebody that is not preceded by a violent degradation of self, no analysis of another human being that is not counteracted with a tortured segment of self analysis. Of course issues such as this apply to every author, every artist, as no single human being exists in perfection on earth; so it is up to us as individuals to gather as much information on the artist as possible in order to come to our own conclusions about the individual and the work, both connected and isolated from one another. After all, he never claimed to be interested in what society dictated for the modern man, who he saw as paralysed and mundane: “for me, obedience to another is the decay of self. For though every being is similar, each being is different and to herd our differences under one law degrades each self.”
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Jean Rhys was born in 1890 on the Carribean island of Dominica, a white descendant of slave owners. She left at the age of sixteen to travel to England for her education before moving rootlessly around Europe with the first of her three husbands. Her bad temper, heavy drinking and general tempestuousness followed her throughout her entire life and seeped into much of her work. She became well known for being extremely irascible and temperamental to be around but remained critically admired with many friends and supporters throughout her life. During her older years she lived in Hampstead, London with Jazz singer George Melley and his then wife who said living with her was “like having Johnny Rotten in the house.” Although the collection of stories Rive Gauche (pictured above and available in The Library) garnered her relative literary success in Paris during her younger years, the outbreak of the war in 1936 halted her writing career and she disappeared from public view, only resurfacing when the BBC approached her to do a voice over of her novel Good Morning, Midnight. Rhys then went on to write her most famous novel Wide Sargasso Sea, published when she was seventy six years old.
During the time of its publication, The New York Times named Rhys as “the world's greatest living novelist.” The book, written as a prequel of sorts to Charlotte Bronte's most famous work Jane Eyre, tells the story of Bertha, or Antoinette, ‘the madwoman in the attic.’ Rhys was disgusted at the relative silencing of the history and oppression behind the character of Bertha in Bronte novel and began to write the life of Mr Rochester's wife, a Creole heiress from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to a certain unnamed English gentleman, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her away from the rest of the world in his mansion. Rhys gave a voice to the mad woman, the lost woman, a feature that characterised much of her writing. Rhys’s pages are an array of outcast figures, women, children, impoverished or elderly people, the sick and the ‘mad’ objects of both physical vulnerability and of a social precariousness. Due to her unique position as a lifelong outcast in Europe from her home in the Caribbean, where she was also considered largely unwelcome and felt intensely ill at ease, Rhys managed to walk the line between native and outcast and perfectly translate this feeling of alienation into her female character - “‘between me and you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all."
Her marriage to her first husband was largely unhappy, they had two children during their travels together, one died and the daughter went on to live largely with her father. Towards the end of their time together, Rhys embarked on a similarly unhappy affair with the famous novelist Ford Maddox Ford during her time in Paris, moving in with him and his wife at the time while her husband spent time in prison. Details of their affair have been immortalised in her short story Quartet and in the autobiography of Fords wife Stella Bowen. Ford regarded her as hugely talented 'with a terrifying insight and... passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World'. He was instrumental in getting Rive Gauche published through his contacts, most notably Edward Garnett who shared his passion for her writing and published the first edition. Garnett was also instrumental in the publishing of works by DH Lawrence (he was the primary editor for Sons and Lovers) and Joseph Conrad. Unfortunately for Rhys the sad fact or her gender meant that instant success was much harder and unlike her contemporaries, her first works weren’t enough to secure her a living or much fame.
Rhys was one of the first women to write about the unabashed sexual desire of women and how an honest pursuit of this feeling led to their general unhappiness and ultimate ruin in a society that was not ready to accept it. She lived on the fringes herself, existing for a while as a demimonde, the mistress of a rich businessman in Paris who supplemented her life with a weekly wage in exchange for sex. The archetypal woman of her novels embodies a type of degraded womanhood, whose journey to satiate her own sexual desires, usually with men who are typically brutes, leads them into turmoil. The narrative often results in the women debasing themselves further, abandoning themselves to their desires. The reoccurring result being that their abandoned position increases the man's revulsion of them, leaving them deserted at the mercy of their lust. Her themes of abandonment, racism, post colonialism and assimilation permeate all of her writing. But ultimately, the dignity and sensitivity with which she treats the women of her work is extremely beautiful and brutally reflective of the innate complexity of womanhood in the twentieth century.
Written by Katie Brown
]]>"To have an inner life, to think, to juggle and leap, to become a tightrope walker in the world of ideas. To attack, to riposte, to refute, what a contest, what acclaim. To understand. The most generous word of all. Memory. To retain, a geyser of felicity. Intelligence. The agonizing poverty of my mind. Words and ideas flitting in and out like butterflies. My brain a dandelion seed blown in the wind." - Violette Leduc
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Earlier this week we uploaded a copy of Le Taxi by Violette Leduc that is for sale in our bookshop. The story deals with the topic of incest between a brother and sister as they drive around Paris in the back of a taxi having sex and talking about their time together growing up in the city. While the subject of the book was and remains taboo, Leduc was never one to shy away from the extremes of life in her writing. She was innovative in her sexual boldness, her ability to delicately express the tenderness that can be felt between two people and in her belief of her talent and her writing capabilities.
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Angela Davis, pictured above, is at the top of our list for her involvement with the Black Panther Party as she joined with the singular intention to address sexism within the movement. She had noticed the unequal delegation of roles among its members and taken offense at some of the language used to address women from the male leaders and sought to change it from the inside out.
She initially suffered at the hands of some chauvinistic members of the party and fought against the ingrained misogyny that was holding the party back. Her natural propensity for leadership and eye for positive reform changed the face of the Black Panthers forever and she continues her advocacy as a writer and teacher to this day. In 1969, the group began feeding vulnerable children at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church on 29th Street before school. By the end of the year, they were feeding 20,000 children in nineteen cities in what would become the blueprint for the government’s school breakfast program.
Angela is currently a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and the author of over 10 books on race, the US prison system, class and feminism. In 2020 she was listed as the 1971 "Woman of the Year" in Time magazine's "100 Women of the Year" edition, which covered the 100 years that began with women's suffrage in 1920.
Probably one of the most famous female faces of the movement, Kathleen Cleaver was married to Eldridge Cleaver, a minister of information for the party whom the book above centers around. The couple were figureheads for the party. Kathleen became the Communications Secretary and the first woman to enter into the parties decision making cabinets. By the seventies the party was made up of mostly women who had managed to evade exile or imprisonment, led largely by the influence of Cleaver. She decided to divorce Eldridge after twenty years of marriage.
They had been traveling extensively to avoid arrest and intense scrutiny from the police in America, leading to them being granted citizenship in Paris with their son. They stayed in Paris for only a year before returning to America to live in exile and where they eventually separated. Kathleen become a Lawyer and graduated from Yale Law School at the age of 49. Kathleen Cleaver now works as a senior lecturer at Emory University School of Law. She has authored several books that include, Memories of Love and War, Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, and Black Flags and Windmills, and currently lives in New Haven with documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne.
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Anne Carson: Lecture on the History of Skywriting from Louisiana Channel on Vimeo.
]]>“I always saw it [my speech impediment] as a strength because since I was experiencing these obstacles in terms of my auditory and vocal skills, I became really good at reading and writing. I realized that at a young age when I was reciting the Marianne Deborah Williamson quote that 'Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’ Her words, her determination and her passion for improving the world we all share with her talent should be a huge inspiration to us all, proving that what limits you does not need to hold you back. For Gorman, this is just the beginning, and she has her sights set on one day being at an inauguration all of her own: “2036 I am running to be president of the United States. So you can put that in your iCloud calendar.”
When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry, a sea we must wade.
We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken,
but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine,
but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
This effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust,
for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared it at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour,
but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So while once we asked, ‘How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?’ now we assert, ‘How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?’
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be:
A country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change, our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the west.
We will rise from the wind-swept north-east where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked south.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
In every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country,
our people, diverse and beautiful, will emerge, battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
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One of my favourite stories is about an old woman and her husband – a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims. She was only able to keep him satisfied with her unparalleled cooking, to which he was a complete captive. One day, he bought her a fat liver to cook for him, and she did, using herbs and broth. But the smell of her own artistry overtook her, and a few nibbles became a few bites, and soon the liver was gone. She had no money with which to purchase a second one, and she was terrified of her husband’s reaction should he discover that his meal was gone. So she crept to the church next door, where a woman had been recently laid to rest. She approached the shrouded figure, then cut into it with a pair of kitchen shears and stole the liver from her corpse.
That night, the woman’s husband dabbed his lips with a napkin and declared the meal the finest he’d ever eaten. When they went to sleep, the old woman heard the front door open, and a thin wail wafted through the rooms. Who has my liver? Whooooo has my liver?
The old woman could hear the voice coming closer and closer to the bedroom. There was a hush as the door swung open. The dead woman posed her query again.
The old woman flung the blanket off her husband.
– He has it! She declared triumphantly.
Then she saw the face of the dead woman, and recognized her own mouth and eyes. She looked down at her abdomen, remembering, now, how she carved into her own belly. Next to her, as the blood seeped into the very heart of the mattress, her husband slumbered on.
That may not be the version of the story you’re familiar with. But I assure you, it’s the one you need to know.
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Georges
You have only one chance left to help me.
It is not sweetness, it is not your desire to “care” for me and that I call you at night: it is your truth and my own.
Georges, do you understand: my life and my death belong to me. Right now I am so close to one as to the other. No person in the world can do anything any longer since I no longer find you deep down – where I used to be able to find you. Georges, maybe I “don’t love you.”
Georges, I know what happened yesterday. I know. I hated our life, I often wanted to run away, to go off into the mountains (it was to save my life I understand that now). As soon as I had money in my pocket, I thought about it. I was horrified by this crazy pace, by my work, by our nights. You dared to insult me by talking about “weakness,” you dare it still, you who do not have the strength to spend two hours alone, you who need another person at your side to inspire all your actions, you who cannot want what you want. I know: she will lead you where she likes, that’s been proved. I believe in our life together the way you still believed in it the first day when you talked about the house. I believe in it the way I believe in everything that brought us together; in the most profound depths of your darkness and of mine. I revealed everything about myself to you. Now that it gives you pleasure to laugh at it, to soil it – this leave me as far away from anger as it is possible to be.
Scatter, spoil, destroy, throw to the dogs all that you want: you will never affect me again, I will never be where you think you find me, where you think you’ve finally caught me in a chokehold that makes you come.
Now that, thanks to me, the most banal image has taken the form of dream, desires, drama, passion, now that only the sweetest hilarity will relieve you from all that is burdensome, all in the form and appearance of the clearest, most scheming, most selfish, most pathetic “adultery.”
As for me I am beyond words, I have seen too much, known too much, experienced too much for appearance to take on form. You can do anything you want, I will not be hurt.
The tragic ones are such hypocrites: you know this well. This tragedy was so staged – day by day – before my disdainful eyes – or thanks to my horrible outbursts which were only a matter of neurosis.
Everything you have been doing, I’ve known about – everything – for more than a year, before and after Sicily, everything that crystallized around a person who took the form of your dream, a shattering dream that knows how to shatter, a dream that is leaving behind the most banal of daily realities that any human being is capable of living: adultery, well-organized, planned out, clever cunning, burning because secret. Understand me, nothing of this being can affect me. I know – rue de Rennes, the mirror she made you get and in front of which I saw her loll as much as possible, from the first day (the days of “Colette I adore you”), without even noticing, to her great vexation.
She can do anything she wants except affect me.
Let her feel herself pissing as much as she wants. I would really like you to know what liberation is: everything has turned to dust.
You can turn my things into playthings, put them at her feet, adore her, never will anything that comes from her affect me. Never, do you understand, will she touch what is between us.
I know: she pleases you “to death” now, to death from pleasure. I know because I know all that you have lived. All that you live. Down there, you will arrange to meet her when you go for a walk, while I sit here nailed to the spot. If you knew: I would come and help you organize these trysts. I will be perfectly calm and happy, I will show you.
How I managed to adorn this miserable girl with the halo of crime that excites you, this girl who was only capable of “laughing” at everything. She studied all my gestures in order to copy them, listened to my words in order to repeat them, she tries to read my books, she tries her best, she exhausts herself to be what I am – it’s so comical I pity her with all my heart.
I have no desire to punish myself – to attach myself when I need to disengage myself.
To be there at the rendezvous in the forest, or in a rented room in Saint-Germain, or at the Saint-Lazare station.
It is with the curiosity of an octopus sticking to everything that she wants to know about all you do and say, all your plans, in order to mix herself up in them, to carry weight. You no longer dare make a decision without her getting mixed up in your plans.
Is it even possible to go on this way? Surely not.
There can be no compromise in integrity, plenitude…life. There can be no compromise in me. It’s clear – isn’t this how I can live again, by escaping the mediocre, all that is
shameful airs
pretense
language
Good – evil – always these words on one’s lips.
As this tumultuous year draws to a close and we finally breathe a sigh of relief at the promising election results this month, it’s not surprising that we are thinking more and more about our communities and how they affect our families. While this year has been full of the most unexpected challenges for us all, it has been a chance for everyone, from all walks of life, to consider the emotions and experiences of strangers much like a family, dysfunctional though it may be. Although it may seem we have very little in common with many people we encounter, this consideration requires us to act in the protection not just of ourselves but of them too. While the other prevailing theme of this year has been an acute awareness of the pressure of isolation, the bigger picture demands that we take steps to feel closer to each other than ever. This month we are going to be sending Sula by Toni Morrison, accompanied by a painting and a poem created in direct response to the text by the artist Inès Di Folco. Both of these multifaceted artists share a gift in being able to explore their roots and their femininity with such vulnerability, while making peace with their ordeals and experiments of becoming. We would like to take a moment to celebrate Joe Biden and in particular Kamala Harris on her appointment as the first Black and South Asian American Vice President, whose election strengthens this month's focus on the necessity of community focused healing.
To read the rest of the essay, check your email inboxes in the coming days <3
Inès Di Folco at her studio in Menilmontant photographed by Gemma in October 2020.
The sleeve.
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Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a french philosopher and intellectual who lived and died in France. He worked throughout his life to reverse widespread perspectives on his fellow mental health sufferers, ascribing meaning to the disorder of their lives and compulsions in the hope of granting dignity and significance to their suffering. His work was not widely admired at the time, much like his main literary influence, the Marquis De Sade. He was described by Susan Sontag as ‘a broker in madness’ and he was kicked out of the surrealist and existential movements dominating the Parisian intellectual scenes of the time with Jean Paul Sartre describing him as a case that needed psychoanalysis. The second half of The Story of the Eye is an autobiographical essay titled Coincidences that confronts his childhood abuse and trauma with the character of Marcelle based closely on his mother. He lived a contradictory life on the margins, working in libraries while living the life of a dissolute libertine. His work served to influence many major writers and psychoanalysts to follow him. Jacques Lacan used Batailles analysis of sexual violence, that he deemed essential to sexuality, to develop his conept of Juissance, a shattering enjoyment that is ‘beyond the pleasure principle.’
Histoire de l'oeil - Georges Bataille - Jean Jacques Pauvert éditeur - 1967. Condition, Good. French.
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Angela Davies - If They Come in the Morning: Voices of a Resistance
Huey Newton - Revolutionary Suicide
Muhammed Ali - The Greatest: My Own Story
Gayl Jones - Corregidora
The Black Book - Compiled by Toni Morrison
Henry Dumas - Poetry for My People
Toni Cade Bambara - Blues Ain't no Mocking Bird
Wole Soyinka - You Must Set Forth A Dawn
Chinua Achebe - A Man of the People
Image: Going to the Movies with Toni Morrison, Kevin Young, August 7th 2019, Getty Images
]]>Nick Cave in Berlin 1985, Stranger in a Strange Land
Nick Cave’s work, both musically and literary, is haunting and ethereal, and with two novels and a handful of collections of writing under his belt, we consider his genius work an enrichment for all logophiles and lovers of literature.
In a recent letter to the online world, he reveals a "grab bag" of his vast collection of literature which nurture his artistic ventures.
"Normally, to answer this question I would simply go to my bookshelves and choose forty books. However, my bookshelves are completely empty. The 5000+ books I have accumulated over the years have been shipped to the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. They are now part of the completely mind-blowing, heart-stopping Stranger Than Kindness exhibition. Without my library in front of me it is a little difficult to assemble a comprehensive list of my forty most loved books. The best I can do is throw together a rather formless and incoherent grab bag of titles that come to mind at this moment that, for one reason or another, I have loved over the years. I think I got carried away. I think there are fifty — in no particular order.
Love, Nick
American Dreams – Sapphire
Break, Blow, Burn – Camille Paglia
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden – Denis Johnson
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor
I and Thou – Martin Buber
Straight Life – Art Pepper
The Bible – King James Edition
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
High Windows – Philip Larkin
The Conference of Birds – Attar of Nishapur
My Promised Land – Ari Shavit
The Christ at Chartres – Denis Saurat
King Leopold’s Ghost – Adam Hochschild
America a Prophecy – Jerome Rothenberg
Ariel – Sylvia Plath
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page – Gerald Basil Edwards
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Shaking the Pumpkin – Jerome Rothenberg
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Avila
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Mid-American Chants – Sherwood Anderson
Collected Works of Billy the Kid – Michael Ondaatje
American Murder Ballads and Their Stories – Olive Woolley Burt
Poems of W. B. Yeats – Selected by Seamus Heaney
The Good Lord Bird – James McBride
Consolations – David Whyte
Roget’s Thesaurus – Peter Mark Roget
Here I Am – Jonathan Safran Foer
Lives of the Saints – Alban Butler
Inferno/From an Occult Diary – August Strindberg
Poems 1959-2009 – Frederick Seidel
S.C.U.M Manifesto – Valerie Solanas
Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings
The Anatomy of Melancholy – Robert Burton
Dave Robicheaux Novels – James Lee Burke
Victory – Joseph Conrad
A Flower Book for the Pocket – Macgregor Skene
The Informers – Bret Easton Ellis
The Frog Prince – Stevie Smith
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Sanctuary – William Faulkner
Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Factory Series – Derek Raymond
The Dream Songs – John Berryman
Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
Walkabout – James Vance Marshall"
We highly recommend poking about the archives of Nick’s The Red Hand Files to find more of his intimate musings on things transcendental and mundane.
"Each answer I write seems to be an act of surrender, but at the same time a kind of armouring up — vulnerability as a form of protection."
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From the nautical voyages in Homer’s Odyssey to Anais Nin’s sexual, intriguing Journals, we wanted our selection to be diverse. Our first curated bookshelf’s goal was to meet the eyes of any reader. From a 1929 limited edition of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terrible to a 1969 edition of Plath’s The Colossus, we hand wrapped some old and limited editions in plastic jackets to safeguard their historicity while giving them also a chic look. Our shelf also consisted of recent publications by Penguin House and New Directions; titles such as Audre Lorde’s Your Silence will not Protect You and Anne Carson’s Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. The shelf will remain there for the coming months but in the meantime we hope to expand our little project and collaborate with some of our other favourite shops internationally.
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In December 2018 we commissioned baker, reader, writer and artist Lexie Smith to design a postcard to accompany Jean Rhys' Collected Stories. The following show just a partial portion of her yield. A recipe that reads like a poem, a voice recording over a how to video, and a series of self portraits alongside that bread sculpture. One year on we visited Lexie and her extensive book collection at her home in Queens, New York that included
Lexie Smith at home in NYC, taken by Quentin De Briey in November 2019.
Bread On Earth x iD was filmed and directed by yasmine diba.
After our most successful month at Senb00ks we are looking forward to sharing new
discoveries with you all more so than ever. As the days finally shorten a little too far and the
cold weather start biting, we are moving onto new artists this month that explore isolation
and loneliness that we all feel to some degree much more as our lives move indoors for the
winter. Not that this must be in any way a miserable journey, quite the opposite in fact. Our
two chosen artists this month both ponder over the emotions of fear, isolation and loneliness
and explore them in relation to how we can all be brought together, how we can all identify in
common passions and how we can seek comfort and inspiration from shared ideas, tastes
and beliefs even when we feel our most isolated or alone. Which one of us hasn’t, at times of
varying sadness, cooked a familiar meal from our childhood or called up a bad ex-boyfriend,
climbed into a beaten-up stretched out old jumper or sought refuge in a tattered book? The
things that connect us most are often symbolic and complicated. For these reasons and for
many more this month’s book will be The Collected Short Stories of Jean Rhys sent out with
a postcard from Lexi Smith, a multi-faceted artist that we have been obsessing over on
Instagram for some while now, and we couldn’t think of a more perfect pairing.
Lexi works in a variety of mediums as an artist but some of her most arresting work has seen
her working with bread, manipulating it into beautiful sculptures. She is a New Yorker
through and through, but her work has much to say about ‘cultural anthropology with bread
as the lens.’ She has recently travelled to India to explore ‘the women…and what sacrifices
they’ve had to make to maintain tradition.’ Her work into understanding the changing
relationship between tradition and modernity is something she shares with Rhys who also
travelled the world in her life and sought to understand the inner condition of the women
she met at both ends of it. Lexi’s edible bread exhibitions invite us to question our own
relationships to bread as a launchpad onto issues concerning societal and personal
consumption. When we feel bad or alone, many of us turn to and end up having negative
relationships with our food, sex, love and friendships. And this is where Jean Rhys’ short
stories comes in, the undisputed queen of the lonely and the isolated, she was a self-
confessed “perennial outsider” who grew up “alone except for books.” Yet in her books, full of
doomed women in loveless relationships, we are never alone. Her reality becomes our reality
through her writing, and we challenge you not to see even a tiny bit of yourself in one of her
incredible characters.
Most notably in this book of extraordinary stories, we are never made to feel at home in any
one place. No homes are entered in Rhys stories and the settings are limited to ‘a few cafes,
boarding houses and hotels.’ In these external spaces we are all strangers and yet her stories
and characters are so wildly relatable and human. Rhys was born on the sunny Caribbean
island of Dominica before moving to London and Paris and this movement informs much of
the transitory feel of her stories. Much like Lexi whose work also exists transcendent of any
specific space and questions aspects of ourselves as a person and as a member of something
larger. It seems extra exciting that we will be posting these books across the world to all of
you that found Sendb00ks through Instagram and online, and this important conversation
around a global and nonphysical community is a subject we are inspired to be a part of and
can’t wait to explore with you all.
From the original essay sent to subscribers.
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, 1994 Outside Myself (Monument Valley)
Zelinda Zanichelli
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