midnight rain

Kim Addonizio, Like That

Architectural ceramics, 1900. Bigot & Cie, Paris. Via Museum of Applied Arts Budapest

“We love life whenever we can”

June 1982, Beirut, Lebanon — Palestinian Soldier Stroking a Kitten

James Baldwin, A Transition Interview, 1972

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), dir. Arwen Curry

The next line of her speech is also great: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.

James Baldwin, from “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation”

Dominique Sanda e Stefania Sandrelli in “Il conformista”, diretto da Bernardo Bertolucci / 1970

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself ― that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Jeanette Winterson, from The PowerBook

love as recognition

anna gavalda / friedrich nietzsche / clarice lispector / jandy nelson / rebecca perry / mhairi mcfarlane

Elene Naveriani - Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (2023)

Louise Glück, from an interview with poet in Poets & Writers

Anne Carson, Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking

art + lemony snicket

x x x x x

Scream (1996) dir. Wes Craven