S(he’s) writing f(o)r substac(k)
To-do list:
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Links:
Millennials are ruining farming. Click this link for pretty pictures of farms!
Has anyone else noticed the latent homophobia in the American Girl Doll community? [I find it concerning that in the American Girl Internet Community it is the Right that cannot meme. –Sarah]
I feel like the girl who wrote this just lowkey made things up. Did Evie Magazine really tell me to wear a graphic t-shirt with a maxi skirt for “exploring the streets of Rome?”
This is a good read on the fashion industry but the author never explains why puffy sleeves are bad.
[I didn’t understand this but I’m linking it for the men anyway. –Sarah]
She’s just like us: Julia Childs described herself as “a rather loud and unformed social butterfly.”
I (Sarah) wrote about making kombucha on the Sarstack.
N.B.:
[I have done this before. It went well. –Sarah]
Travel:
Amy and Sarah went camping in Pennsylvania. They hiked on a mountain, and they swam, and they cooked over a fire. This was dinner:
For dessert they made campfire bananas. While they were eating the bananas Amy said “I feel like the chad yes meme right now.” Here are the bananas:
They also took a late night walk and saw so many stars and lightning bugs.
Etiquette:
If the soup is too hot, it's okay to blow gently over the soup before you put it in your mouth.
–from Emily Post
Snacks:
Clare came up with a really great one: water crackers with crème fraîche, a slice of plumb, fresh mint and basil, and a drizzle of hot honey. She made it for some friends who were skeptical at first but then completely sold. She was like, ya! Lol. Angel emoji. [This sounds so good! –Sarah]
Poems:
After the Grand Perhaps
After vespers, after the first snow
has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave,
after the anorexics have curled
into their geometric forms,
after the man with the apparition
in his one bad eye has done red things
behind the curtain of the lid & sleeps,
after the fallout shelter in the elementary school
has been packed with tins & other tangibles,
after the barn boys have woken, startled
by foxes & fire, warm in their hay, every part
of them blithe & smooth & touchable,
after the little vandals have tilted
toward the impossible seduction
to smash glass in the dark, getting away
with the most lethal pieces, leaving
the shards which travel most easily
through flesh as message
on the bathroom floor, the parking lots,
the irresistible debris of the neighbor’s yard
where he’s been constructing all winter long.
After the pain has become an old known
friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it.
The power of fright, I think, is as much
as magnetic heat or gravity.
After what is boundless: wind chimes,
fertile patches of the land,
the ochre symmetry of fields in fall,
the end of breath, the beginning
of shadow, the shadow of what as it moves
the way the night heads west,
I take this road to arrive at its end
where the toll taker passes the night, reading.
I feel the cupped heat
of his left hand as he inherits
change; on the road that is not his road
anymore I belong to whatever it is
which will happen to me.
When I left this city I gave back
the metallic waking in the night, the signals
of barges moving coal up a slow river north,
the movement of trains, each whistle
like a woodwind song of another age
passing, each ambulance would split a night
in two, lying in bed as a little girl,
a fear of being taken with the sirens
as they lit the neighborhood in neon, quick
as the fire as it takes fire
& our house goes up in night.
After what is arbitrary: the hand grazing
something too sharp or fine, the word spoken
out of sleep, the buckling of the knees to cold,
the melting of the parts to want,
the design of the moon to cast
unfriendly light, the dazed shadow
of the self as it follows the self,
the toll taker’s sorrow
that we couldn’t have been more intimate.
Which leads me back to the land,
the old wolves which used to roam on it,
the one light left on the small far hill
where someone must be living still.
After life there must be life.
Lucie Brock-Broido, from A Hunger, 1988 [I actually hate the title of this poem but the poem totally earns itself and rocks. LBB is a sleeping master. I like her because she said once at a Q&A session that “half of a woman’s poetry reputation is her hair.” If you look her up, you can see that she was plainly correct. If she were still alive today, I’d be all, you dropped this, queen: crown emoji. —C]
“The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter” by Ezra Pound
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.By Rihaku
What we’re reading:
Clare re-read some stories in 1 Kings in light of this Supreme Court decision that you may have heard about but you also may not have she dk! She also has been reading and re-reading this one email sent to her by a beloved. Today, she rearranged her bedroom which gave her reason to read through some old letters, including a very sweet one from a girl who helps with this newsletter whose name starts with A and is Amy.
Sarah picked up Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor and read a few pages, but she cannot take too much at a time because it’s so wretched. She began rereading Till We Have Faces. She is reading about Till We Have Faces, too. What she has read online has been very bad, upsettingly bad. Her father says he has books in the basement on Lewis that will be good.
Exhortations:
You must be in the cringe but be not of it.
Request for approval:
Is this okay?