The sky is high. The Czar is far.
Jason of Clarity of Night is hosting an awesome short fiction writing contest in partnership with Anne Frasier.
I stumbled on the rules via a friend of a friend of a friend, and wound up participating in the festivities.
A lot of good writers are featured there. I haven’t had time to go through all of them yet, but one that stuck out at me almost immediately was The Crater Doesn’t Move.
Cheers.
WHEN YOU ARE OLD
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
– William Butler Yeats
This is a poem that’s perfect for bedtime, somehow, and even more perfect for a Monday night. In my not-so-humble opinion, that is. Yeats was a bit of an emotional sadist, really. In a good way.
I had given up on Vanity Fair, Wolcott’s wit notwithstanding.
Providence intervened as I was lounging around on campus, bored out of my mind, watching the new freshmen stagger around with that all-too-familiar shell-shocked look in their eyes. I asked Khaled to buy me the latest copy.
Kate Moss was on the cover. Stunning as always, even more “stunningness” in the inside spread. I remarked to Khaled that for me, Kate Moss seemed to be one of the few people out there who looked completely natural, innocent, even, in the nude. A babe in the woods. Then I read A. A. Gill’s essay on Moss, and saw this:
“… The image that is most archetypal of [Moss], the one that flickers on the retina and best exemplifies her sense of self, is Kate Moss in nothing at all. Naked. She is the most unself-conscious and unconcerned without clothes… It’s always utterly, naturally, completely her. And winningly, omnisexually attractive. It’s like Eve before the apple. Not a lapse of modesty, but an absence of prurience.”
Personally, I believe that Eve was framed, but agree with Gill on everything else. Kate Moss reminds me of my mother’s old approach to photography (before my mother got mixed up with the wrong crowd, i.e. the Church), wherein skin equaled innocence. To pose in front of the camera and make it love you, you had to be a child, running through the sprinkler in a shift with no underpants on. You had to be human, not a piece of product, and Moss, for whatever reason, be it genetics or character or both, is exceedingly human in the nude or semi-nude pictures she takes.
It’s all the more distressing to me when I read discussions on the hyper-sexualization of both women and kids, whilst remembering my mother’s artistic philosophy, or leafing through sumptuous-yet-pure pictures of Kate Moss, with doves’ eyes within her locks.
Today we signed on to become volunteers at the Animal Protection Society of Durham. I’ve been asked to man the front desk once a month, because that’s where you generally “see the worst of people”: folks who abandon their pets because they’re the wrong colour, and owners who tie their dog to a tree for the rest of their life, or use it in fights, or experiments.
I hope this new gig won’t make me hate the world or anything.
He of North of Sunset fame, author and blogger extraordinaire, is being picked up by a major, major agent.
Let’s hope he does not forget us poor sods as he bathes in champagne, and let’s also hope that the major, major agent treats him well. Henry’s great, and he deserves this. It would be wonderful if more people became acquainted with him and his work. I’ve been lucky enough to call him a blogger-buddy for some time now, and I have waited for this to happen for him. And it finally did. So that when I started reading the announcements on his blog, I wasn’t even surprised. It seemed perfectly natural that Henry would finally get the recognition he deserved. The entire thing has made me believe that the universe might have a tiny conscience after all.
May it all go well for Henry. Cheers.
Natalia A. 