I am finally getting around to compiling this, like you asked me to. To annoy you, I’m making this like a horoscope of sorts for you, a Taurus edition of Current Affairs. Here is a description of Tauruses I like that I included in an email to our mutual friend and fellow Taurus, Tomisin: “This is not to say that Taurus is materialistic. On the contrary, a more correct understanding would be that there is a strong emotional connection between physical objects and a solid sense of self-worth for those born to this sign. Not necessarily concerned with pursuing objects for their own sake, Taureans are here to learn to find the usefulness of function and form. Taurus relates to all things physical, sensual and real. Accordingly Taureans will be most responsive to what they can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. That which is tangible, or ‘real’, generates feelings of material security or self-worth for Taurus that are hard to ignore.” This Current Affairs will honor that connection between people and things, material or immaterial. This is for you Soso; enjoy.
Cy Twombly’s palazzo as photographed by Horst P. Horst, included in this wondrous essay on the 1966 Vogue feature that haunted Twombly’s legacy:
Cy Twombly’s palazzo and belongings as photographed by François Halard:
DIARIES ON LIVING AND LOVING
- Tavi Gevinson, writer, actress and editor-in-chief of Rookie Mag, is a Taurus so I feel it is apt to include her writings on this list. For the Infinity issue of her magazine, about the “infinite feelings, colors, sounds, experiences” that we find difficult to communicate, Tavi shared her diary entries from her first couple of months living and working in New York. In it she writes on how “it’s gotten shockingly effortless to live in Infinity, and trust that I’ll retain what I need to later, and if not, accept the price of a life fully lived.” Read the first entry here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, and the sixth here.
- Enormous Eye diary entries by amazing writers: Sarah Nicole Prickett, Durga Chew-Bose, Doreen St. Felix, Dayna Tortorici, Larissa Pham. These are really good to read in bed, snuggled under covers, especially as winter approaches; to be soaked up in another’s day-to-day mundane activities without moving. These always make me sentimental, missing my loved ones, eager to love and dote on them. Otherwise these make me melancholic, but in a good way; writerly, perceptive.
- Sarah Nicole Prickett’s “diary of outfits” that really documents the early moments of falling in love, of seeing someone and of being seen, and the ways we communicate ourselves to others, how we express ourselves; a heart-stirrer, this one, called “What I Wore to Fall In Love.”
- An excerpt from Arabelle Sicardi’s Enormous Eye entry and one of my favorite things I’ve ever read because of how romantic it is. Read the rest of their entry here.
Takanobu Kobayashi, Television, 1993, oil on cotton:
Lyle Ashton Harris, Selections from the Ektachrome Archive, 2014 (Mature content)
“In Selections from the Ektachrome Archive, bedroom scenes and personal mementos punctuate public presentations and social gatherings, as a register of Harris’ life during the height of the AIDS crisis and its impact.”
Henri Fantin-Latour, Peonies, 1876
Kara Walker, Dreams herself into being, 2014
Jesse Darling, Not Long Now, 2014
Talia Chetrit, Street self-portrait #2, 2015
Francois Dischinger, Las Palmas, Hollywood, 1998
Lois Mailou Jones, Jennie (cleaning fish), 1943
Kerry James Marshall: (top) Untitled (Pink towel), 2014, (bottom) Untitled, 2012
Reading List
- “Social Life” by Hannah Black
- “Free the Roses” by Sarah Nicole Prickett
- “Tripartite” by Eliza H.
- “The Algerian’s Flowers” by Marguerite Duras, translated by Lauren Upadhyay
- “Saying Goodbye to Cassini, the NASA Mission That Transformed Our Understanding of the Solar System” by Alan Burdick
- “Editor’s Note: Consent” by The New Inquiry
- “What’s Drake to Do When Toronto Isn’t Enough?” by Amani Bin Shikhan
- “Seeing is Consuming: Feminism and the Perils of Visibility” by Abbe Schriber
- “Buying your way out of Horror: Race, Class and Gender in The Headless Woman” by Juan Velásquez-Buriticá
- “Spectral Power” by Liat Berdugo
- “The Bleak Left” by Tim Barker
- “All Around Us” by Kelley Dong
- “Where on Earth Are You?” by Frances Stonor Saunders
- “New World Disorder” by Hannah Black
- “The Clothes They Were Buried In” by Philippa Snow
- “The Fallacy of Formalism in Film Criticism” by Chelsea Phillips-Carr
- “The Bond of Belief” by Sara Ahmed
- “The Middle” by Sarah Nicole Prickett
- “New York State of Undress” by Fiona Duncan
- “How Hollywood Segregates Eternity” by Harmony Holiday
- “A View of Her Own” by Sarah Nicole Prickett
- “Consent: It’s Not Sexy“, the most concise panel on rape, consent, and responsibility by Adult Magazine
- “In the Maze” by Dayna Tortorici
When you’re done reading Too Much and Not the Mood, read these interviews of Durga Chew-Bose if you want:
- ‘When You’re Writing, Everything is in Retrospect’: An Interview with Durga Chew-Bose for Hazlitt
- Bookforum talks with Durga Chew-Bose, an interview with Sarah Nicole Prickett
- ‘Durga Chew-Bose on the power of uncertainty’ for The Creative Independent
- ‘Durga Chew-Bose Has Been So Young For So Long’ for SSENSE
Other interesting interviews and conversations:
- Juliana Huxtable for SSENSE
- Doreen St. Félix for Into the Gloss‘s Top Shelf
- Maggie Nelson by Sarah Nicole Prickett for Bookforum
- Kimberly Drew by Doreen St. Félix for Lenny Letter
Watch and listen:
This conversation, but especially Doreen St. Félix’s part:
You should enjoy this one
