"I Shall Move Somewhere Into The Woods And Try To Improve Myself."

<3

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

R.F. Kuang (Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, 2022)

“She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem.”

-Raymond Carver, “Cathedral” (1983)

Art for arts sake

sometimes i think of yusuf, at the beginning. poet son of a merchant boy in borrowed armour, skull cracked open on a rock. how long until he returns home again? How does he return, estranged, to those Ithica-like Tunisian shores? Can his father still recognize his covered face?

yusuf al-kaysani, the son, the poet, the not-soldier, made and unmade each night in the looms of his mother's memory, mindbody woven and unwoven by something infinite and nameless.

sometimes i think about "di genova" vs. "al-kaysani". a land versus a bloodline. How they lose both, and then the names, too. immortal odysseus, ogygia-bound, longing to see the smoke that rises from his homeland, longing for death, kept in the soft-tender company of his murderer.

(really, you were founded on the bloody rock of holy ground. really, sometimes there is no return from war. at least not from this. not from the way he touches you.)

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

-Virginia Woolf

Dead Poets Society (1989) dir. Peter Weir

I am a terrible combination of “whatever happens, happens” and “If everything doesn’t go according to plan, I will vaporize”

Nicky and Joe just out there absolutely crushing the enemies to lovers trope. no one’s doing it like them. iconic.