Reading is sexy, PDFs make the thrill economical

And the Internet is a glittering, traversable highway where you can get off at any spot. Here are my recommendations. RIP Z-Lib.

Cyber Diary is a bi-weekly publication of digital diary entries.

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“Hemingway should be read standing up, Basho walking, Proust in the bath, Cervantes in a hospital, Simenon on a train, Dante in paradise, Dosto[yevsky] in the underground, Miller in a smoky bar with hot dogs, fries and a Coke… I was reading Mishima with a cheap bottle of wine by the bed, totally exhausted, and a girl in the shower.” — Dany Laferrière

Reading — it ellicits! It evokes! It lures! Reveals the story to you slowly, unravels parralel dimensions. It is the bridge, portal, key into another psychology, another time, place, urgency. In Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea it was the wild hot tropics of Coloubri, Jamaica, near Spanish Town circa 1800s. In Marguerite Duras’ The Lover it was prewar Indochina, lyrical and feverish. It revs up your heart chakra, makes you cry when it feels good, gives you oblivion for a second — the dilemmas of your day falls away. What is sexier…

Happy beginning of December. Just a few more weeks until the bells chime. There is fire on the trees and the mornings have gone dark again. How were the past thirty days for you? How will the next thirty days be? I’m sitting at my kitchen table here near Pompei, most angelic little commune, still bloated from a dinner of farfalle, eggplant, and pesto. For dessert: dark chocolate mousse, banana, shaved almonds. I also quit drinking (again)!

Yesterday, a sudden transmission of information.

I LOVE TO WRITE AND IT IS ALL ↓ BELOW ↓ AVERAGE. It should devastate me.  The sky should be descending on me from above, rapid-speed, my winged cerebral angels plummeting straight over the edge of fire-flattened mental heavens — once prosperous! Bye bye.

Bright side: small victory for the Venusian in me. In recognizing where I fall short I have reaffirmed my good taste, my intuitive sense for excellence. I am not there yet, I am not even in the vicinity, but one day maybe. And maybe never. Maybe the pursuit of feeling truly excellent will be a Barthes-eque love affair; articulation impossible, the “getting to” and “retrieving the contents of” the mind, for display, for relation, impossible. For now I feel decent actually, mystified and young again, because this — to write — is a fun eternal practice and it is all in my hands. To do with it what I will. First I need to buy a thesaurus. I don’t know any words. God my limited vocabulary is disgusting me lately. My main issue isn’t writing, I can do that, at least to average proportions. I have a problem with thinking. I have forgotten how to think. I have forgotten how to go deeply into one thought. To challenge the thought. In 2023 I want to pitch to publications but I feel like the ideas I have have nowhere to go but to somewhere very close to me.

Excavate, inquire…Eat etymology for dinner like caviar, fresh meat, time!

I know what I like (eg: Fiona Duncan)…

and I know what fails to move me (eg: Jia Tolentino)…

I know that most of my obsession for the written word is the divine traps that are set with it; I mean total lures into sensation. Textures, treasures, atmosphere, weight : font, syllabel, vowel. The colour of it. “Written portraiture,” the wetness it evokes, its sexiness, its sadness, its looseness/openness, This Author Harbours An Aversion To Intimacy, the secret setting it contains(conjures?). I’m not fantastic at this yet, my voice, my energy, my mind — so young. Microblogging on Tumblr has not frozen me in time but it has definitely frozen some of my braincells and there are synapses needed for long effort that just don’t come online as easily anymore (working theory).

The aim, starting now: And I am aiming as sharp as Cupid:

a) Read more. Way more.

b) Pray to be reminded of the art of form and fashion via (intellectual?) osmosis.

I would be ordering books if I had any cash and I probably wouldn’t be reading as often as I do if I had a job, reliable WiFi, or more friends in Italy to spend time with IRL. Also I will always prefer a hardback physical copy of a book because I find it insanely grounding to hold a story in my hands and cerebrally bite into it…highlight my favourite phrases nostalgia pink…but the Internet is fun, the Internet is lovely. The Internet as a glittering, traversable highway where you can get off at any spot. 

Here are my December reccomendations:

Articles/Journals

• Home Away From Home: The Love Language of Souvenirs for SSENSE

• User Error: Fraud by Adina Glickstein for Spike Art Magazine

• Ottessa Mosfaugh Plays to Win by Kaitlin Phillips for The Cut

• Internet Girl by Honour Levy for NY Tyrant

• Haruki Murakami on Cold Beer, Nothingness, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for Interview Magazine

• The Downward Spiral: Persona by Dean Kissick for Spike Art Magazine

• Stress and the City by Fiona Duncan for Adult Magazine

• Adult Mag is offline now, but thankfully Wayback Machine exists.

• BRENDA’S BUSINESS with RICK OWENS for o32c

• Fiona Alison Duncan Curates Books for Homes, Hotels, and Shops by Adam Robb for Architectural Digest. “It is easiest, of course, to do personal book shopping when you're intimate with someone. I think of it as part therapy, part divination, part gift giving, and part polemical.”

• Worn Out: Shrugging Towards Bethleham by Cara Schacter for Spike Art Magazine

  This is because specificity is the easiest way for a writer to look chic. Didion’s always like: “Beth Israel North”- this, “the Cornell wing of Columbia-Presbyterian”-that. She’s obsessed with Cedars-Sinai. She’s like: 

  “‘It’s not black and white,’ a young doctor from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles had told me, in 1982, about the divide between life and death.” 
  (The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005)

  You can take a nothing sentence, add specificity, and it’s chic.

  “…she does not stop until Jane Lisch appears with a jar of Gerber’s Junior Chicken Noodle Dinner.” 
  (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

  That’s how you make things more interesting than they are. That’s how you get dimension and shadow. It’s about being pointed.

• Mornings After You by Bijan Stephen for Adult Magazine

• Learning to Live With A Partner Who Never Says I Love You by Kate Morgan for The Cut 

• What Comes After Ambition? by Ann Friedman for Elle

Fiction

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Mosfegh 

• Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (Part II)

• Exquisite Mariposa by Fiona Duncan

I could not find a PDF of this one. But since I have read it three times this year I would say that it’s worth the $16.95 if you’re looking for a book to gift yourself for Christmas.

• I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

• Bear by Marian Engel

As is evident by the briefness of this section, I desperately desire fiction recommendations to get me through the winter. I will love you forever if you let me know what is the best work of fiction you have ever read?

Non-Fiction

• Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic by Esther Perel 

• The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

• Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery by Virginia L. Blum

• Beyond Individualism: Toward a New Understanding of Self, Relationship, and Experience by Gordon Wheeler

• Telepathy and the Subliminal Self: An Account of Recent Investigations Regarding Hypnotism, Automatism, Dreams, Phantasms, and Related Phenomena by Mason Osgoode

• On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry

• The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures by Jean Baudrillard

• The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor

• Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks

• The Akashic Experience: Science and the Cosmic Memory Field by Ervin Laszlo

• I Used to Be Charming by Eve Babitz

• Only Love Is Real: A Story of Soulmates Reunited by Brian L. Weiss

• Psychology and the Occult by Carl G. Jung

• Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Eva Illouz

• Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help by Eva Illouz

Substacks

The Unpublishable by Jessica DeFino

• I Want You To Lick Me

• Eat Shit, Kim Kardashian

Back Row by Amy Odell

• Confessions: Fashion Magazine Assistants

• “Nepo Babies” Need Better Talking Points

Recovering by Holly Whittaker

• The courage to listen to ourselves.

“Last week I read that Kendrick Lamar goes months without a phone (in addition to not having a social media presence). He disappears into his creations, he relies on second-hand information to understand What The Internet Is or what’s happening on it.”

• The mistake you keep making

Oldster Magazine

• My Mother Wanted Me to Be Happy by Gina Fattore

• Letter To My Younger Self #2: You Are Here by Sara Eckel 

• Everything (Really Is) Fine by Kim France

Bookbear Express by Ava

• Ways of Thinking About People

• Stamina

URLs (Honourable Mention)

Hermit People, a website by Hélène Kugelberg, Elise Haugslett, Colin Bergh profiling and interviewing people about their homes. I love the edibility of the CSS. Bright colours and big, chucky, smooth serif fonts remind me of Piczo, MySpace, Livejournal,

Marlee Grace’s Newsletter Class on Notion.

Thank you, love you, have a wonderful day.

FYI. Cyber Diary is on sale for December.

Until next time xoxo