✮Five Brilliant Things✮
On misanthropy and memory
Hello,
There’s a slightly misanthropic edge to this batch of five things. I guess late February brings out the grouch in me.
Elissa Altman on art, envy, and doggy dog worlds
‘I once told a well-known writer that I’d just had an essay taken by a highly esteemed literary journal; I was thrilled, and grateful. She waited a beat, beamed, and said Oh honey, that’s where writers get published when they can’t get into The Paris Review.’
Moments before her leg is amputated, Frida Kahlo writes to Diego Rivera
‘I’m writing to let you know I’m releasing you, I’m amputating you. Be happy and never seek me again. I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want you to hear from me. If there is anything I’d enjoy before I die, it’d be not having to see your fucking horrible bastard face wandering around my garden.’
“A winter friend knows my greys, my perennial complaints, vain woes, and does not paper over my doldrums. Knows my laments and stands beside them—a contrast, a reprieve,” my friend Gretchen wrote to me when I asked her what came to mind when she heard the term. “A winter friend puts tea in my cold hands and believes I’m good even when my thoughts are harsh like a scraping storm or hard like frozen ground. A winter friend is dependable, here again and here again. A companionable candle when the days are short.”
Emma Gannon on inviting guests to go home
‘My friend Charlotte sent me a meme about the German phrase ich fuhle mich jetzt genug beucht which means “I have been visited enough now”. I felt seen.’
Mike Sowden explains why handwriting matters
‘Most of us can type much faster than we can write because we’re moving our bodies much less. But it seems the cost of that is we’re shortcutting our body’s role in helping us think and remember what we’re typing. That’s what handwriting is: it’s the slower, more physically arduous and complex way, but that physical demand upon us seems to be serving a really useful cognitive purpose.’
Take care,
Katherine
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Frida! Lord have mercy!
Ich fuhle mich jetzt genug beucht. (In my family we reduce it to: habe genuch. Colloquially, Enough already.
Yeah, The Paris Review. Sigh.
The Frida Kahlo comment made me laugh out loud, I was not expecting that!!