Vintage Innuendo: Still More Over Sexteen, edited by J. M. Elgart, drawings by Priscilla. Grayson Publishing Corp., 1954

Hans Bellmer's Doll, in Surrealism: 50 Works of Art You Should Know by Brad Finger. Prestel Books, 2013.

Graffiti attributed to Banksy, from the book Banksy, Carpet Bombing Culture books, 2012.

Even today women are looked upon not so much as the creators but simply as the custodians of the progeny they carry within their bodies. And in some insidious recess of the male mind, women are still regarded as polluters of men.

Jamake Highwater, Myth and Sexuality

Annabel Lee, Poison. Chicago, 2017

It's early in the morning. It's my habit to send a message to my friend, a writer, each day. Most of these messages are trivial nonsense. This morning, however, I am thinking about Azar Nafisi's brilliant book Read Dangerously. I realize that in order for people to be able to read dangerously, someone needs to write dangerously. The message today is short, but on this rare occasion it is not trivial.

Write dangerously.

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman. Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940. Illustrations by Lewis C. Daniel, Introduction by Christopher Morley.

Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

Terry Pratchett, Mort

Spill

My hands are wrapped around my coffee cup because the cup is warm and my fingers are freezing. I rarely stop to buy coffee, but I'm making an exception today. The mild winter has lulled me into complacency but now January has arrived with a vengeance. My jacket is too thin and I don't have gloves and by the time I'm a few blocks from home I know I've made a mistake. Now, however, I'm inside the coffee shop, thankful that I have time to spare before I need to be at work.

That's when I notice the woman at the next table. She's dressed warmly, with a nice scarf and a knit hat. She's drinking coffee and reading. The book catches my eye. It's called Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. I don't know anything about the book, but I love the title.

The book is a paperback and it's old. The cover is worn and tattered, and there are brightly-colored post-it notes sticking out from the pages. Lots of notes. There are several different colors, as if she had selected different colors for different types of notes. The edges of the notes are not crisp. They're bent and folded and ripped, because they have been sticking out from the book for a very long time.

I immediately understand. She's tagging passages that she likes. She's marking lines and quotes that are important to her. These are the things she wants to remember. The things she loves. The fragments that will stay with her for the rest of her life. There are too many to keep track of. She loves this book deeply, so deeply that her affection is spilling out of the book, overflowing in a rainbow of tiny paper tabs.

In this moment, I fall in love with this woman. I will never see her again, but that doesn't matter. I will love her until my dying day. She has traveled with this book for a very long time, reading and re-reading it, loving it intensely, and that is all the reason I need to love her.

"In those days people fell in love much more suddenly than at present, as all ancient stories make manifest…"

Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra

In the Manner of Dreams

Just now I wrote an email to a close friend. I was telling her about a dream I had last night. After I sent the email I kept thinking about the dream and I felt like crying, even though it was a pleasant, happy dream.

In the manner of dreams, it took place in a town where I lived long ago... except that it was nothing like this town. I was not the age I am now; but I was also not the age I was then. There was a woman in the dream who had been a girl in this same town, except that she was older and did not resemble the girl in any way at all.

I had not been in love with this girl.

In the dream, she was taking me somewhere. I didn't know where, but I was with her and I was happy.

I would like to write her name. I would like to include it in this story, but of course it wasn't really her. Right now I am speaking this name over and over in my head: This-is-her-name, this-is-her-name, this-is-her-name.

In the email I told my friend the girl's name. Only my friend gets to hear this name.

This-is-her-name, this-is-her-name, this-is-her-name.

I don't know why I feel like crying, except of course I really do, but I am not going to say the reason, just as I am not going to say her name.

Censorship by Dorothy Iannone, Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland, 2014

I have noticed that a book that creates a sexual scandal often becomes quite famous; in any case, the scandal certainly does not hurt the distrbution of the book. Paintings, however, cannot, in general, afford the same notoriety. Perhaps this is because a book can be bought anonymously and read in privacy. Even pornography, that unrelentingly mechanistic substitute for real feelings, can be perused and even possessed without the necessity of publicly allying oneself with the sentiments expressed, as one must inevitably do if one buys and hangs a painting in one's living room where one's colleagues, clients, and friends will see it. Why can't we stand up for Eros? Wouldn't we feel better if we could stand up for this life-loving part of ourselves?

Dorothy Iannone, Censorship, Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland, 2014

Femme June: Natural, 2023

If I didn't know you, what would fill the blank spaces where the thoughts of you would have been?

Ardis: Queen of the Damned. Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, June 2023.

Femme June, photographed in 2023, with Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, Librairie Grund, Paris 1961.