“I care little for plot and prefer a lingering glow..”

Agnes Martin. The Distillation of Color, Texts by Durga Chew-Bose, Bruce Hainley, Olivia Laing, Design by Mine Suda, Pace Publishing, New York, NY, 2021 [Exhibition: Pace Gallery, New York, NY, May 5 – Jun 26, 2021]

I wish you were here. The days and nights are beautiful as only autumn can be […] My delight is purely aesthetic, and country bumpkin I am good, industrious, and loving; how long will it be, though, before I break out?

— Vita Sackville West, letter to Virginia, 11 Oct 1927

I remember being surprised at how yellow and how red autumn really is.

— Joe Brainard, I Remember

In the corner of Mommy’s heart, a small black mole lifts its head / It becomes a song. A fabulous solo roams desperately looking for death / A song graceful like the deep autumn night / The endless greetings of the dead.

— Kim Hyesoon, Autobiography of Death

Say autumn. / Say autumn despite the green / in your eyes. Beauty despite / daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn / mounting in your throat.

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

We’re the types who keep from joining everyone outside, or rather, we enjoy-with-skirmish an autumn sunset’s afterglow, anticipating instead the quick tide of darkness that comes next.

— Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood

The mottled lights from across the other bank beamed on the water, reminding me of Van Gogh's Starlight Over the Rhone. Very autumnal, very beginning of school year, very Indian summer, and as always at Indian summer twilight, that lingering mix of unfinished summer business and unfinished homework and always the illusion of summer months ahead, which wears itself out no sooner than the sun has set.

— André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

It still comes as a shock to me how irreversible life is

Imagine that. Even when we’re pressing snooze and rolling over in bed, folding ourselves into our covers and postponing the day’s bubbling over, and soon after notching cold butter on warm toast, or later coming to a halt as we bound up a flight of subway stairs only to stall behind an elderly woman whose left leg trails behind her right leg—one leaden step at a time—even then, when time decelerates and the relative importance of our lives, of our hurry, undergoes a sudden, essential audit; even then, our heart never stops. . . despite these bouts of wonder and alarm, when my heart races, dimples, is weary and deflates, it never exhausts. How is that possible? How does it maintain? Stays going. On and on.

Durga Chew-Bose, from “Heart Museum,” in Too Much and Not the Mood

Durga Chew-Bose, “Heart Museum” from Too Much and Not the Mood

Durga Chew-Bose

Some of us are born a little mournful, and we spend our lives discovering new traditions for housing those ghosts we’ve long considered companions. Framing, I’d venture, is central to this urge. It gives memories a physique.

Durga Chew-Bose, Letter of Recommendation: Framing (NY Times, Feb 4, 2020) (via Alive on All Channels)

“I love a confessional mood that isn’t too profound.”

Durga Chew-Bose on Jamaica Kincaid’s Talk Stories

🌹

Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood

“When you travel,” writes Elizabeth Hardwick in Sleepless Nights, “your first discovery is that you do not exist.” This sentence, which I read in late September as I shuffled and flopped from my couch to my bed and then back to my couch again, chasing patches of shade as the sun cast a geometry of light on my walls, this sentence surfaced on the page like a secret I’d been hurtling toward all summer but, until now, was nothing more than a half-formed figment. (I’ve come to hope for these patterns that build in increments, eventually sweetening into an idea I’ve long been blueprinting in my mind; I’ve come to understand them as a huge chunk of what writing involves.)

—Durga Chew-Bose, “Since Living Alone” from Too Much and Not The Mood: Essays

I have complicated feelings about wanting to disappear, because I already struggle with feeling invisible, and I know that visibility can be construed as a privilege, but I also never want to be fully seen. I even like, on occasion, to be misheard. What I struggle with more is being misunderstood.

Durga Chew-Bose (x)

Do you have any light-hearted comforting reads? Feeling a little down

sure! i hope you’re feeling better soon. maybe you’d like one of these, depending on what you’re looking for:

if on a winter’s night a traveler by italo calvino is a really delightful escape. there’s a playfulness that drives this book, especially after a few chapters—it kind of reminded me of the feeling that i used to get reading lemony snicket as a kid

i always crave something funny when i’m feeling bad... priestdaddy by patricia lockwood, zambra’s chilean poet, happy hour by marlowe grenados?

the rachel incident by caroline o’donoghue is a new book that really charmed me, it’s a portrait of an early-20s friendship and an illicit affair set in cork, ireland. it’s literary-leaning of a beach read but it has that candylike quality (not every moment is breezy, but overall really fun)

i thought too much and not the mood by durga chew-bose had this lovely optimism in a genre that can be stereotyped as moody (personal essays). a clever and effervescent book that left me inspired to create things

i would not call her work lighthearted, but a novelist that makes me feel like you can face the most fucked-up challenges in life with moral strength and heart and humor is miriam toews. i would probably start with fight night for something on the lighter side of her spectrum. i might add banana yoshimoto on a similar note, some of her themes/plot points can be heavy and mysterious yet the books have this soothing effect on me, they feel colorful and warm. kitchen is a popular starting place and a quick read

“When I think of my brother’s childhood friends, of the two who are dead, I become, in those seconds, not inconsolable but wanting for my parents. I am homesick. Parent-sick. Cousin-sick. Okra-sick. . . I am sick for those years when I was paying attention without purpose. When I was arranging stories free of import, and when my imagination could draw courage instead of warrant that I stay in. . . I am sick for using change to buy lime popsicles. Sick for slamming doors to emphasize my temper. I am sick for not perceiving winter. For being unbothered by February’s frost. . . I am sick for packing a snowball but being too shy to throw it and so I’d carry it in the gloved pillow of my palm like a pet snowball. I am sick for using small scissors to cut cardboard hearts; for gluing them on paper doilies and writing someone’s name with felt marker. I am sick for cardboard and paper and markers, and the time it took to make things before gifting them. . . I am sick for my incorruptibility. Sick for believing. Sick for my body before. Before I’d ever noticed I was in possession of one. Before full-lengths. Before I knew anything about valleyed collarbones, a stomach’s folds, smooth legs, small wrists. . . I am sick for wearing orange. For those years when I knew nothing about the need to abide. When I smiled with my teeth.”

— Durga Chew-Bose, from “Part of a Greater Pattern,” in Too Much and Not the Mood

Nobody ever teaches you how to be a person torn-between. How to shape your breaths so as to accommodate both the solitude and the stampede.

Durga Chew-Bose, “Part of a Greater Pattern”from Too Much and Not the Mood