Oh hi

Why hello friend,

How have you been? Well in body, mind, or spirit, if not all three, I hope? Since writing to you last, in August, my months have shown once again life’s capacity for delivering the most rambunctious of fortunes high & low, in quick succession. Popping in now to turn the lights back on, and let you know I’ve got a new bit of writing up at The Back Room, with thanks to Claudia La Rocco who, in the middle of my rollercoaster ride, invited me to contribute. In the essay I allude briefly to one of the highs and then more lengthily, but still quite slant-ily, to the worst of the lows. Its real pitch was, ostensibly, to investigate the parallels and parallelograms of the practices of Ayurveda & poetry, and it does, but life and its malcontents did get in the way. It feels a lifetime and then some since I wrote it (mere weeks ago): LIVING WITH REALITY / A TOTAL WORK OF ART.

Check it out, & let me know how you feel about it?

All is well, as Mom in her continually sloping decline still likes to say. But, what is well, given the times?

*

While I’m here:

Went to an actual theater, a rare event for me these days (but why?), to see THE FRIEND, starring Naomi Watts, Bill Murray & an uncut Great Dane called Bing (in the film, more exquisitely, Apollo). Have you seen it already? I love Naomi Watts’ infinitely expressive face and the gradations of complex emotion she’s able to render. Tough material, delivered lightly, humorously, finally. Recommend.

Syd Staiti’s A New Cadence Means a New Idea, also at The Back Room, a gorgeously meandering and precise essay on Temenos 2024 and the screening of the penultimate segment of the 80 hours of Gregory Markopoulos’s film Eniaios. Do read. I imagine it as a next best thing to being there or having been there.

Also The Friend, the novel the movie was based on. The book is darker than the film but thus far (I’m 2/3rds in) somehow also less emotionally grueling. And, really, a whole other animal. (Idea for you: make a comparison study of the pair.) The sketch of the viper’s pit a writing community can be is something any of you in a writing community will recognize. Some decent writer/writing teacher jokes, as well. Did you know about this novelist Sigrid Nunez? I didn’t. I like her! The Friend is a writer’s novel, all the way, and I read that Nunez is — do we dread this phrase or covet it? — a writer’s writer. What else of hers shall I read?

Driving through La Mesa this morning I passed a spice & tea shop I thought was called “Flaneur” —which would’ve been wonderful, would it not? Alas, the shop’s actually just called “Flavor”. Idea for you: open a spice & tea shop called Flaneur. I’d meander there.

Have you missed me? I’ve certainly missed you.

yrs in the ether,

Suzanne