November 5, 2024 Diaries Philadelphia Farm Diary By Joseph Earl Thomas Elana the goose. Photograph by Joseph Earl Thomas. September 1, 2024 Elana thinks the world is coming to an end, but I remind her how this is a fundamental problem of perspective. She is both right and wrong, and so am I. Elana, insofar as I can tell, contains the multitudes most other three-year-old Sebastopol geese and humans above the age of thirty lack. When I open the coop, this Amish-made shed, painted blue with little herb planters beneath the windows, she tawdles out, screaming, as geese often do. Her adopted babies (three gray “African” geese) and a duck trio waddle out after her; they test their lungs against the air, honking and such over the sounds of slow traffic on Penrose Avenue, the warblers waiting to share their food, four dogs barking on the other side of the yard, those big black vultures competing for pool water, and my neighbor’s white cat, everybody’s nemesis, lurking at the edges of our fence and licking its lips at the thought of baby birds. The nearly last living rooster is sexually tepid, but eager for food, guiding all thirteen hens to the snacks I’ve dispensed, clucking them over to what he’s “found.” Elana grooms my pants leg, then unties my retro number 8s as if desperate to return to summer, to the sandals that ferried my bright green bare toenails out to her like so many flecks of potential vegetation. Failing, she looks up at me quizzically, or, like, Where the fuck is my food, nigga? Read More
October 30, 2024 Diaries Sleep Diary By Rosa Shipley Photograph courtesy of Rosa Shipley. June 29, 2024 Bed at midnight. Awake at 3:12 A.M. Back to sleep around six, awake again at 8:39 A.M. Very hot out. June 30 Bed at one thirty. Up at six thirty. Realized these are my final hours in my apartment before I move tomorrow. Not much sleep, but for good reason. When I already know that my sleep is going to be abbreviated, it’s easier to make peace with the specter of fatigue. This apartment has a skylight, and my bed lies directly beneath. All the time, it gives the sensation of soaking in a sun shower. It is as if I am sometimes being cursed by God’s blessing. No air conditioning, so I freeze tomatoes in the icebox, as I call it to myself—I live alone—and then put them on my belly and heart to cool. The past few weeks, when I’ve been up in the night and sensed morning coming, I’ve tried to locate the darkest corner of my studio apartment. This just means I’ve moved my top mattress layer, a cotton Japanese futon, to the floor. Restless, with one pillow and one sheet, I escaped the skylight. With my body this close to the floor, I can feel the rumblings of the building below me, the deep hum of the subway underneath, and the trucks outside, all the sound so bass-tone that I forget I’m even listening. Makes me think of the way that they say mushrooms speak to one another from underground, or of the sound of a whale. July 1 Bed at midnight. Up at eight. Miraculous! Read More
October 29, 2024 Diaries The City Is Covered in Snow: From the Notebooks of Orhan Pamuk By Orhan Pamuk At the heart of this book there is a dream I’d had before I ever started writing and drawing in these notebooks. I have managed to make sense of some parts of the dream, but others I still don’t understand. I was watching the dream unfold as if it were the view outside my window when I suddenly woke up, afraid … To help me understand that dreamscape, I have arranged the illustrated pages of this book not in CHRONOLOGICAL but in EMOTIONAL order. Read More
October 23, 2024 Diaries Pull-Up Diary By Mitchell Morgan Johnson Photograph courtesy of Mitchell Johnson. July 14, 2024 I went to the neighborhood gym for the first time today. Until now I was driving, sporadically, to the university gym where I get in for free, but only sporadically. So I paid forty-five dollars for a month of entry to this one. I’m trying to get stronger. Bigger, too. It sounds boring because it is. I am a twenty-seven-year-old gay man who has started going to the gym. I have all the standard gym desires: strength, size, beauty, health. The trouble is that these are poorly defined, with few benchmarks. So I have come up with a more specific goal, too: I would like to do a pull-up. Overhand, unassisted. Right now I can kind of do one if I start with a little jump, but when I try a true pull-up, the best I can do is retract my shoulders and bend my elbows a little before my strength gives out. The neighborhood gym is run by a Ukrainian family. The daughter, no older than fifteen, signed me up. It’s small and not very nice; the dingy locker room reminds me of my middle school’s. Mercifully, though, it’s uncrowded. Today I’m starting with assisted pull-ups on the assisted pull-up machine, which has a pad for your knees and a counterweight to help lift your body up. I tried it with forty pounds of assistance, then fifty, and then finally, at sixty, I could complete five. Then I did the rest of my workout, with various machines and weights and benches, and walked home. Read More
September 18, 2024 Diaries Dreaming Within the Text: Notebooks on Herman Melville By Christopher Bollas From Six Drawings by Robert Horvitz, a portfolio published by The Paris Review in 1978. The following entries came from notebooks the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas kept between 1974 and 1977. These notebooks were not written or edited for publication–Bollas says they were more like “mental scratch pads where the author simply writes out what he is thinking in the moment without, ironically, thinking about it.” The entries touch on things Bollas was reading at the time, scenes he saw in London, what he was observing in patients–and, more often than not, the ways these all intersected in his thoughts. We selected these entries in part because they cover a period of time when he was reading and thinking on and off about the work of Herman Melville, alongside many other questions about character, the self, and others. Undated entry, 1974 Let us imagine that all neuroses and psychoses are the self’s way of speaking the unspeakable. The task of analysis is to provide an ambience in which the neurotic or characterological speech can be spoken to the analyst and understood. It is not so much [a question of] what are the epistemologies of each disorder but what does psychoanalytical treatment tell us about them? We must conclude that it tells us that all conflict is flight from the object and that analysis restores the structure of a relation so that the patient can engage in a dialogue with the object. Read More
August 28, 2024 Diaries A Rose Diary By Walt John Pearce The rose bush farthest to the right. Photographs courtesy of the author. April 12, 2024 I live on a mountain and am surrounded by mountains and last year I planted five rosebushes. Last year I dug five holes and it took a few days because the ground is hard where I live and it is full of bluestone and other rocks. In the old days they made use of the rocks that they found when they were digging into the ground. They built walls of bluestone to keep the cattle from going past the property line and you can still see many of these walls today and there are even some of these walls on my own property. These days the rocks are not useful to me at all and they were a big nuisance to my digging. Once the bushes were in the ground, four out of the five bushes from last year bloomed once or twice, and they had some nice flowers but it was nothing too spectacular. The blooms were small and the flowers were plagued by bugs and beetles and slugs. The beetles were the worst of the pests in the way that they crawled and in the way that they chewed on the petals. The blooms barely smelled like anything at all. The bush all the way to the right never bloomed and its leaves stayed small like fingernails. The lack of frequent blooms made every bloom feel like a gift. Now these bushes are more established and it is their second year. With another year come more established roots and with more established roots come more frequent and beautiful blooms. All of the rose experts and all of the expert rose gardeners agree on this. I prune the five bushes from last year down to the minimum. I take my clippers and trimmed off any long leftover shoots or old growth that shows signs of disease. This will help the bushes conserve energy and produce healthy and strong shoots. The five bushes from last year look like five bunches of sticks in the ground. This season is sure to produce beautiful blooms. April 13, 2024 Last year I planted three English shrub rosebushes and two hybrid tea rosebushes. This year I would never plant a hybrid tea rose. I know now that hybrid tea roses are tacky with their supermarket physique and their lack of a formal aroma. The hybrid tea rose is a Valentine’s Day card from the Dollar General and the hybrid tea rose disgusts me. Instead I will plant four new English shrub rosebushes. The English shrub rose is closer to an old garden rose or even a wild rose than a hybrid tea rose or God forbid a floribunda. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century nobody in England was that interested in old garden roses and roses that looked wild or rough. Most of these old plants would bloom only once a year, which was not enough for the greedy Victorians, who wanted fat roses to put on their tables and on their dressers. The hybrid tea rose was created and when most people see a rose in a romantic comedy they are probably looking at some version of a hybrid tea rose. Hybrid tea roses bloom many times throughout the season and they can be bred in a large variety of colors, which was very impressive to the gluttonous Victorians and their French counterparts. What the hybrid tea rose gained in abundance it lost in charm and in romance and in fragrance. Most hybrid tea roses don’t smell like anything at all. The old style of roses fell out of fashion and gardens were filled with hybrid tea roses and their demented and mutated siblings. Roses started to look less like something Rilke would cry over and more like something Oscar Wilde would use as a pattern on his silk smoking jacket. Luckily, sometime around 1950, another British guy said enough was enough, and David C. H. Austin started to work to cultivate roses that bloomed more than once a season yet had a strong and decadent fragrance and looked and felt more like an old English garden rose. Thanks to Mr. Austin these roses are now widely available and beautiful gardens around the world can be filled with roses that look like real roses and the smell of roses can be inhaled all over the world including on my own property. I preordered all of my roses online in January from David Austin Roses and there is a wonderful variety of amazing and beautiful roses available as well as many helpful guides for planting and care. It can be overwhelming to browse the David Austin Roses website due to the number of choices. I try to stay focused when I am choosing my roses and I try to not think too hard. I try to just trust my gut. In mid-April, the roses that I preordered are delivered bare-root and when you open up the box it looks like you were mailed a box of wet sticks. Read More