Canopus Rising

- How Poetry is Diabolically Being Used in Everyday Prompts to Get AI to Do Things It Isn’t Supposed to Do 

- On making art in an overwhelming world

- California - Vote Now in the June 2 Primary!

- Links we shared when we thought the world was ending

- Surrealism and Fashion

- The Imperfectionist: Nobody’s ever ready

- Waiting for :: writing through - Notes on ambient disaster

- The Neocons’ Revenge?

- The Craft of Writing: Molly Crabapple on History as Necromancy

- Medieval snail homes

- The Pepe Silvia Guide to ChatGPT Psychosis

- Underground Alchemists, Hags and Magic

Oh, I want to find a library where the exit signs are missing and live in its crowded, labyrinthine passages on air, wine, and stories. I want to lie on a patch of grass in an ever-flowering garden, where a small black dog pants in the shade, and apples and figs brush my shoulder or thump, gravity-plucked, in the shadows as I watch the clouds pass above me for days. I want to chance upon a waiting room with plush velvety armchairs and a platter of gingerbread biscuits on the coffee table, as well as every book I've ever wanted to read but I haven’t gotten to yet, and I might sit here for the rest of my life, waiting for god knows what, lost in this or that tale.

That time feels ages ago. We returned home only a few days before Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel retaliated. “It’s complicated,” I was told at times. Never mind all the violence from the Nakba onwards. “[A]n incremental genocide” since 2006, according to Israeli historian Ivan Pappe. 

Shortly after the liberation of France from German occupation in August 1944, Colette wrote:  “Fifteen hundred days. A thousand days, and then more than five hundred on top of that. As many days and nights as it takes a baby to be born, to grow, to start talking, and to become an intelligent and delightful human being; enough days for other human beings, completed and flourishing, to go down in terrifying numbers to their deaths.” 

For whatever reason—a phrase, I think, in Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities—I was reminded of a wet September afternoon in The Bombadier, a pub in the fifth arrondissement, diagonally across from the Panthéon, where the French bury their illustrious dead. Near the bones of Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Marie Curie, we idled for ages over our pints, waiting for a break in the rain, chatting about who knows what, stories of our misspent youth, I think, the moral of which was always that youth was wasted on the young.

Just across the road was a church, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, mixing Gothic and Renaissance styles, an edifice devoted to the splendid accretion of ages. In front of its massive indigo doors, two teenage girls hung out, beyond the reach of the rain and worldly concerns, one lying with her head in the other’s lap, chatting and laughing in their haven of stone and flesh; the moral obviously did not apply here.

Time passed slowly, in sips of beer and infinitesimal changes of light. Nevertheless it passed. The girls embraced, parted ways. Then celebrants of St. Genevieve, the city’s patron saint, assembled: men and women in Renaissance dress made speeches, blew horns, danced, dispersed.

Finally the rain let up, and we ourselves left, walking to the Musée du Cluny to see tapestries devoted to the six senses and crowded with flowers, orange trees, pines, and monkeys, dogs, and rabbits, all framing the same protagonists: a woman, a unicorn. In one tapestry, the woman shows the unicorn its reflection in a small hand-held mirror.

Does a city have a soul? Some cities merely tolerate their people. Others hate, prickly with hostile architecture. This one charms and seduces. Teeming with marvels, it is at ease with itself, even as it sways on uncertain ground. I dreamed on my feet, and maybe the city dreamed with me.