I first listened to Sally Mann narrating her book Hold Still simultaneously perusing the photographs in the book. Some may prefer to read and look a hI first listened to Sally Mann narrating her book Hold Still simultaneously perusing the photographs in the book. Some may prefer to read and look a hard copy, but I liked listening to Sally Mann’s voice telling her story to me. The vibes were like those I found from Patti Smith’s Just Kids, but more authentic, if not personal? Artistic memoirs of a time and place more fictional to me than the United States as shown with its media itself. I didn’t listen to Patti Smith with the kind of context required for these kinds of books I suppose. For here in Hold Still, the setting is a place I can tangibly grasp. If not for COVID-19, I might even have tried to travel around from my spot in Virginia over to Rockbridge County. Visit what has been romanticized from Mann’s words to my memories of the place; its sunsets, the idyllic pretty brick houses giving way to quintessential Southern houses surrounded by larger swaths of land which I now understand to be farming grounds. ... [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image]
Here are some of my favorites. One of the most captivating pieces in the book was a heavily annotated letter from Dr. Mungner to Sally Mann. The content of the letter is shorter than all its footnotes.
I practice the slow looking details for observing and contemplating the photographs. What captures your attention first? Where do your eyes rest? What do you notice?
I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar to run from the feelings by experiencing them via proxy. The feelings involved in every shift happening around me. I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar to run from the feelings by experiencing them via proxy. The feelings involved in every shift happening around me. You see, I was moving to a new country, for new studies, new education, new experiences, same brain churning escapist inner dialogues, minus the guys, ha ha ha.
It was a sufficiently absorbing, heavy, wonderfully written book. It was narrated with just the right gravity by Maggie Gyllenhall. It is a visceral book of an intense life lived inside only the recesses of her head. If I write a book now, it would aspire to be The Bell Jar.
It is that book others wish they had written first, almost always women, because which chick-lit, rom-com, women's erotica have I read like this one? One that self analyzes as if it were a story outside of her own? One that so vividly describes a woman’s experience of stomach upset, unfair role in society, her Shirepanjire (a remarkable Kannada film) descent into madness and sadness. Where else is it? Frida Kahlo’s work perhaps? Simone de Beauvoir? There are so few. I would have loved to discuss these with book clubs....more
My heart goes out to you Salman Rushdie. I cried countless times at the mortal peril of Freedom of Speech, dissent against authority seems to be a losMy heart goes out to you Salman Rushdie. I cried countless times at the mortal peril of Freedom of Speech, dissent against authority seems to be a lost cause. No matter, we will fight. I am sorry for the way this great country has treated you. I am sorry for that guarded shell of a life. I am sorry. I did not know all this when I read The Midnight's Children, while I, a tiny 15 year old girl peered wide eyed at the world's injustices. 5 years later, I am still in awe of your writing and mystical magical realism, embedded layered symbolism, and arrogant, self involved metaphors. When I first saw the backside of a book's portrait of Salman Rushdie, I pegged him down as that disgruntled uncle, surly and manly in that way society expects such an angry lost heavily guarded person to be. It might have been your hooded eyes, like you said Salman Rushdie. I know now, and this is the testament to my belief in your words, that you are this, and so much more, rightly so. I listened to you telling me so. I burned with jealousy at your preparatory and Oxford days, I wondered at your Man Booker fame, I felt like shit for your fatwa days. I loved your descriptions of a country you never forgot, and your growing into the kind of writer and person you decided to be. ...more