Apparently my favorite picture books as a child were written by queer authors. This brings me joy.
A good novel is elusive; as a film-maker you don’t ever really possess it, you only get an idea of it and you work on that idea. . . . What, then, is a good film taken from a good book? It’s a film that picks up every impulse of the writing and finds a way of changing it into an image. The effort requires not faithfulness but invention and often betrayal. The goal is to get to the heart of the book, or at least the idea that the screenwriters and the directors have formed of it. If that is achieved, the most unfaithful film can turn out to be mysteriously close to the text. It’s what happened with Gyllenhaal. Her film seems scrupulously close to the book precisely because it has the faithfulness of betrayal: the most productive, amazing and difficult type of faithfulness, in life as well.
Elena Ferrante, on the Lost Daughter (2021) in an interview with the New Statesman
on knowledge
[text ID: as a child, i knew everything before others my age did, i learnt to read like the words had always been mine and i was just taking them back, like they belonged to me, i knew how the clouds worked and why bees died after one sting - i thought the world was something you could swallow. i don’t remember when i started falling behind, but suddenly i knew there were things i didn’t know that others did, and shame with its cheeks glowing red told me not to ask, so i didn’t, and listen: when you know this little about love, it feels like knowing nothing at all. outside my bed the sky is darkening, and here is what i know there are 117 million lakes in the world. i am lonely. 7 trillion nerves in the human body. i want to be touched. acacia trees can warn each other of danger. i don’t think i was meant for love, like how grass isn’t meant to grow tall or some insects aren’t meant to live long, simple as that, nothing to mourn over, but i mourn, still. end ID]
blastedheath
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), Knives, 1981. Color polaroid, 4.25 x 3.25 in.