On the Seashore, by George Elgar Hicks, circa 1879.
I have spent a lot of summers being miserable about being miserable. Florida in June, July, August (and May and September and October and sometimes way into November, too) is brutal, and I have never made my peace with that. I’ve written about it as dread, as folk horror, as a survival problem to be wrangled with the right eerie playlist and robust air conditioning.
Looking back at those posts, I think I was doing what I’ve always done: sending my mind somewhere else. Into books, horror films, art, other people’s landscapes. Anywhere but here, in this body, in this place. Escapism has been my primary coping mechanism for as long as I can remember. It has served me well in many ways. I have read extraordinary books and watched extraordinary films and found my way to extraordinary art because of it. But there is a difference between enriching your inner life and just…not being present in your actual one. I am not sure I have always known where that line was.
I turned fifty last month. My knees are stiff. My lower back has frequent complaints. I keep seeing people shuffling on Instagram (that sort of hypnotic footwork dancing? I don’t know how to describe it?), and I am intrigued, but the jumping involved in the more energetic, athletic versions makes my teeth rattle just thinking about it. I need to find a low-impact place to start because I want to do it, it looks fun and cool, and I still have time left to do things that are fun and cool! But. My body is making itself known in ways it didn’t used to. But. It’s also more than that.
This past weekend, Yvan’s mother came to stay with us. She has ALS and is nonverbal at this point, her right side paralyzed, and she communicates through a talking board that her hands struggle to use (and English is her second language, Icelandic is her first, so even when we can make out what she’s spelled, we’re not always sure we’ve understood correctly.) Most of the time we’re guessing. Her husband, who is elderly himself and exhausted in the way that intense caregiving can exhaust a person, needed the weekend to repaint/redecorate their bedroom for the hospital bed that was being delivered. He needed her not to worry about her, just for a few days. He needed to not be burnt out for forty-eight hours.
So she came to us, and Yvan and I were both dreading it, for various reasons. We had to learn to feed her through a stomach port with a gravity feeding tube. We had to learn to mix her medications and administer them the same way. We had to learn all of this without killing her, which felt like a reasonable bar to clear but also an extremely high-stakes one. I was anxious about the physical intimacy of it – helping her dress, changing her pad, getting her situated. She couldn’t tell us if we were doing it wrong. We just had to try.
The weekend came and went. After the first night, we were both more comfortable. She slept a lot. We had people over; one of Yvan’s brothers came for lunch and a movie, and an Icelandic family friend stopped by for coffee. I stumbled through some feedings and screwed up, but I did not kill anyone. She seemed more relaxed than usual, looser, without the rigid routines her husband runs on. Yvan said it was good to spend time with his mom without his dad hovering, and I think that was true.
At one point, I was sitting with her, and I did the thing I always do when I’m nervous, which is babble, and I started telling her how much she and her family mean to me. She started crying. Which made me start crying, because I am a baby! I apologized and gave her a hug; she gave me a thumbs-up and something that was almost a smile, and I chose to interpret that as a good cry. I think it was.
She is thirty years older than me. Watching her, helping her, fumbling through it, learning the weight and reality of her body and what it needs now … I kept thinking about thirty years from now. What I want those years to look like. How I want to have spent the ones between then and where I am here and now.
I don’t want to spend them escaping into my own head. I have been doing that for so long, and I think maybe it has cost me something I am only just starting to add up. Not the books or the films or the art; I will never give those up, and I don’t think I should. But that Sarah-specific habit of using them to not be here. To not be in this body, in this place, in this heat, in this life that is actually mine.
So this summer, I am trying something different, which is not really a big deal, mostly just small, unspectacular acts of paying attention to the body I actually live in. I have spent the winter eating my morning gruel of oats and hemp and flax and chia, and now I am switching back to breakfast soup. This morning, it was cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, onions, a dashi-soy-mirin broth, and one lone leftover barbecue rib from the weekend that fell apart in the pot and seasoned everything with smoky, sticky fat. Hot soup in the morning feels like tending to something!
Some other things I am doing or acquiring or finally committing to:
Cool baths instead of hot ones. I have been devoted to magnesium soaks, but maybe the point is the soaking, not the temperature. Cool water in the Florida heat sounds obvious, but I am sometimes a moron.
Cold tea from the iced pitcher. I have approximately one million teas on my shelf, and I have been making them hot all winter and ignoring them all summer. No more. Brewing them strong and keeping a cold pitcher in the fridge at all times.
A cooling face mask once a week. I already do gua sha and have a whole routine, but I want to add something purely indulgent and cold to it. The Numbuzin No. 4 Icy Soothing Mask has been on my radar, and this seems like the summer to find out. No alcohol, no menthol, and “clinically tested to lower skin temperature by 8 degrees for up to thirty minutes.” I am sold on the no-menthol part alone. Ugh, menthol. So gross.
Ear seeds. I have been watching a lot of ASMR head spa content on YouTube, and the ear seed application videos (used for pain and stress? I think?) specifically have caught my attention. I want to try them.
Acupressure shoes. I spend a lot of time on my feet in the kitchen on weekends, and by the end of it, my feet ache. I read about these recently and ordered a pair. And come to think of it, maybe I need a whole-ass acupressure mat too.
The resistance bands that have been sitting in their box since I ordered them. Now is the time. My knees need the surrounding muscles to do more work and I need to actually open the box.
Cooling shorts under every dress and skirt. I have been a Thigh Society devotee for a while now, but this summer I am committing fully. I accidentally just ordered two more pairs in beige, not black, and I am trying to convince myself it makes no difference, hehehe)
Breathable pajamas. I get so hot at night! This roundup from The Strategist looks promising. I shall report back.
The paper parasols I own half a dozen of and have never actually used. Lucy requires a midafternoon walk, and that’s when the evil day star is at its most villainous!
Finding a low-impact entry point into shuffle dancing, because I want to, and I am going to figure it out, dangit.
And then there is everything else: the parts of summer that feed the mind rather than just the body, which I refuse to give up, I am just trying to be more present while I do them.
I have been working on two self-directed curricula, one in hauntology and one in Julia Kristeva and abjection, and summer feels like the right time to actually sit with them rather than just add to them.
I also recently wrote about reclaiming artmaking through zentangles and collage, and since then I have moved into watercolors, which feels like a real thing that is happening now rather than just a tentative experiment. I want to spend more time with that this summer!
I will also be deep in the work of promoting The Art of the Unknown, my fourth book, which comes out in September right at the start of spooky season, and quietly, very quietly, I have begun the early research for what comes next, which will take me back into some of the territory I first explored in The Art of the Occult and go somewhere further and deeper with it. That is all I will say about that for now.
My sisters and I binged the Scarpetta series earlier this month and have decided to go back to the beginning of Patricia Cornwell’s books and do a proper sister book club from the start (I have only read the first one, and that was like, thirty years ago.) Also is it just me or does her husband in the series sound like he’s just a humble space chicken from a backwoods asteroid?
I am also taking this opportunity to resurface some older posts. A blog entry goes up, gets its moment, and then sinks into the archive where most people never find it again. That has always felt like a waste to me, because the thinking and the feeling that went into it doesn’t expire just because the publish date is two years ago. Writing isn’t milk. It doesn’t sour and go rotten! (Unless it turns out you’re a predator or a TERF or some other lousy thing, I guess, because that deffo sours the writing.) And there are always people who weren’t here yet when something first went up, who might find it useful or funny or resonant now. An archive isn’t a graveyard. It’s a shelf, and things on shelves deserve to be pulled down and looked at again, especially when you’re standing somewhere new and the light is a little different and you can see them more clearly than you could before.
These posts were written by a version of me that was coping, or raging, or reaching for something beautiful in a season that felt hostile and gross. Looking at them now, from here, I think I can see what I was reaching for. Maybe you can too.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I was traveling for most of the month, so I didn’t have much time or energy to try things, but here are my musings on five fragrances I sampled this past May…!
Witch NY Basil-ica A not-nearly-long-enough playlist on a Sunday morning, Haley Heynderickx and Cosmo Sheldrake trading sweet, playful verse in a sunlit patch of floor. The tardigrade in its shrubbery, with its little dappled patch of moss, the bug collector scooping the centipede out the window, carefully easing the praying mantis priest into a jam jar. A small disturbance of anise, sharp and green and dark, and then the green rushes in through the window, tangy lemon balm and the acrid green resin of unripe fruit leaves and clean, crisp cedar, a breeze of honeyed effervescence gone flat, warm and golden and slightly sleepy. The sound a fern makes when it uncurls, a soft incantation for rainy windowsills, a potion brewed in a thimble, a love letter from the slug to the fruiting vine.
Heretic Queen Of The Night Honeyed night blooms open pale against absolute black, a luminous vanilla moment, sweet and strange and fleeting the way a face emerges from darkness before the darkness rushes in. Vetiver, dry and dusky and gritty, the black sand of dreams. The mortuary scent of jasmine, a bitter shiver of arsenical wallpapers. The scent of the thing that presides over the voice that whispered your name, and there was no one there, which is worse than if there had been someone. The road that looks different on the way back because something has shifted that you cannot name or locate or defend against. The cat that peers into the shadows and sees what you cannot. The hour between 3 and 4am. The goddess of objectless dread.
Pearfat Parfum Sister Hildegard Thin cold air and clover and wildflower sweetness, morning dew on stone, the sort of bright bright, expansive, anything-is-possible morning that makes you want to set out with everything you own in a small bundle on a stick. A small figure against a large landscape, stepping off into something with no idea what that something is. Then: a door in the meadow, and beyond it woodsmoke and char and animal warmth, pine resin and ash, the dark beyond the firelight pressing in close. The flames a waystation, the meadow a small window just behind you in the distance… but you are not the same person who left it, you’ll never be that young or that bright or that foolish again. But you’ve learned you can light this fire of glow and illumination for every version of yourself you encounter along the journey.
Flâner Yakisugi Wood Incense in a cypress enclosure, herbal smokiness that is not now-smoke but then-smoke, absorbed into the walls over many generations. Resinous and pencil-dark and cool, a bitter astringency, dusty-dried to a husk of itself, the aromatics of a space long tended. The knowing of which wood to burn and when and why, a knowing internal and undemanding, unhurried, uncommodified. Then the world got very loud and very fast, and people forgot how silence felt, and the how in the feeling was a healing, and someone noticed the forgetting and put a price on it, because people were so harried and hollowed out they would pay anything to remember what standing still felt like. Two hundred and sixty-nine dollars, and it doesn’t even include a sound bath or a breathwork session or an adaptogen bar, just a metaphorical cedar door wrapped in a mountain fog of the then-smoke, which became a now-amenity.
Syd Botanica Butterfly TamerA History of British Butterflies, Morris, The Reverend Francis Orpen, 1864; forest green cloth binding, gilt-stamped butterflies on the spine, hand-colored plates behind tissue guards, the smell of a volume that has been handled with reverence and also with muddy field boots, airy and ozone-tinged, the mineral shiver of pre-rain shrouding delicate papery grasses and flowering herbs, pale gold at the tips, cool green at the root, something floral but not quite flower, the honeyed dust of dried chamomile, the ghost of a garden in late summer. The slightly breathless Victorian naturalist earnestness of a parson who looked closely at small winged things, who catalogued every county and date and friend who once glimpsed one in some hedgerow, who recorded with equal gravity the testimony of Mr. H. Sims, certain he saw one Silver-washed Fritillary near Norwich on the 24th of August 1810, who struck at it with a forceps and missed, and the testimony of J. C. Dale, Esq., certain he saw one Purple Emperor settled on some rushes in Cambridgeshire in July 1818, wings half-expanded toward the sun, and the diary entry of a Miss Eulalia Cramm of Shropshire, who recorded with great excitement the appearance of a Velvet Obscura on her windowsill, though she could not be entirely certain it was not a very large moth.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I have been traveling and am behind on everything, and so I don’t have much lined up for the ol’ blog this week. SO I thought I’d pull a lazy move and share an update to a blog post I wrote a few years ago, Bargain Bin Romance, where I captioned some gothic romance covers with silly, made-up nonsense. It occurred to me that these would work better with some cheesy graphics, and I even added a few more to the mix!
Anyway, back to normal (?) updates once I get my shit together!
artist: Jerome Podwil
artist: Lou Marchetti
artist: Lou Marchetti
artist: Jerome Podwil
artist: George Ziel
artist: George Ziel
artist: Esteban Maroto
artist: Harry Barton
artist: Harry Barton
artist: Lou Marchetti
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Ývan surprised me with the biggest of all surprises for my birthday! This morning we drove to an Old Navy parking lot to pick up our newest art acquisition: this fancy orc guy, an original painting by none other than the late Richard Bober (he of mystery artist Wrinkle in Time infamy!)
I loved this magnificent gentleman the first time I laid eyes on him a few years ago and my gast was completely flabbered when I realized Ývan had stored that tidbit away and later secured him for me. Get you a partner and collaborator who delights in your delights, for real!
Ývan was later aghast to learn I have renamed this fine fellow Dominic Toretto.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I recently wrote about building my own personal curriculum to better understand 1) the ideas and concepts around the term “hauntology,” and 2) wrap my head around Julia Kristeva’s writings. But it occurred to me that I’d be terribly remiss if I didn’t mention my own books in terms of creating some courses for self-learning!
I put together a (hopefully very shareable) slideshow of graphics about how each book might assist in studies of the arcane & esoteric, the darker side of life, and the fantastical, and how you shouldn’t skip the visual component when you’re deepening your understanding of this, that, or the other thing. (Coming from a rather lazy student, I mean obviously more pictures and less words is the way to go hehehe.)
Building Your Personal Curriculum: Where My Books Fit
If you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably seen people talking about “personal curriculums,” essentially, self-directed courses of study built around whatever you’re genuinely curious about. Instead of following someone else’s syllabus, you’re creating your own path through a subject, pulling together books, films, essays, art, music, whatever feeds your particular obsession.
It’s a beautiful way to learn, and it’s having a moment because people are hungry for depth, for expertise that comes from genuine interest rather than algorithmic recommendation. You get to be both student and curator of your own education.
I love this concept because it’s exactly how I’ve always learned: following threads of interest across mediums and disciplines, building connections between visual art and literature and history and folklore. It’s also, not coincidentally, how I approach curating my books. (It’s also a good reason to buy new notebooks!)
Which brings me to this: if you’re building a personal curriculum, here’s where my Art in the Margins series fits.
Studying the occult, symbolism, or esoteric art history?
The Art of the Occult belongs in your visual studies. From theosophy and kabbalah to the zodiac and alchemy, from spiritualism and ceremonial magic to the elements and sacred geometry—this book brings together artists who have been drawn to these unknown spheres and created curious artworks that transcend time and place. Whether you’re learning tarot, diving into the history of magical practice, or exploring Hermetic traditions, you need the visual language that goes with it. These works stem from a soul-deep desire for truth and awareness, revealing the hidden rules of nature and our world through imagery that has haunted and inspired across centuries.
Exploring Gothic aesthetics, melancholy, or the beauty of darkness?
The Art of Darkness is your visual companion. This book celebrates artists who have been obsessed with darkness throughout history—creating works that haunt and horrify, mesmerize and delight, and play on our innermost fears. From dreams and nightmares to matters of mortality, from depravity and destruction to gods and monsters, these artworks indulge our greatest fears while asking: what comfort can be found in facing our demons? Why are we tempted by fear and the grotesque? If you’re studying Victorian mourning culture, exploring Gothic traditions, or simply trying to understand why certain aesthetics speak to something deep within you, this is your sourcebook. Denial of our darkness leads us to fear it….better to create a connection with our shadows and revel in all the inspiration and wonder we may find there!
Deep-diving into fantasy worldbuilding, mythology, or the fantastic?
The Art of Fantasy gives you the visual language. Artists have explored imaginary worlds and fantastical creatures for centuries, expressing the unreal and impossible, the mystical and mythical through paint and illustration. This book presents a compendium of artworks inspired by myth, fantasy, and the unreal—from beasts and beings to forgotten realms and wonderlands, from dreams and magic to faith and philosophy. If you’re studying folklore, reading epic fantasy, learning about mythological traditions across cultures, or working on your own creative worldbuilding, these visual flights of fancy and imagination show you how artists have conveyed the vast swathe of hopes and dreams in our collected hearts. Fantasy is not simply an escape from reality…it is the irresistible impulse that reveals hope and wonder in us all.
Why Visual Art Belongs in Your Curriculum
Whatever you’re studying, visual art deepens your understanding in ways that text alone cannot. It shows you how ideas manifest aesthetically, how concepts become tangible, how symbolism operates visually. The artists in these books are thinking deeply about their subjects, creating work that’s in conversation with history, mythology, spirituality, and culture across centuries.
If you’re building your own curriculum for any of these subjects, please don’t skip the visual component! These books are resources, and they’re meant to be referenced, returned to, absorbed alongside whatever else you’re studying.
And if you’re building a curriculum around something else entirely? Tell me about it. I want to know what you’re learning, what threads you’re following, what obsessions are driving your self-directed education. That’s always been my favorite kind of conversation!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I don’t often love other people’s photos of me. When I take my own photos, I know which angles don’t accentuate my weak chin, my big forehead, my weirdly enormous nostrils. Mostly, I don’t smile. Partially vanity because I feel like I look like a derpy fool with weird teeth, partially in service of retaining some enigmatic aura, which is dumb because I am, in fact, a derpy fool with weird teeth.
But two weeks ago in Philadelphia, standing in front of LOVE with Yvan while our friends snapped pictures, I just grinned unthinkingly. It was a beautiful day, I was with people I adored, and I was having a fantastic time. I had no control over what my face was doing, how my mouth was moving. I was just feeling a lot of things. And my face reflects that! And I actually love that photo.
I bring this up because for Rue Morgue #230 (May/June 2026), I dedicated an entire column to obsessing about teeth. Teeth in horror films. Teeth as a site of body modification and vampire aesthetics. As memento mori. Teeth as the thing we pay thousands of dollars to control, straighten, beautify, perfect, and fit in– or elsewhere, other people are paying to get permanent fangs, to become a different kind of beautiful, to perhaps stand out.
In 2019 or so, I finally broke down and got Invisalign…something I’d said I would never do. I meant it when I said it. But I was so self-conscious about my teeth and had been for years, since I was a little girl. So when I had the means (I used my Art of the Occult advance), I did it anyway. And when they came off, I felt incredible! Invincible! I had straight teeth!
But a few years later, despite the fact that I diligently wear my retainer and have never skipped a single night…they’re drifting back. Slowly, inevitably, creeping back toward the snaggledy jankiness they naturally want to be. After all that work and pain and money! It sucks. Maybe I should have just gotten fangs instead.
Anyway. Teeth, man! I wrote about my obsessions and anxiety around it, and maybe you’ll want to see what I had to say. Read the full column in Rue Morgue #230 (available now at newsstands).
Here’s an entirely unrelated thing! A smattering of artful tidbits from the chapters of my forthcoming book, The Art of the Unknown: A Visual Treasury of the Esoteric, Uncanny and Unexplained, due into this world on September 1 and available for preorder now.
What Wenzel Hablik (1881–1934)achieves in this magnificent artwork makes the word ‘attempt’ in his titles seem almost comically modest. In Starry Sky, Attempt(1909), this visionary Czech artist transforms the cosmos into a pulsing, living thing. Planets hang at eye level, stars cluster and swarm like bees, and the very fabric of space seems encrusted with crystalline light. This crystalline quality was no accident – a chance discovery of a crystal fragment in his childhood sparked Hablik’s lifelong obsession with geometric forms and luminous patterns. Against a backdrop of deepest midnight, his celestial bodies pulse and throb with impossible colors. Crimson planets hang like ripe fruit, violet nebulae swirl like smoke, and countless stars burn in constellations of gold, azure, and white. That Hablik called this a mere‘attempt’ speaks volumes – as if this breathtaking cosmic vision were just a preliminary sketch rather than the universe reimagined in its full glory.
Leaf-like spirits spiral through the air while a lone figure sits among wildflowers, witnessing the hidden face of the breeze. Robert James Enraght Moony (1879–1946), influenced by Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelites, believed the natural world harbored invisible forces that revealed themselves only to patient observers. Magic doesn’t require remote wilderness; sometimes it’s waiting for someone willing to sit still and really look. His 1938 oil painting is essentially about how the world is constantly doing amazing things right in front of us, but we’re all too busy scrolling on our phones to notice. (Well, they didn’t have phones in 1938, but you get the idea.) We’ve all experienced this: you’re sitting in some random place when, suddenly, the air feels electric, like the world just reminded you that it’s a miracle, that you’re a miracle, that this ordinary day in 1938, or right now, is actually the most extraordinary thing that’s ever happened.
In the gloaming of a haunted forest, Dante Gabriel Rossetti(1828–82) stages an encounter with existential terror: meeting your exact double while on a romantic stroll. (‘So… come here often?’ suddenly becomes a deeply unsettling question.) Twomedieval lovers stumble upon their exact replicas, creating a mirrored quartet of supernatural dread. The woman on the right swoons dramatically, while her companion draws his sword against this impossible apparition. The doubled figures aren’t reflections but solid presences, glowing with eerie phosphorescence against the darkening woods. Rossetti calledthis his ‘Bogie drawing’ and paintedseveral versions over the years. Rossetti reportedly used himself and his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, as models for the imperiled couple, painting one version during their honeymoon, of all times. Folk beliefs hold thatencountering one’s doppelgängerportends imminent death, lendingthis woodland date a macabre edge. What terror might we feel, meeting ourselves in the flesh, our secret selves made manifest?
A woman floats in dark waters, her reflection staring back with eerie ambivalence, both versions seemingly unbothered by their impossible arrangement. Leonor Fini(1908–96) paints a doubled existence where neither face claims to be the original – they simply coexist, calm as you please, while three skulls drift past and dried leaves cling to a barren branch. The Argentine-born artist gives us feminine power at the end of the world (or perhaps its beginning – the title suggests both), yet her subject appears utterly untroubled by the apocalyptic scenery. The cracked, aged texture makes the woman feel ancient, eternal, as if she’s been taking this same leisurely soak since the lake first formed. In the distance, buildings shudder under a moody sky touched with orange and green – civilization reduced to a faint silhouette on the horizon. But why worry? The water’s fine, the company’s quiet, and there’s something marvelously peaceful about having your own reflection as your only companion at the end of everything.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Fifty stars in the night sky is barely a drop in the celestial bucket of universes. Fifty grains of sand wouldn’t even cover the head of a pin (or would it? I have no sense of dimension or spacial awareness.) Fifty dollars is the paltriest of fancy cheese budgets.
But I reckon when it comes to the lifespan of a human person, fifty years is rather a lot. As of today, I have been here for all fifty of them.
How am I me being alive in this world right now? I could have been anybody, anywhere, at any time. But I ended up being me, here, now, in this life. I think about this a lot!
I was scared I was going to die at 49 like a couple of other women writers that I read about. Fuck yeah I didn’t die!! So here’s my annual birthday carousel of faces of undeath to mark the passage of another year. (In this one over on Instagram, I look like my late mother when her eyes would go all crazy, in another my hair looks super good.)
Anyhoodle, it’s my birthday, go buy one of my books, either one of the books I wrote or one in my pango shop. Or write a nice review for one of them! Or whatever, do something nice for someone! There’s lots of birthdays today, I guess!
I recently arrived home from some travels with a spectacularly awful head cold. Ugh! I have been wanting to write up a little travel report to share on the blog here, but have just been feeling too listless and unmotivated to even think about it. (I will say, however, that it involved a night with Florence!)
Last night, in a sleepless delirium of fever, it occurred to me that I have a book coming out in four months’ time and I am out here thinking about posting dumb personal stuff like a gormless chump — when I should be hyping up my newest artsy fartsy book offering!
So, here’s a thing I made for social media book marketing, and I am afraid I must subject it to you all, as well. (Mostly because it took me about four hours to make the above graphic in Canva, hehehe! A designer, I am not.)
Are YOU drawn to the art and imagery at the edges of things? The unexplained? The esoteric? The forces that persist just beyond the threshold of ordinary reality?
Do you find yourself awake at 3am thinking about parallel worlds? Visionary states? Liminal spaces? Cosmic mysteries? Restless souls? Forgotten knowledge? Sacred cycles? Corporeal energies?
Friends. FRIENDS. Have I got the book for you.
Introducing The Art of the Unknown: nearly 200 works by artists across the centuries who looked at what science couldn’t explain and picked up a brush. Painting. Photographing. Diagramming. Their way toward forces and phenomena that defy comprehension.
But WAIT. There’s more.
For the low, low price of whatever your local bookseller is charging, you too can own a visual treasury of the esoteric, the uncanny, and the unexplained. That’s right. It could be yours.
And if you order in the next fifteen minutes …okay well, you can’t, it’s not out until September, but the preorder link is here, and I cannot stress enough how much I would like you to click it.
Call now. Operators are standing by. I am the operator. I am also standing by.
(This unhinged inanity brought to you by the very busy graphic I made that reminded me of late 80s infomercials for paranormal book collections and psychic hotlines. And also the woo woo advertising nostalgia I remember for things like the Pure Moods cd, which incidentally, I listened to while I was visiting Philly.)
Vallense Source A nocturnal glamour-cryptid, cloaked in its own velvety wings, its vast buggy eyes like antique opera glasses. It lives in cultivated dark, manicured parks behind concert halls, the shadowed side of a fountain, topiaries at midnight. It has a taste for finer things and knows where to find them. You didn’t know it was on the guest list, but here you both are! Mossy and ambery and peppery, with a resinous sweetness that reads less like dessert than like the filling of some abstract turnover made with dry grasses and syrupy saps, ground and sweetened acorns bound together in something dark and flaking. Rich and musky-dry, slithery, a lurker. It unfolds slowly next to you on the bench, vast wings spreading, obscuring the moon, eyes enormous and unblinking. It means you no harm. It is simply drawn to the same things you are. It will have what you’re having.
Premiere Peau Doppel DancersThe shadow of something pale and cold against silk, light gathering at the edges, overcast. A duel with its back turned, a frozen moment of stillness, each gazing outward, away, the recognition of what lies between dissipating as each follows its gaze inward. Powdery and rooted and chilled, somber as cut stems left too long in cold water, as roots pulled halfway from dark soil, neither fully of the earth nor free of it. The same flower meeting itself from opposite sides of the membrane. Each one a version of the same thing: two that are one, neither fully one thing nor the other, caught in that charged space between. At the back, a molassesy brown sugar darkness, fungal and sweet, the earth already in quiet conversation with what stands above it. Something close to the work of an artist of constructed selves, of thresholds, of becoming and unbecoming: the white mask held to the blank sky, the foliage climbing the legs inch by inch, the landscape making its slow, patient claim on a body that moves through it. A ghost caught between breaths, already deep in tender negotiation with what waits beneath the soil, a surrender so private and so deliberate it feels indecent to witness. The presentiment of something not yet arrived but already, somehow, complete.
Rahasya Chai Addiction This is a fleeting review, much like its gorgeous but utterly fleeting top notes of ginger and cardamom. Delicate, ephemeral, and in one nostril and immediately out the other. Not even a slow fading spicy goodbye, but a chaste, wispy vanishing. After this near-instantaneous disappearing act, is almost straight-up, 100% the creamy/cozy white musk, sweet grasses and hay, and warm, breezy sandalwood of Coty Vanilla Fields… with the teensiest-tiniest inclusion of a bit of milky black tea (all latte, no tannins though). I love Vanilla Fields! So that’s not really a problem. But, that is a thing that exists at a much lower price point! However, if someone wanted to gift me a bottle of Chai Addiction, I would be super excited to receive it, and I would wear the heck out of it. I have a birthday coming up next month. Hint hint hint.
By/Rosie Jane Matilda opens with passionfruit that is almost too much, funky and warm and slightly sour. A little creamy. A wet dog and her pup cup. There’s something about the scent that translates to me as a fuggy pink, road-dusted, rained-on toe bean. Or maybe Gertrude Abercrombie’s snail shell on dark sand under a crescent moon, a woman’s torso emerging from the spiral of it, dreamy and shadowed and smudged, a little begrimed? The artist’s feral cats, watching from their litter box just outside the frame. “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” energy, whimsy, sweet and alive, rolling around in something a little rank.
Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Champaca Heady and luminous, steamy and silky, velvety and floating, kaleidoscopic and shadowed…all of these things seem quite the opposite of one another, and yet these are all of the sensations and impressions arising from just a scant few minutes with Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Champaca. An opulent, intoxicating spray of creamy orange blossoms encased in glowing citrine, cloaked in dusk and shade, illuminated by a breathless summer evening’s first moonbeam. It’s stunning.
Bad Hare Day: A heavy-handed sprinkle of brown sugar crystals, golden amber molasses-lite funk, over a pillowy cloud of full-fat whipped cream, almond wisps soft and musky. A clinging cottony fluff, like a small, warm creature has just vacated the spot beside you.
Moon Rabbit: Almost-jasmine, almost-cherry, honeyed and drifting, wilting softly in the steam from a cup of green tea, grassy, restrained, a soft ellipsis of bitterness. A dewy footprint in the soil after a night of sleepwalking through the cold silver fields, frost-pale leaves.
Sunny Bunny: Somewhere on the sands underneath a striped umbrella where it is perpetually 1965, Gidget is doing the watusi at the edge of the surf, and hot dogs are a nickel, there is a beach bunny who left for spring break and is still looking to catch the perfect wave. Salt-crusted whiskers, sun-fluffed fur, a tiny dab of coconut sunscreen on its twitchy pink nose. Spring break was supposed to end and somewhere there is a fable about this.
Brown Bunny: Soft and creamy, cold and sweet, a peach that’s been syruped and jammed and ice-creamed, and is also possibly wearing a fleecy lavender bunny onesie.
400 Rabbits: A lime Peep, soft and rounded, the citrus baked into a dense, faintly powdery, sugary chew, the lime and the marshmallow fully merged into one slightly artificial, deeply satisfying thing, sitting next to the other weird novelty offerings, like the deviled egg and glazed ham Jones Cola on the Easter dinner table.
Sir Hopsalot: A glazed sweet bun served on a craquelured ceramic bunny plate, the thin crackling sheen of the pastry mirroring the aged glaze of the dish beneath it, both of them faintly dusted with musty bergamot, tea that has been sitting a little too long in a very nice cup. There is a childhood habit of ascribing inner lives to the objects in one’s house, the lamp with sassy opinions, the armchair with a dignified sadness, the sugar bowl that is simply beside itself with joy to be of service. The plate would like you to know it is pleased to make your acquaintance!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
