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“Many men gravitate toward the security and domesticity of long-term relationships. Lots of clients will re-create their primary relationship in the field that’s supposed to be their escape from the same. They orchestrate it, because when it’s not there, they ache for it. They may need to feel and act as if they’re relationally unencumbered. They may make a show of how horribly the collar chafes or how brazenly they yank it off, but they still want the tether of home. Carousing and womanizing aren’t the same without it. A leashed dog feels the frenzy for a squirrel just out of reach, then returns to a full bowl and a fleece bed that smells of himself. An unleashed dog follows a scent into new woods, wanders exhausted into an empty field, lies down in the friendless dark.”

—Charlotte Shane, An Honest Woman

Rebecca Horn, “Einhorn”

Described by Horn as possessing “consciousness electrically impassioned,” a performer meanders through a landscape, moving in and out of focus. “Nothing could stop her trance-like journey, in competition with every tree and cloud,” Horn recounted from her performance. Before making this work, the artist was bedbound in a hospital for almost a year while she recovered from lung poisoning and mourned the death of her parents. During this period of extreme isolation, she began to design a series of wearable sculptures: unwieldy, fantastical prosthetic extensions to her body, including Einhorn. Simultaneously referencing the possibilities and limitations of the human body, the work articulates Horn’s yearning for new ways of moving through the world.

The art was really speaking to me today at the MoMA.

Presenting the 40 books I read in 2024! Not that I ever really care about how many I’ve completed, but it is very satisfying to reach a nice round number at the end of the year (even if I did have to sneak a Ray Bradbury short story in there at the eleventh hour). I find it amusing that you can also chart my personal vibe shift about more than halfway through here. The book list never lies!

Many of these books instantly became new favorites of mine: Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key, The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen, What Do We Need Men For by E. Jean Carroll, A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers, Health and Safety by Emily Witt, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet, and Nine and a Half Weeks by Elizabeth McNeill. I also reread both The Surrender and Dangerous Liaisons for the second time and appreciated them anew.

2024 was the year I got really into Sappho, highbrow smut, and nutrition (random). I started and stopped many books on current events. There are plenty of books here that I liked very much while reading but don’t feel any need to revisit. Sadly, Fear of Flying did not hold up to a reread - though I liked seeing everything I’d underlined on my Kindle from 10 years ago when I first read it.

For further lurking into my reading habits, here are the books I read in 2023, 2022, and 2021.

In the midst of twixtmas, a glorious spring day.

Sound dating advice from Les Liaisons Dangereuses

When I peep the marvis toothpaste in my christmas stocking

Finally, someone on the internet with a refreshing design philosophy.

Jared Frank’s Silverlake Home (via Apartment Therapy)

“It was a pleasant enough fantasy. I did well within it, better, in fact, than I had while my office, my clients, my work, had been serious matter, hard-core reality. As is only right in one’s fantasy, I was at ease, relaxed, calm. I won a new account one day, charmed a colleague into peace after months of altercations the next. I worked tirelessly, suspended. Minor annoyances over which I would have fretted in the past—a phone call not returned, a longer than reasonable wait for a client’s decision, a coffee stain on my sleeve half an hour into my day—no longer mattered…The reality of my days was replaced by surface equanimity and a blandness to the core.”

—Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks

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