#Susan Mitchell

[mournfulroses]

Susan Mitchell, from a poem titled "Lost Parrot," featured in The Atlantic Monthly

[headlightsforever]

Susan Mitchell

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Detail of inlaid eye belonging to the "Seated Scribe" , 2600 - 2350 BC. Crafted from red-veined white magnesite and rock crystal.

The Polished crystal was covered in the back with material used to create the color of the iris. :: [Treasures of ancient Egypt]

* * * *

The Dead, By Susan Mitchell

At night the dead come down to the river to drink. They unburden themselves of their fears, their worries for us. They take out the old photographs. They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures, which are cracked and yellow. Some dead find their way to our houses. They go up to the attics. They read the letters they sent us, insatiable for signs of their love. They tell each other stories. They make so much noise they wake us as they did when we were children and they stayed up drinking all night in the kitchen.

[sabinahahn]

Drowned Girl by Susan Mitchell

[poem-today]

A poem by Susan Mitchell

The Bear

Tonight the bear comes to the orchard and, balancing on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees, hanging onto their boughs, dragging their branches down to earth. Look again. It is not the bear but some afterimage of her like the car I once saw in the driveway after the last guest had gone. Snow pulls the apple boughs to the ground. Whatever moves in the orchard— heavy, lumbering—is clear as wind.

The bear is long gone. Drunk on apples, she banged over the trash cans that fall night, then skidded downstream. By now she must be logged in for the winter. Unless she is choosy. I imagine her as very choosy, sniffing at the huge logs, pawing them, trying each one on for size, but always coming out again.

Until tonight. Tonight sap freezes under her skin. Her breath leaves white apples in the air. As she walks she dozes, listening to the sound of axes chopping wood. Somewhere she can never catch up to trees are falling. Chips pile up like snow When she does find it finally, the log draws her in as easily as a forest, and for a while she continues to see, just ahead of her, the moon trapped like a salmon in the ice.

 

Susan Mitchell

[noleavestoblow]

Tonight the bear comes to the orchard and, balancing on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees, hanging onto their boughs, dragging their branches down to earth. Look again. It is not the bear but some afterimage of her like the car I once saw in the driveway after the last guest had gone. Snow pulls the apple boughs to the ground. Whatever moves in the orchard— heavy, lumbering—is clear as wind.

― Susan Mitchell

[spudcity]

The Bear

Tonight the bear

comes to the orchard and, balancing

on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees,

hanging onto their boughs,

dragging their branches down to earth.

Look again. It is not the bear

but some afterimage of her

like the car I once saw in the driveway

after the last guest had gone.

Snow pulls the apple boughs to the ground.

Whatever moves in the orchard—

heavy, lumbering—is clear as wind.

The bear is long gone.

Drunk on apples,

she banged over the trash cans that fall night,

then skidded downstream. By now

she must be logged in for the winter.

Unless she is choosy.

I imagine her as very choosy,

sniffing at the huge logs, pawing them, trying

each one on for size,

but always coming out again.

Until tonight.

Tonight sap freezes under her skin.

Her breath leaves white apples in the air.

As she walks she dozes,

listening to the sound of axes chopping wood.

Somewhere she can never catch up to

trees are falling. Chips pile up like snow.

When she does find it finally,

the log draws her in as easily as a forest,

and for a while she continues to see,

just ahead of her, the moon

trapped like a salmon in the ice.

–Susan Mitchell

[culturevulturette]

THE BEAR

Tonight the bear comes to the orchard and, balancing on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees, hanging onto their boughs, dragging their branches down to earth. Look again. It is not the bear but some afterimage of her like the car I once saw in the driveway after the last guest had gone. Snow pulls the apple boughs to the ground. Whatever moves in the orchard— heavy, lumbering—is clear as wind.

The bear is long gone. Drunk on apples, she banged over the trash cans that fall night, then skidded downstream. By now she must be logged in for the winter. Unless she is choosy. I imagine her as very choosy, sniffing at the huge logs, pawing them, trying each one on for size, but always coming out again.

Until tonight. Tonight sap freezes under her skin. Her breath leaves white apples in the air. As she walks she dozes, listening to the sound of axes chopping wood. Somewhere she can never catch up to trees are falling. Chips pile up like snow When she does find it finally, the log draws her in as easily as a forest, and for a while she continues to see, just ahead of her, the moon trapped like a salmon in the ice.

Susan Mitchell

[grandhotelabyss]

On cover designs, do you have favorite or least favorite designs or trends in book design? Past or present.

Most "least favorites" age into quaintness, like lurid pulp covers of classics in the initial paperback era. I absolutely loathe, however, the Penguin Classics Deluxe trend of getting indie comics type artists to draw ironically cutesy and trivializing cartoon covers:

On the other hand, you don't need to put contemporaneous painting and sculpture on the front of old books, as when they inevitably wrap Henry James in John Singer Sargent. You can modernize. My favorite in the modernizing vein, recently praised by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, is Milton Glaser's Signet Classics Shakespeare series.

Of all the riches embedded in the Monacelli book, it may be the complete covers of the Signet Shakespeare, from around the same period as the Dylan poster, that are the most arresting. A central figure, usually enigmatically representative of the play’s action, appears in half-finished form, done in a charmingly elegant, linear style that recalls both Aubrey Beardsley and white-figure Greek vases; only a small patch of the drawing is in color, while the rest spins out like suggestive smoke. “Hamlet” is an agonized youth’s face, with a watching father’s head springing from his own and a barely suggested woman’s head—Ophelia?—alongside; “Julius Caesar,” memorably, is a tilting classical figure in profile, a zigzag of blue on a white implied toga to suggest greatness and a spot of pure red nearby to imply his stabbing. If you had no idea of what a play was about, none of these covers would tell you. Glaser relies on a general knowledge of the text—Hamlet is haunted, Julius Caesar is killed—and then suggests with his cryptic images that this story is more interesting and somehow more contemporary than one might have thought. The covers were less illustrations of the plays than they were invitations to read them.

Finally, the 1990s Vintage International paperback designs by Marc J. Cohen and Susan Mitchell are wonderful, possibly my all-time favorite. For me, they're still the tonal-visual correlate of 20th-century literature: Joyce, Faulkner, Mann, Camus, Ellison, McCarthy, Byatt, Roth. It helps that I graduated to reading Faulkner and Nabokov from reading Vertigo Comics, since the Vintage covers, with their broodingly or lyrically "historicized" mixed media and typefaces, belong to the same postmodern culture of design as Dave McKean's Sandman covers, an aesthetic totally antithetical to the post-Underground Comix cartoonishness favored by Penguin Classics—a style that shows, too, how we might understand at least one wing of postmodernism as a neo-Romanticism, as, that is, an affirmation. I very much dislike the streamlined blandness, what Twitter celeb Paul Skallas calls "refinement culture," of Vintage's current redesign, though it's not as bad as the homogenizing "blob" situation of contemporary literary fiction.

[justjensenanddean]

Jensen Ackles arriving at The Boys panel | San Diego Comic-Con 2024, July 26, 2024 [x]

[positivexcellence]

@TheBoysTV: You’re all fuckin welcome, Hall H

[kitsunetsuki]

Guy Bourdin - Susan Moncur & Gala Mitchell Wearing Dresses by Yves Saint Laurent (Vogue Paris 1971)

[weclassybouquetfun]

The cast of Amazon Prime Video's THE BOYS took to the Comic Con stage again in support of their penultimate season, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan moderating the panel.

The panel kicked off with a musical interlude that would do Vought International proud with Jessie T. Usher recreating his A-Train rap.

THE BOYS is ending next season, GEN V is returning, and now there is the announcement of a new entry into The Boys universe: a spinoff prequel series centering on Jensen Ackle's Soldier Boy and Aya Cash's Stormfront.

VOUGHT RISING, everyone! I know it looks like something THE BOYS would spoof, but it's real.

Also unleashed was this season's blooper reel.

[emotinalsupportturtle]

I think it’s obvious that one of the things I find most attractive in a person is a good sense of humour, evidenced by the number of comedians I have crushes on

[dailychaceccrawford]

Chace Crawford and the cast of The Boys for Entertainment Weekly, San Diego Comic Con 2024

[theartofangirling]

“flowers,” anaïs mitchell // “the diary of anaïs nin, 1931–1934,” anaïs nin // “the divine secrets of the ya-ya sisterhood,” rebecca wells // “nine,” sleeping at last // “i, etcetera,” susan sontag // “the dream thieves,” maggie stiefvater // “hey, little songbird,” anaïs mitchell