#fatal interview

[derangedrhythms]

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fatal Interview: from 'Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane...'

[rustbeltjessie]

Another thing I made on May 1st: my own copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Fatal Interview. See, I’m working on a new project, which is, much like Fatal Interview, a sonnet sequence inspired by a love affair. I decided I needed a copy of the book to have near me while I work on it. I looked for used copies online; found some that weren’t too expensive but were still a greater expense than I can justify right now. Then I thought I’d just have to content myself with the .pdf, which, ugh. Then I remembered that I’ve got some amateur book-binding skills, so I printed out the book and made my own cover for it and stitched it all together with twine, and honestly this makes it even more special than if I’d purchased a copy.

(May 1, 2023)

[razorsadness]

excerpts from "How Love May Be Acquired": Prescriptive Autobiography in Millay's "Fatal Interview" by Ann K. Hoff (CEA Critic, Vol. 68, No. 3 (SPRING and SUMMER 2006))

Indeed, Millay’s relationship with the autobiographical project is strange and complex—even dysfunctional. Like many lyrical productions, the sonnet series Fatal Interview straddles the gap between that which is autobiographical and that which is autobiography. The reader can glean a great deal from the poems, details that lead the reader to feel an uncanny, and often voyeuristic, familiarity with the speaker and her circumstances.

...

The formal ingredients of the sonnets present the very obstacles autobiography theorist, Philippe Lejeune, suggests they might when he declares autobiography to be “A retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (On Autobiography 4). Poetry confounds Lejeune’s vision of autobiography because it does not depend on a narrative progression. Poems can be circuitous, or hover in a single moment indefinitely. Lyric poetry also has an established history of using a universalized and thereby fictionalized first-person voice, which makes it difficult to verify the confluence of author and speaker, or the “autobiographical pact.” Finally, poetry’s propensity to choose beauty of language over accuracy of fact makes it tempting to dismiss self-representations in verse as universalisms or generalities.

...

The sonnets chronicle the beginning and demise of the affair, and yet the affair itself extends beyond the span of time in which Millay wrote, revised, and published the poems. The poems seem hyperbolic and fundamentally romantic, and yet their depiction of the state of mind of their author, and the events of the love affair, correspond with striking accuracy. The poems weave through Millay’s life in a peculiar way. In the months following their first meeting, Millay kept a notebook with a photo of Dillon inside. In it, she composed sonnet after sonnet. As she finished the poems, she would send them, a few at a time, to her lover. Millay’s letters to Dillon from this period were comprised in large part of these poems, and the relationship was in large part, literary—epistolary and lyrical. He wrote poems to her and she to him. The sonnets record the volatile emotions of the author as she imagined their love affair and its demise in extravagant detail.

...

The full ironic impact of these lines can only be appreciated when the reader understands that the love affair was largely epistolary until after the sonnet sequence was imagined, completed, revised, and published. Like a mirror seen through a mirror, Millay’s poem predicts that at the demise of the relationship, she will have been—as the poem dictates she must be—”prophetic of the end” (41.4). Fatal Interview is the autobiographical account of the myth the poet rehearsed in her life. References to St. George may give way to the myth of Endymion, or Tristan and Isolt, or Helen of Troy, but make it no less clear that the author pens a literary life—imagines a romance worthy of a famed and mythical poetess. In an odd entanglement of life, art, and desire, Millay imagined a love affair of mythical dimensions and then does her best to live it as it was written.

...

Even within this more orderly progression, the poems shuttle back and forth between desperation and independence. They alternate between lovelorn and scornful. They are bold and clingy in turns. They are modernist and hopelessly Keatsian. And so are the letters; so were the actual communications of the affair. Millay did indeed vacillate between these extremes in voice, letter, and behavior. Millay spiraled in a great circle.

...

...Millay is not content. She uses other myths as primary forces in the sonnet series, depicting herself as an amalgam of classic female figures, all of whom conducted affairs like her own with varying results. She uses these allusions to parallel her own situation and often uses them to convey what the limits of the affair with Dillon will be. In Sonnet VI, which begins “Since I cannot persuade you from this mood / Of preoccupation with the dead,” she cautions Dillon:      ...that which Helen did and ended Troy      Is more than I can do though I be warm,      Have up your buried girls, egregious boy,      And stand with them against the unburied storm.      When you lie wasted and your blood runs thin,      And what’s to do must with dispatch be done,      Call Cressid, call Elaine, call Isolt in! (6.5-11) Here, she seems to be telling Dillon that she will not leave her husband despite her passion for the young poet, for Helen’s deed is “more than [she] can do.” However, she also seems to be expressing frustration with the literary nature of her relationship with Dillon by implying that he cares more for ghosts of antiquity than the living woman. She challenges him to take comfort from these literary specters in his time of direst need. In reminding him of that impossibility, she restores the ultimate control....

...

Millay wanted the world to question and doubt whether the poems were “real” accountings of an affair. And while Lejeune argues that autobiography is not a guessing game, Millay’s personality made a guessing game of the life’s events even as she lived them. Would she return to her husband? How deep were Dillon’s feelings for Millay? Did he reciprocate her passion? How intimate was their affair and how long did it last before degenerating into friendship? Even Eugen, with whom Millay shared many of the intimate details of the affair, did not know the answers to these questions. Millay’s interest in writing the poems that comprise Fatal Interview was originally conversational, but it was also prescriptive. In essence, while many writers describe their lives, Millay wrote about events she had not yet experienced, but instead envisioned. The life she cultivated was more myth than reality in the end. She prescribed the life of a radical lyric woman poet and did her best to live that legend.

[userarmand]

Shall we? Here? Now? It's a roomy box.

[fishfingersandscarves]

armand de gorgeous

[cryinglookingatsoulages]

top ten most insanest decisions ever made even m night shyamalan on shrooms couldn’t have written things that happen in louis’ brain on a random thursday afternoon.

[thesirenisles]

🥀 Queen Mother of Vampires:

Akasha of Egypt

“I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.”

-Lestat

The goddess, Aaliyah Haughton as the Ancient Kemite (presently known as Egyptian) Queen, “Akasha” in the film “Queen of the Damned.” (2002)

[dxxtruction]

The framed art on the wall in this scene is Louis Icart's Salome (1928).

Salome is known for her role in the death of John the Baptist, where she requested, upon being able to satisfy Herod with her dance, to be presented with his head. She was a popular depiction in the earlier half of the 20th century, and late 19th century, being seen as representation of the ultimate femme fatale - a character archetype of a woman out to achieve some aim and who, through her desirability, leads men to their doom.

There are arguably 3 femme fatales in this room.

(Larger image of artwork below)

[nalyra-dreaming]

HOMME-FATALE

Sam, come and collect your award 🙌

src

[derangedrhythms]

Night is my sister,

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fatal Interview: from 'Night is my sister, and how deep in love...'

[rustbeltjessie]

Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain, Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XXX from Fatal Interview

[thedailydescent]

I love you Louis but don't you think instead of fucking that walking red flag you could go check on your daughter who was also just threatened two seconds ago??

[angryteapott]

daniels daughter #1: hi

armand: i used to put a bottle in a bra to pretend to breastfeed you

[rainafaye]

[livelovecaliforniadreams]

When Life Imitates Art 

+Bonus