Bibliomancy class is next week! Hugo House memoir class is Next week! Thanks to everyone who’s signed up for the bibliomancy class. I’m looking forward to a good time. If that doesn’t include you… 😒… you got one more week to catch up with the cool kids.

My beginner memoir class with Hugo House also kicks off next week. This is for all you folks on the West Coast looking for some daytime learnin’. Link at the bottom of the newsletter. There are 4 spots left. This is my last class of the year.

Saturday, I took myself on a solo date to NYC, less than 90 minutes via train from Philly. Sometimes, I refer to myself as the queen of minor misfortunes but this weekend, I was the benefactor of what I’m going to call a series of “Lil’ luckies.”

A series of lil’ luckies will give you the sense of leading a charmed experience, you can almost feel the hand of God ushering you along, shielding you from harm.

This week I can’t stop talking about:

Minda

I saw two different documentaries this weekend (and if you know me, you know I am not a movie person, so this is rather impressive) and I highly recommend both for different reasons.

Once Upon A Time in Harlem

This documentary is a 1970’s gathering of the remaining living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance and is currently making its way through the film festival circuit. Bill Greaves considered this footage the greatest achievement of (a quite illustrious) career, unfortunately, he did not complete the doc in his lifetime. His son, David Greaves, who helped film the party (held at Duke Ellington’s home!), stepped in with his daughter to finally finish the documentary. David Greaves and his daughter Liani Greaves were members of talkback following the film. What an altar to the legacy of that family and Black brilliance.

By being an acolyte of Zora Neale Hurston, I’m adjacent to studying the Harlem Renaissance, so it was like a child sitting in awe among adults at a party long past her bedtime that I watched this film. Names I’d heard of, and names I hadn’t, telling their personal stories of the era and also speaking the names of those who were no long among them and those who came before them into the room.

This footage is to be cherished.

You Can See Everything

I think it’s been well-established Elizabeth Holmes (or I guess she’s going by Liz these days) is nutso banana pants but this film is three hours long and GRIPPING the whole way through. I watched this with a Black feminist lens as Holmes testing the bounds of whiteness, of blonde hair and blue eyes overplayed and white men using a white woman as avatar like some freaky modern digital day Buffalo Bill, but you may find it engrossing for other reasons. Nathan Fielder is a master of Creative Nonfiction and Holmes and her partner are the type of ego demons who don’t realize they shouldn’t let anyone behind the their curtain ever (even a false one).

The New Museum has a sleek, small restaurant. I, against the better judgement of my bank account, decided to dine there because I was too excited to get upstairs to see the Arthur Jafa exhibit to find some place else to eat.

I ordered their caesar endive salad, which I quite enjoyed, but it definitely didn’t deserve its $30+ price tag (well, I did add ahi tuna as my protein BUT STIIIILLLL). It was a few leaves of endive lettuce sprinkled with, what couldn’t possibly be more than ten pieces, of crispy chickpeas. I thought to myself, I could make this at home. Then realized, I had in fact been making it at home (for a fraction of the cost) all summer. Allow me to introduce you to the Trader Joe’s Caesar Salad Dip.

I find that store bought caesar dressing doesn’t have enough OOMPH for me and I’m mostly too lazy to make it myself at home with any kind of regular consistency. So the Trader Joe’s Caesar Salad Dip provides all the body and flavor I’m looking for.

Instead of leaving the endive leaves whole, I chopped them up to make them easier to shovel into my mouth while doing something else. After you’ve chopped up your endive, which you can buy a 3-pack of at Trader Joe’s (I use two 3-packs of endive because don’t play in my face with some damn salad leaves for lunch), glop on a few spoonfuls of the dip, as much or as little as you’d like. Then, squirt in some quality olive oil, again, as much or as little as you need to achieve the right consistency for you.

The mix-ins are the fun part. I never thought to eat my at-home salad with crispy chickpeas (but I will now!) but some things I did do:

The possibilities are endless! This salad comes together quick and the endive is sturdy, so if you have leftovers the salad won’t be all soggy and sad later. I don’t have any pics of the salad because 1) it’s not cute and 2) I haven’t made it since the summer. I never thought to share it with you all because it was just a quick bit of improvised home cooking, but some fancy restaurant charging $30+ for a salad I thought I invented is flattering lol and I will be grabbing the fixins’ to make it again this week. Caesar feels summery to me but it doesn’t have to be all squash and root veggies this time of year.

I was in New York to see the Arthur Jafa exhibit at the New Museum. Even after two full floors of his artwork, I wanted to camp out inside his worldview longer, so I read an essay he published called, “My Black Death.” I had to re-read each sentence three times and stopped frequently to look up terms and highlighted damn hear the entire essay (mind you it was well after 1AM and I’m promptly in bed at 10:30P person…). But it was worth the challenge. The essay is about a developing a distinct Black aesthetic in film, but is also about how modernism was birthed from Blackness (he draws the line from African masks to Picasso to Pollack and jazz), and sci-fi films being about white anxiety about Blackness. The essay is clearly in conversation with, if not inspired by (I’ll have to check the dates) Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark” and her analysis of white anxiety about Blackness being the prevailing driver of American Literature.

As an aside, that is the entire point of this section of the newsletter, I came across the term “plastic language” in the essay.

For a visual artist, plastic language, as far as I can understand, is looking at the thing that’s the stand in for the thing…? So for graphic designers this is thinking about the design of the letter as art itself… or something like that. But plastic language means something different in the field of linguistics and it’s basically words that don’t really mean anything anymore, like communication, resources, strategy, etc.

And I’m sure there's a much deeper dive one can take into all of this, but I find it helpful to have a word for when I tell writers to strike this kind of nonspecific language from their writing. Hollow words tend to make an appearance when we’re fearing vulnerability. Plastic language is said to be used to grant the user an air of authority (like when people use therapy speak in everyday convos) and authority often means not having to be vulnerable. So when I see it crop up in someone’s writing, it’s an immediate flag to ask them to go deeper.