Show Me the Crook of Your Arm, the Part From Which Blood is Most Likely Drawn

There are particular seasons that dictate the types of books I read.  The summer, for example, has never been the time for me to read books by Poe.

This year, however, this end-of-spring-beginning-of-summer cusp has placed a strange desire deep in my center.  I have been craving- of all things- to read of, and psychologically within, shadows.

It began with the book I mentioned a while ago, Carlos Ruiz Záfon's The Shadow of the Wind, a gothic and incredibly dark mystery of life, love, and literature. It continued on with Ben Catmull's Ghosts and Ruins, a black and white art book of gorgeous haunted houses  has their slow curling stories.

Presently, the theme pushes on with In Praise of Shadows, an essay written by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki that is, without a doubt, seducing me at night.  As it is fairly short, and has language one would wish to savor, I have only been reading it on nights that I am alone in my room- just before bed, with the window open and the night air pouring or pushing in.  

It is exactly where I want to be, and what I want to be reading.  While it does, indeed, feel strange to be reading such dark and charcoal-ed words during these days of sun-warmed skin and grass-stained knees, the soot of these stories is smearing exactly what needs to be reached inside of me.


k.


(photo: artwork of Magdalena Szymaniec- Hannibal á la Saint Sebastian) 

(The photo, of course, is a wink towards my recent introduction and fascination with True Detective mixed with the everlasting love of my chosen patron saint.)