Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

On shame and friendship:

 On dependency, partnership and loss:

More photographs of Picasso by Robert Capa

Robert Capa, Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot (1948)

"At first all the viewer registers is the lit-from-within triumph of Gilot's smile; and right behind it Picasso's amiable servitude. But keep looking and you'll see in Gilot's eyes that she believes her power to be everlasting; and then you'll see the cold wordiness behind Picasso's play-acting deference. It hits you full force: Gilot is Anne Boleyn in her moment of glory and Picasso the appetite-driven king before he's had his fill of her. 

The photograph is so richly alive, it is actually shocking: it both excites and appals. Most days I don't even glance in its direction, but on the days that I do take it in, it never fails to arouse pain and pleasure, in equal parts. It's the equal parts that's the problem."

- Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City, 2015

Caroline Walker, Theatre (2021) at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Ken Currie, Three Oncologists (2002) at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Shon Faye, Love in Exile

I really loved Shon Faye's non-fiction book of personal essays on love and explorations of different kinds of love beyond romantic love. I found compelling her arguments around how the fetishisation of the nuclear family and heterosexual romantic love and 'failure' to find this as not evidence a personal or intrinsic shortcoming, but as markers of a failure of society. 

Depictions of heterosexual love and partnership have been (falsely) elevated to the highest judgment of one's worthiness in books, films and television. Faye proposes that not only have these illustrations in media set unrealistic and unhelpful expectations, but that this obsession with securing romantic love is indeed a byproduct of late stage capitalism where the nuclear family and romantic love have served as a refuge and space of leisure away from the grind of work and productivity that exhausts and alienates us. Love has become more private as a result, and has shifted away from community oriented environments where different and more diverse loves previously flourished - for example, love in lasting friendships, which has been devalued in favour of a laser focus on finding and keeping romantic love, and nurturing this love in the confines of the private domestic sphere. 

I wanted to save the following page for two reasons: (1) because of its acknowledgement of the "crisis in male friendship" that has led to a rise in misogynistic views and violence against women, and (2) because of Faye's inclusion of the quote by Jo Spence, one of my favourite artists on the importance of female friendships. For Spence, it may have been "too late to be [her] mother's friend" but for many of us, the opportunity remains not only to be our mother's friend, but also that of our daughter's and to impart new teachings on ways to love. 

Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Strange Beach

Snippet from the poem 'More Night' that I enjoyed: