CONTEXT COLLAPSE by Ryan Ruby

Finishing this gem. #NovellaClub

Of the Andalucian مُوَشّح, (footnote 24) Encoded itself into the structure 24* The فوئع (or "necklace") was a bilingual form, a dialogic love song whose strophic sections were sung by a male voice in classical Arabic , each of which Concluded with a خرجة (or refrain ) sung by a female voice in Mozarabic, the vernacular of al-Andalus. In The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, Marta Rosa Menocal hypothesizes that the poetic form was transmitted from the Iberian peninsula to Christendom by the thousand or so slave girls who were trafficked from Barbastro by Gui-Geoffroi, Duke of Gascony, during the protocrusade against the Taifa of Lárida, whose songs would have been part of the soundscape of the castle at Poitou, where his son, Guilhem IX, spent his youth. However it ultimately arrived, the impact of Hispano-Arabic poetry cannot be overstated, as—along with the mid-tenth century "Riming Poem" and the chanson d’aventure, written in octosyallabic couplets—it is the first instance of the sustained use of rhyme in western literature. Rhyme, like meter, has mnemonic value, but its appearance in written poetry after the passage of millennia suggests that it served a deeper function— as a metaphor for an ideal set of social relations, and as a tool for conceptualizing persistence within change and change within persistence. It’s Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse (2024)

Slow start to my admin day: #novellaclub reading, coffee, pink salt bath.

“I walked through the halls and entered all the rooms I’d once inhabited, inhaling hints of my former selves and of the women I’d known while I’d lived in those rooms.”

Nº 117/2024 • THE SEASIDE HOTEL by Michael Holt (2024, @sublunary.bsky.social) #NovellaClub

I thought: In a fairy tale I would be a queen of desolation with agates for eyes and a gown made of wind.

The Seaside Hotel, Michael Holt

I didn’t think I was going to like this book, but I really do, writing the dissolve and the rematerialisation #NovellaClub

Happy weekend! #NYRBWomen24 #AContinuation25 #NovellaClub

After I got past my initial election derailment, November ended up being a great reading month. I finished part 3 of our #KateBriggs24 reading project, books 20 & 21 of #NYRBWomen24, a reread of Özlü for #NovellaClub, and several others that I would highly recommend.

new #novellaclub pick just arrived

“We grow up inside an anger that grows with us.”

Nº 109/2024 • COLD NIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD by Tezer Özlü (1980, @transitbooks.bsky.social 2023) tr. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely

*a reread for #NovellaClub 💛

Just ordered #novellaclub