Catie Disabato's Blog, page 11
June 12, 2015
Two Poems by Molly Rose Quinn | The Offing
The exceptional The Offing, a channel of the lareviewofbooks that launched earlier this year, publishes two of my poems today, called “Rousing Success” and “Rich Girl.” They’re kind of a lot.
lovely friday poems
June 10, 2015
"Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed..."
Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed concern and shock, or (helpful but alarming) encouraged me to call the police if ever I felt threatened. I sort of knew what I was getting into when I began, and I believe I have as good an understanding now as I can have now that I’ve finished, but this fear is palpable. I know Champion will read this and I cannot imagine how it will feel for him. I would not want such a piece to be written about me, but I also hope never do to the kinds of things Champion has done. And I think that if I ever do them, I will deserve a story like this.
“Experiencing criticism for your actions is not the same thing as having your life ruined,” Mallory Ortberg wrote in The Toast on October 6, 2014, “no matter how unrestrainedly strangers talk about you.”
“You can ruin your own life,” she says, when you hurt someone else. “You have ruined your own life from the inside out.”
Though Ortberg was writing about a particular situation—rape allegations that were then roiling the alt-lit community—I think this is a useful framework to apply to any situation in which one person has hurt another. She argues that if someone has attempted to “physically and emotionally dominate” another person, then bringing that hurt to light “is in fact the best possible thing that can happen” to the aggressor, to everyone.
”-
The Exile of Ed Champion | Brooklyn Magazine
I’ve been living with this story for a long time. It’s been hard to research, hard to write, hard to edit, hard to publish. I hope something good comes out of it.
(via mollitudo)
Molly’s glorious piece on Ed Champion is worth the deep dive, even if, like me, you’re not in the ny literary scene.
June 9, 2015
Learning To Count With Song Lyrics
When the sky is full of zeros and ones?
(I take) one, one, one cuz you left me
And two, two, two for my family
And three, three, three for my heartache
And four, four, four for my headaches
And five, five, five for my lonely
If Man is five, if Man is five, if Man is five
And six, six, six for my sorrow
If the green grass is six
Then the Devil is six, then the Devil is six, then the Devil is six, then the Devil is six
And seven, seven for no tomorrow
and the soybeans are seven
Then God is seven, then God is seven
And eight, eight, I forget what eight is for
The junebugs are eight
But nine, nine, nine for the lost gods
Ten, ten, ten, ten for everything, everything, everything
the weeds and thistles are eleven
June 8, 2015
June 5, 2015
Rebecca Minkoff Molly Metro Wallet | SHOPBOP
catiedisabato Do you think the Molly Metro wallet is named after The Ghost Network?
Oh man I hope so! Molly would rock the shit out of that wallet.
June 4, 2015
“A foggy night in Odessa, Ukraine, when a digital billboard...
“A foggy night in Odessa, Ukraine, when a digital billboard crashed and displayed a floating error warning in the night sky.”
deadhorsebrooklyn:
“If my father let me, I could have this...
“If my father let me, I could have this life, and I would make it good.
I wasn’t weak. He just didn’t know what I was capable of. No one did.”- from The Invaders, coming July 7th
Mel Roberts’ Rich Thompson and Mike Kelley Bel Air, 1962
Super pumped for The Invaders. I loved the author’s first (How to Get Into the Twin Palms) and reading about the “epic downward spiral” of a a wealthy 40-something woman and her “troubled” stepson sounds like my kind of jam.
May 28, 2015
"Some days you can’t do anything
Not even your own makeup
Some days you already blew it
One wonkily..."
Not even your own makeup
Some days you already blew it
One wonkily painted eye
Watching the liner tutorial
Like an unwrapped egg”
- “Smartphone” by Niina Pollari, Dead Horse
(via sometimes-behaves-so-strangely)
Notes on Scenes from the Novel About Being In Your Late Twenties in Los Angeles That I Am Not Writing
Standing in the dim kitchen with S, in the old apartment, each of us barefoot and hungover. She offers me broth from the guy at the local farmers’ market. It’s not marrow broth, not that expensive New York stuff, for winters and colds; this is vegan, and maybe somehow fermented, and anyway, for a detox, which is what we both need.
I don’t want it, though. I don’t trust things that come out of that fridge unless I put them in there myself. Instead we each find an avocado in our separate fruit bowls, and then knives. We cut them in half and cut the halves into squares. I put mine in a bowl of rice, with kale, and hers goes on pita. “I don’t think I would still be alive if it wasn’t for avocados,” she observes. She’s a vegan. “I don’t really understand what people who don’t eat them, like, eat.”
-
Stopping on my way to a wedding shower to pick up weed for the bride, who’s in from out of town and doesn’t have a card of her own, anyway. We danced around it in text messages, using the plant emoji like we might mean joints, eighths, edibles of cacti. Finally I called her on the phone to ask, “Indica or sativa?” She didn’t know what I meant because you don’t buy that way where she lives now– there are dealers, not dispensaries, and they show up with what they show up with.
I don’t have a card, because I don’t smoke. I can’t explain the difference between indica and sativa because I always mix up which one is which. Trying to translate her east coast order to my west coast friend is like playing a game of telephone in a language I don’t really speak. “I’m just going to give her whatever’s in the freezer,” X. says.
“The freezer?”
“Best way to keep it fresh.”
When I do the pickup, the light is winter-white and hot to stand in, even though it’s too cold for the thin jersey dress I’m wearing in the shade. I can’t find parking so we do the hand-off on the sidewalk. A friend of X.’s is in town and we have friends in common, so we talk about that, and where to go for dim sum, and how much of the weed the bride should eat so that she gets high– but not too high– in her parents’ house that night.
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After T.’s car caught on fire somewhere between Venice and Silver Lake, we gathered at her apartment. She was, understandably, shaken. It was midsummer and late enough that the sun had already set. A 30 rack of Tecate someone had brought over for the Fourth of July was still sitting on her kitchen table. I drank one, and everyone else got high; we ordered burritos to be delivered even though it cost more than picking them up ourselves. We smudged sage and pulled tarot cards, hoping to explain the car’s combustion, and everything else in our lives. We were still wearing the temporary tattoos we’d put on together at that celebration on the Fourth, ice cream cones lovingly rendered on each of our wrists. When we washed our hands, it was in a sink filled with rocks: feng shui, T. explained to me, something to do with keeping money from running down the drain.
I know the farmer’s market broth Z is talking about, salty and miso-y, they sell it in plastic jugs or you can buy a small paper cup of it, warm, to sip on while you browse the vegetable stands. I also bought a bottle of their miso dressing and this week I’ve been eating it on everything. I know that soon I’ll be tired of the taste of miso but right now I can’t get enough of it, taking little sips out of the bottle, soaking my lettuce, salads as a miso delivery system.
May 23, 2015
Though I’m proud of myself this week and of what I’ve done, it was also an exquisitely stressful,...
Though I’m proud of myself this week and of what I’ve done, it was also an exquisitely stressful, sleepless one. I was in a daze the whole time, and I felt like I was constantly relying on my body’s last stores of energy, or if you prefer: running out of gas, burning the candle at both ends. You know the feeling, when you’re lifting weights, of the rep right before the very last one your body is physically capable of completing? That feeling, but about my psychic energy, the whole week long. At night, I was only able to recover enough energy to fill up the emergency tanks again, never able to really replenish. Like my state California, so suffering from drought that even a thunderstorm can’t save it.
So today, my only mission was to recharge my batteries. I drove to the San Gabriel Valley and ate a dim sum breakfast with two absurdly fantastic women. Then we walked around in a nearby Chinese (Cantonese?) grocery store for more than an hour, slowly filling our cart. They had fat, fresh cherries for under $2 per pound (at Whole Foods it’s $7.99 a pound I think), gallon bottles of my favorite cheap sake, giant bunches of chinese scallions, fresh tofu made right in the store (fresh soy milk too, some bottles in the fridge still hot because it had just been cooked, but I didn’t buy any), cans of cooked quail eggs in water (I had to try them), and fresh, squishy rice paper.
I thought about how wonderful it is to have found a friend who likes to grocery shop as much as I do, who likes to buy bags of fruit and little trinkets, and stare for half a minute at the live crawfish writhing in their box.
Sara and I had a can of beer in a suburban park we felt like trespassers in, then we drove back to the city, she went to work. Now, I’m in my big red arm chair, eating the cherries and reading The Argonauts. Outside my window, someone is playing the Wiz Khalifa Furious 7 song “See You Again” and it’s just the right volume level for me to hear but not be bothered by.
