The magnolias are finally blooming in Toronto: happy days.

Local tulips from the fruit market, purchased on total eclipse day, in rough shape but only $2 a bunch. I trimmed away all the decayed leaves and they gave me a week of beautiful tulip drama.

Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira

I’ve been following Anthony on various platforms for a while and I was very excited when he shared the cover of this book, which was an expansion of a story by the same name published on Hazlitt, and I diligently put in my pre-order. I wanted to know what a book written by someone who came from where I came from (the child of Portuguese immigrants raised in Toronto and educated at single-sex Catholic schools—when I was a student, my all-girls’ high school was the sister school to his all-boys’ high school) would be like. We don’t tend to be the most literary bunch, so it’s nice to see. Also, I loved Lauren Groff’s Matrix and Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch, two recent-ish books that drew from religious traditions. If more contemporary authors want to merge mysticism with modern life, I would encourage them enthusiastically.

I am in complete awe of this book. If you know me well you know I can’t resist a reference to St Catherine of Siena!1 I suppose the short version is that it is a reclaiming, a very queer book about “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” It travels through and across time and is deeply informed by close, scholarly readings of the Bible, early modern English literature, the writings of medieval saints and mystics, and also, for example, Rebecca. Characters are one person but also possibly another. It highlights the most radical teachings of Jesus. I can imagine that this might not sound very appealing to some people, especially those raised with no religion or even too much religion. It’s a tough sell! If I mention, say, St Francis of Assisi or Julian of Norwich I get asked if I’m Catholic again like those Dimes Square people (uhh, no, but I reserve the right to pull out my rosary from Fátima made of crushed rose petals when I’m scared, okay?). The book is subversive, intense, and wildly romantic: it is so full of love. It is bursting with love. It is the Psalms crossed with the vernacular. It’s also a book about grief, of a lover left behind by one killed in a gruesome way. We are back to “gorgeous but sad,” my favourite. Sentimental but never maudlin, which I think is helped by the fact that it is so grounded in the literature that inspired it. And it is funny! Jesus has some pretty good zingers in this book.

Okay, I think I packed in as many adjectives as possible.

Of course, I loved the mom stuff, the parts that are about Mary but also clearly about just a regular immigrant mom (when the narrator helps his ailing/aging mom up the stairs she says good night and calls him “meu amor,” which made me cry for all the tenderness of that scene). To me, the book is not just about reclaiming the queerness that existed in these stories, but (intentionally or not) also reclaiming the stories of the women who were written out, relegated to the apocryphal or to memory alone, from the Council of Nicaea to the Reformation and beyond.

I should also add that the book is also… smut. But as I mentioned a few posts back, I read Margery Kempe by Robert Glück earlier this year, and I have read Teresa of Ávila. Ecstasies with the Lord is nothing new to me. There are passages in the book that are reproduced from such figures as Rupert of Deutz (“i took him in faster and deeper than the softest wax is able to receive the strongest impressed seal”), St John of the Cross (“and so i remained, lost and / oblivious / my face reclined against my / beloved / all ceased, i abandoned myself / leaving my cares / forgotten in the lilies”), Bernard of Hoyos (“i will be your husband / and you will be my husband”), and others, that place Dayspring in a long tradition of unambiguously sexual-sacred texts. There is so much about bodies in this book, about their physicality and their smells and their hair, and about what bodies do; I have a 7 year old, so we make fart jokes, and I definitely laughed at the one(s) in this book (again, this follows a tradition: medieval fabliaux, Boccaccio, the phallic pottery of Caldas da Rainha that I certainly grew up with, and more).

Shout out to the “swollen sea-slug tuber” in this book that I think will remain lodged in my memory forever.

The book itself is a stunning object: I adore the cover, and the typesetting is a feat (rubricated text!).2 I just got the audiobook, narrated by various voices, and I’m excited to dive in.

A book to be read while listening to Sufjan Stevens (“John the Beloved,” “Drawn to the Blood”—“for my prayer has always been love” is very Dayspring—and “The Transfiguration”), Royal City (a Toronto/Guelph indie band from 20 years ago fronted by a theologian), Lux Vivens (an album of Hildegard von Bingen’s music recorded by Jocelyn Montgomery and produced by David Lynch).

Pantheon Modern Writers series books designed by Louise Fili

A while ago I picked up Marguerite Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein because I had read an interview with Rachel Kushner in which she said it was one of her favourite books (I also loved it). I found a secondhand copy bundled with Blue Eyes, Black Hair for $9 on, of all places, Poshmark. When they arrived I was struck by how much I loved the cover design of these books and looked up the designer for this series, Louise Fili. It turns out that she has been behind so many iconic cover designs (including all the best Italo Calvino covers). I had seen these Pantheon covers around before but for some reason their design really hit me when I saw the two side by side, and I decided to look into others.

The pastel tones, the imagery (the photographs for this series are often done by Christine Rodin and they are so sumptuously 1980s I can hardly stand it), the justified text, the author signatures superimposed over four lines that make me think of sheet music: I love these details so much.

I decided to start collecting as many as I could, and I think every one of these are bangers: I could do a year of reading only Pantheon Modern Writers series books and I bet it would be satisfying. I found some of them at local bookshops but it’s been easy enough to find some online. Book conditions vary but I’m not super precious about that kind of thing unless pages are falling out, or the book is mildewed (I currently have a copy of Blow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar in the freezer because it arrived from a French bookseller a little smellier than I would like).

Look: there is a Tsushima in the mix. It’s one of the few Tsushimas I have left to read that have been translated into English, other than a few short stories I was able to download from JSTOR and other repositories, and a book called Laughing Wolf. I’m parcelling them out.

I’ve since found a few books about design written by Louise Fili herself—she is a master of typography, heavily inspired by signage from Spain and Italy. Who knew Poshmark would set me off on such a satisfying journey/obsession?

I combed my bookshelves and found a few other Fili covers. This is my copy of The Lover that I bought and read in the late 1990s (the also iconic cursive text update that inspired my Minor Canon hat was done by Peter Mendelsund), and I used The Trial for an independent study in high school.

This book cover, even though it is discoloured in parts. That ribbon text! This design was by Lewis Deane.

The interior typography is lovely.

This episode of The Critic and Her Publics. Transcript here. Jo Livingstone talking medieval stuff and reciting Old English with Merve Emre! (The CS Lewis chat in this episode of Reading Writers: also incredible. RW is just so good all around.)