In Which Laura Riding Can Move Like A Bolt From A Bow

This is the second in a series. You can find the first part here.

Coming Back

by ALEX CARNEVALE

I am glad women are going mad. It's about time they did.

- Robert Graves in June of 1929

Laura Riding had taken Nancy Graves' husband from her and had tried to arrange a three-way marriage. It wasn't working out: Nancy had taken up with Geoffrey Phibbs, the intern who Laura had been fucking with Graves' permission. Riding wrote:

There is a woman in this city who loathes me... What is to her irritation is to me myself. She has therefore a very direct sense of me, as I have a very direct sense of her, from being a kind of focus of her nervous system. There is no sentiment, no irony between us, nothing but feeling: it is an utterly serious relationship.

I think of her often. She is a painter - not a very good painter. I understand this too: it is difficult to explain, but quite clear to myself that one of the reasons I am attached to her is that she is not a good painter.

Also her clothes which do not fit her well: this again makes me even more attached to her. If she knew this she would be exasperated against me all the more, and I should like it, not because I want to annoy her but because this would make our relationship still more intense. It would be terrible to me if we ever became friends, like a divorce.

When she found about the destruction of her carefully arranged Trinity, Laura Riding drank Lysol. In front of Robert Graves, his wife, and the intern Geoff Phibbs with whom she had been sleeping with until his rejection of her, Laura hurled herself from a fourth floor window. She broke her her pelvis and suffered a compound fracture of her spine. "She is a great natural fact," Graves would later say of Laura Riding, "like fire or trees. Either one appreciates her or one doesn’t but it is quite useless trying to argue that she should be other than she is.” The police called her a vampire.

The initial diagnosis was total paralysis. The attending surgeon, a certain Dr. Lake, commented: "It is rarely that one sees the spinal cord exposed to view - especially at right angles to itself." The police hoped to charge Robert Graves with attempted murder, but he also had to obscure the suicidal purpose of his girlfriend's jump, lest she be deported as an American citizen. Laid up in the hospital, pumped full of too much morphine to speak, Laura Riding asked for Gertrude Stein.

Gertrude wrote to Graves:

Laura is so poignant and so upright and she gets into your tenderness as well as your interest and I am altogether heartbroken about her, I cannot come now. But tell her and keep telling her that we want her with us. I had an unhappy feeling that Laura would have sooner or later a great disillusionment and it would have to come through a certain vulgarity in another and it will make Laura a very wonderful person, in a strange way, a destruction and recreation of her purification but all this does not help pain and I am very closely fond of you all. Tell her all and everything from me and tell her above all that she will come to us and reasonably soon and all my love.

Riding, Graves and friends socializing in Majorca
The poems she wrote in the wake of her attempt to end her life took on a Steinian tinge.

What to say when the spider
Say when the spider what
The spider does what
Does does dies does it not
Not live and then not
Legs legs then none

When Laura was well enough to receive her letters, Stein sent this missive.

I have been thinking of you a lot lately back home, and I hope going on, and not too bad and not too anything but alright. I do hope to hear that everything is coming back, and that it would be good for you to take treatment at Aix or or somewhere near us, a something that would be a pleasure to us all. Do let me hear how everything is going.

When Laura was finally ready to travel, she met Stein, whom she had praised in a long essay, and found her a tremendous disappointment. Gertrude's sermons on the day's weather, she felt, bordered on madness. She described the older woman as "nervous with a continually aborted generosity." Most things she idealized ended up disappointing Laura, and Stein was no different. Riding would write about her again decades later, saying, "She was by her own created image of herself, as a compendium of human versatility compressing the range of diversity within it to so abbreviated a representation that she was the God of herself."

"Perhaps," Riding added, "everyone up to the time of her self-deification was to blame, for the great emptiness that accumulated in human self-knowledge which Gertrude Stein tried to fill with herself for everyone's edification."

graves

She was equally incensed in the days of her recovery by evidence of the burgeoning relationship of her now-former lover Geoffrey Phibbs and Graves' wife Nancy. Their coming together had not merely been revenge; they would live together for the next five years. When Nancy and Geoff arrived in the hospital to visit her with a small plastic statue of Nefertiti, Riding had them thrown out of the room. 

Out of loyalty to Laura, Graves refused to pay any child support while his wife and Phibbs were together. Even though he had basically left his wife for Riding, Nancy's betrayal of him loomed larger.

His wife tried to convince him otherwise, writing, "I know what you feel about us and what you know about us and I know just how much you can't afford to feel about or acknowledge to yourself or anyone the truth about the whole thing. I know you have to, being you - but curse the you that does it." For his part, Phibbs was a fantastic stepfather for five years before Nancy dumped him.

with his wife Nancy 

Hart Crane wrote to Laura to ask what had occurred. She explained, "We had all been sleeping with the Devil." Riding's main enemy Louise Bogan spread all kinds of stories about her, resulting in William Carlos Williams' famous appraisal of Riding as a "prize bitch." Graves' family called Laura a she-devil, and Graves' friend Siegfried Sassoon complained that he was tired of hearing from Robert "through a bonnet." It was necessary to leave this environment to preserve what remained of the love between them.

Through Graves' intervention, charges of attempted suicide were dropped, but Laura Riding still had to leave England. Finally free of all his responsiblities and entanglements, Graves took the recovering twenty-nine year old to Majorca. "Majorca," Stein had told them both, "is paradise, if you can stand it."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. The next part of the Laura Riding journey will appear a week from today.

"Spend Christmas With You" - Anthony Hamilton (mp3)

"Santa Claus, Go Straight to the Ghetto" - Anthony Hamilton (mp3)

In Which We Lose Ourselves In The Timber Hills Of Paul Bowles

In Paris, Young Paul Bowles

by ALEX CARNEVALE

You see I shouldn't be so wretched if there were only some way I could be sure that some day, be it fifty years hence, I shall be able to justify to myself the fact that I'm alive, but now I see no way, not even a vista of what might become a hope. It is not a help for me to repeat that life is its own excuse. I say: my life is no excuse. I have a horror not of anyone's failing to find merit in my existence, but only in my own. And in order for me to find myself worthwhile, I have got to be pretty brilliant, and understand everything.

Paul Bowles arrived in Paris in 1931. When he rode up to the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, they could not believe they had been corresponding with a college student. "I was sure from your letters that you were an elderly gentleman, at least seventy-five," Stein told him. He was twenty-one years old.

Bowles started fast. He had been insulated from the world until the age of six, when he was sent to school. "I developed a superiority complex the first day," he wrote in one of his many, many letters. His advancement continued apace:

When I was eight I wrote an opera. We had no piano, but we had two or three pieces of sheet-music which I studied and I had a zither which I tuned in various scales and modes. My first sexual thrills were obtained from reading newspaper account of electrocutions. At the time I was quite unconscious of the facts, except that I had the New England guilt about it.

Bowles' first literary idol was Poe, and crossing the Atlantic aboard the S.S. McKeesport he contemplated setting some of the man's poems to music. As a self-described modernist snob, Bowles' perspective on other artists resembled his shaky feelings about being turned on by torture -  a mix of wonder, awe and pain. Upon his arrival in Paris, the first person he went out of his way to meet was Jean Cocteau. At the beginning of April 1931 he writes that Cocteau

rushed about the room with great speed for two hours and never sat down once. Now he pretended he was an orangoutang, next an usher at Paramount Theatre, and finally he held a dialogue between an aged grandfather and his young grandson which was side-splitting. I think never have I seen anyone like him in my life. He still smokes opium every day and claims it does him a great deal of good. I daresay it does. By definition, the fact that it is considered harmful for most mere mortals would convince me of its efficaciousness for him.

Reading Bowles' private letters is like watching the precise movements of a guided laser. He writes completely differently depending on the level of intimacy with his correspondent. He penned almost stream-of-consciousness Joyce imitations to his friend Bruce Morissette, adopting a more formal tone for those whose friendship he coveted and had yet to earn. With his closest ones he even vacillated between styles with a severity of purpose nearly bipolar in its enthusiasm.

By June of 1931 he was in Berlin. He hated the city, all rain and mosquitos, but it was mostly that the place suffered in comparison to Paris. It is obvious how much his surroundings affected Bowles' personality. In his letter to the Paris-born Jew Edouard Roditi, Bowles accurately described his view of the German metropolis:

if only the world were stronger! if only there were more dimensions! if only we thought in terms of perfumes! if only there were a third world where we could hide from the other two. then the other one would not be always grinning in feeling so perfectly well that we could do nothing when it intended to enter. there would be two of them there, and the two would be easier to fight than the one. but now it is always either one or the other, and neither one stays away long enough. in full noon sleep falls upon one for one tiny second without measurement and one knows there is no escape. berlin is not a beautiful city

Later he would tell Roditi, and in a sense himself as well, that "I have the feeling you are primarily two people, one of which should be killed."

Among so many potent writers and artists, it was natural for young Bowles to feel a bit discouraged in his own writing. Yes, he could write or speak to Gertrude Stein anytime he liked, but reading further and further into her work, he despaired of his own.

All my theories on her I discover to be utterly vagrant. She has set me right, by much labor on her part, and now the fact emerges that there is nothing in her works save the sense. The sound, the sight, the soporific repetitions to which I had attached such great importance, are accidental, she insists, and the one aim of her writing is the superlative sense. "What is the use of writing," she will shout, "unless every word makes the utmost sense?" Naturally all that renders her 'opera' far more difficult, and after many hours of patient reading, I discover she is telling the truth, and that she is wholly correct about the entire matter. And what is even more painful is that all my poems are worth a large zero. That is the end of that. And unless I undergo a great metamorphosis, there will never be any more poems.

In August he boarded another ship, the S.S. Imerethie II, with a destination of Tangier. His reaction to this lush place was the polar opposite to his experience of Berlin. In a postcard to John Widdicombe he wrote, "here I shall live until the eucalyptus leaves all fall and it starts to rain across the strait." He took up residence in a villa with Aaron Copland. The villa featured a permanently out of tune piano, and while Copland found he could not do his work, Bowles' mood improved immediately. After a sojourn in Marrakech, Bowles returned to Paris before stopping in London at the beginning of December.

London did not offend him as a city, but as a way of life. In a letter to Charles Henri-Ford, he writes,

I have crossed the little water that is mightier in its human gap than an ocean, and fallen again into the great pit of London. The chalk cliffs at Newhaven were all greyer through the dawn rain than any human eyes could be, and white gulls fluttered out of the black wind into the vague lights of the boat, and seemed to cry when their flight crossed the boat, but to be silent when they went back into the darkness again. There is little change, save that Piccadilly grows more and more like a sprawling Times Square, running down Haymarket and Coventry and Regent, all garish and burning with neon. It doesn't fit. In New York, the great planes of the lifting buildings can carry it off, in London it stays right there, on the ground, on your mind, on your hands, and you can't lift it. I am sad for this.

Paris left me empty. I look only, everywhere, all hours, for that new way of looking at the human thing, the heart, I suppose, of the world, and I found it not there. I was childish to look for it. Only the echo of the beat, not the strong pulse.

At any rate, it was good of you to lead me about by my nose, and to let me meet so many people. As you know, I like to meet everyone in the world at least once.

He had met many of the most important artists of his generation; from Klee to Gide to Stein to Copland to Pound. For a short time, it raised all boats to be amidst such individuals, but eventually Bowles' surroundings discouraged him: 

Literature has never lived on literary talk, and literary acquaintances. I want to take every poet and shove him down into the dung-heap, kick all his literary friends in the ass, and try to make him see that writing is not word-bandying, like Stein, and the thousand legions of her followers, but an emotion seen through the mind, or an intellectual concept emotionalized, and shaping its own expression. You can't write from a literary vacuum, and all of Paris, I felt, was trying to. They get all tangled up in trying to write cleverly and as no one else has, and get lost in the timber hills of their effort. I can't help thinking Shakespeare never worried about writing a new kind of blank verse, just went ahead instinctively and did it.

The artists and writers Bowles once idolized had begun to let him down, as they had to. (He called Gertrude Stein, who told him, "Why don't you go to Mexico? You'd last two days there.") Friends he depended on for money were no longer as forgiving; after all, he had been in Europe for almost a year. A traveler is always welcome, a wayward resident finds himself more swiftly resented. Even Copland became slow in answering his letters, and Bowles stopped visiting the Stein home. He developed syphilis and then acute tonsilitis, medical expressions of how little Europe had left for him. How he loathed these ancient cities! By the same token, he did not want to go home at all.

In Algiers he began, for the first time in his life, to read the work of Marcel Proust.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Blue Jasmine and the Fullbright Company's Gone Home. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"On My Own" - Zero 7 (mp3)

"Don't Call It Love" - Zero 7 (mp3)

in his library

In Which Gertrude Stein And Alice B. Toklas Cuddle To Keep Warm

The Fleetness of Stein

The letters of Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein consist of two genius-level intelligences exchanging information — praise, guilt, happiness, confusion — from deeply different literary perspectives. The two first met when Stein was promoting her novel The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in Chicago, returning to America after 30 years in Paris. Stein was 60, Wilder 37.

It is Stein whose private writing appears more congruous with her published work. In contrast, the closeted Wilder experiments with Stein's language play here in a way he never managed to in his plays or novels. Stein's letters may constitute the more electric art, but Wilder's writing to Stein can be said to comprise a greater revelation. In these letters from the 30s, both artists were in a similar place in their lives, dealing with the onset of notoriety resulting from public attention to their work, and trying to remain true to an artistic vision. If nothing else, Thornton Wilder was better at telegrams than any man who ever lived.

at a party with Thornton

January 23th 1935

My dear Thornton,

I am writing some little short things about newspaper writing and Detective story writing and I think of you, I am full of meditation about narrative and how it can be written and every solution is a solution and I think of you. That is really what I want the course to be our course, just to find out how narratives should be written are written can be written may be written, it kind of worries me how they were written have been written worries me less but this other thing does worry me, quite a lot it worries me and sometimes I know and mostly I don't know and I think of you both ways I think of you, I am now writing about American education, well anyway I do think of you, and it is nice to think of you, here in New England as well as elsewhere.

Lots of love

Gtrde

may 1934 with photographer William G. Rogers

Thornton sent along the following telegram shortly thereafter:

DON'T LET MY WORDS CONSTITUTE UNJUSTIFIED PRESSURE BUT I RECOMMEND THE INVITATION OF BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE A LIVE LITTLE EXPERIMENTAL COLLEGE THAT HAS LONG READ YOUR WORK BUT IF YOU ARE ECONOMIZING ENERGY DISREGARD THIS WIRE EXCEPT ITS LAST WORDS VIZ THAT I SIMMER IN HAPPY ANTICIPATION

THORNTON

February 14th 1935

My dearest Thornton,

Why did we not hear about Black Mountain College before, it looks like a perfectly heavenly place and their account of themselves most amusing but now we are in Charleston and every moment we are taken, we could have gone from Chapel Hill which was already a place we liked immensely, but anyway every place left out is an inducement to come back and that is the way we are beginning to feel about it, I guess we are going to be awful lonesome in France, anyway that is the way we are beginning to feel about it. We get to Chicago around the 25th and I do want to talk everything over with you, now that the time is approaching I am getting a little nervous about just what I want to do, and now about our plans. Do you want us to go straight to your flat when we get to Chicago, your flat being of course our flat as we are arriving a few days before the first and what is the address of that flat so that we may have a trunk forwarded from New York, you will be getting a lot of mail for us which I hope is not being a bother. Our address in New Orleans is the Hotel Roosevelt, so will let you know about all that there, we are still enjoying it all immensely, which is very nice of it.

Lots of love and everybody loves you, and somebody just told us that a sister is just like you, which must be nice for the sister

Love

Gtrde

April 2nd 1935

PLEASE FORGIVE DELAY IN ANSWERING HAD AN ODD LITTLE UNIMPORTANT NERVOUS BREAKDOWN PERFECTLY RECOVERED WE ARE REMEMBERING THE GREATNESS OF YOUR VISIT LOVE TO BOTH

THORNTON

Stein's white poodle is the Basket mentioned here, and Pepe was their Chihuahua.

June 8th 1935

My dear Thornton,

Yes you shall and will stay where you like as you like as long as you like and wherever you like, but I think at your date at any of your dates we will be free and so glad to see you, there has not been much sunshine so far, there are nightingales and it is pretty and by the time you come there will be sunshine and so please us and please everybody, yes certainly correct the lectures if you will be so kind that is the proofs I want awfully to see the introduction in print not having seen it otherwise so do whatever you want to do about it, I have almost begun my new work, not really but almost, it remains the geographical history of America with the subtitle the relation of human nature to the human mind, which of course allows me anything and is once more to be the history of the Universe that is our universe, I feel that necessity coming over me again, it is necessity, but I am hesitating to begin but begin it will, and go on it will at least it will, their wills a bouquet, that was always a favorite work of mine, of mine, and some day you will have them play it in Chicago, you see I am beginning, and it will be nice seeing you and we liked your grandparents, it is not a confusion, although it might have been if it so completely had not, so any date you set will do, really and truly do, because Alice and I love you very much and Basket and Pepe will too, in part you might say they already do, too

always

Gtrde

On July 16th of 1935, Wilder wrote to his new friends that "I can no longer conceal from you two that I love you and am looking forward like a madman to gazing into your beautiful eyes. At the heart of love lies the consciousness of the fleetness of time."

October 7th 1935

SPLENDID BEAUTIFUL FASCINATING DEVOTEDLY

THORNTON

their studio at 27 rue de fleurus, with paintings by gris and picasso among others

Thornton felt overstressed during his time in Vienna. His recollection of his meeting with Freud is truly a wonder to behold.

October 14th 1935

Dear Friends,

So I shall see the Rue de Fleurus at last and my friends in it. And the pictures around them.

I still don't know when. I beg you not to change your plans one jot — because I can come to you in either place perfect well. I still haven't the faintest notion when I'm leaving here. There's so much in town here that vexes me, the kind assiduities of authors, playwright and stage directors — such phone-calls, such as When can I talk to you about New York, and Perhaps you can tell me which are the best literary agents. Such meetings in cafe-houses. The way strangers call up and ask for an appointment is the limit. And even if I were hard as nails about putting them off what can I do, if at social gatherings everybody wants to make an engagement for a good long talk, freighted with self-interest.

Excuse all this self-pity.

There are compensations. Prof Freud was told that I had expressed (under pressure, but certainly true) a wish to see him, and he asked to go yesterday at 4:15 to his villa in Grinzing. I was all alone with him for an hour and a half, and it was fine. He's seventy nine. He talked of many things: "I don't do anything any more ... loss of interest ... satiety ... impotence."

"The poet we call Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford...the sonnets are addressed to Wriothesley who was about to marry Oxford's daughter when Oxford fell in love with him himself." "I could not read your latest book ... I threw it away. Why should you treat of an American fanatic; that cannot be treated poetically."

"My sister-in-law admires your Cabala the most; I do not think so." (One of the characters makes a slighting reference to Freud in it!)

"I am no seeker after God. I come of an unbroken line of infidel Jews. My father was a Voltairean. My mother was pious, and until 8 I was pious — but one day my father took me out for a walk in the Prater — I can remember it perfectly and explained to me that there was no way that we could know there was a God; that it didn't do any good to trouble one's head about such; but to live and do one's duty among one's fellow men."

"But I like gods" and he pointed to handsome cases and cases full of images — Greek, Chinese, African, Egyptian — hundreds of images!

Wilder with Robert Davis

"No, my work did not require any particular intellectual gifts - many people could have done it - the quality I had was courage. I was alone, and every discovery I made required courage. Yes, the courage to publish it, but first the courage to think it, to think along that line."

"Just these last week I have formulated a new definition for religion." He stated it and I said I had gathered it already from the close of Totem and Tabu.

"Yes," he said, "it is there, but it is not expressed. Hitherto I have said that religion is an illusion; now I say it has a truth — it has an historical truth. Religion is the recapitulation and the solution of the problems of one's first four years that have been covered over by an amnesia."

"No, I am as unmusical as I am unphilosophic."

"My daughter Anna will be so sorry to have missed you. You can come again? She is older than you — you do not have to be afraid. She is a sensible, reasonable girl. You are not afraid of women? She is a sensible — no nonsense about her. Are you married, may I ask?" !!!

Really a beautiful old man.

What a lucky boy am I. My cup runneth over.

Thornton

stein and toklas with friends

Stein writes her friend a Christmas letter.

December 25th 1935

My dear Thornton,

Every day a letter to you and it is a pleasure to me and I guess a pleasure to you, I am afraid Bennett Cerf is in a mess, too bad he was made to be happy and if you are made to be happy it does not come easy not to be. I have just written them to right away send you the ms. and so if you don't get it will you call them up and after you have it why do what you like with it, having showed it to them I have no further publishing obligations, just had a charming telegram from Woollcott, he sort of replaces Mildred Aldrich in our life a necessary thing to have in one's life, Basket and Pepe had a Christmas dinner, much appreciated, Pepe slept through the lighted crèche but Basket was sweetly sentimental, Alice says that is because Pepe is more honest, well anyway we love you a lot and may it be a glad new year, and we do love you a lot,

Gtrde and Alice

Stein and Wilder in 1937

Stein reported in a March 6th letter of next year that "Pepe the other day slept 26 hours out of the 24, he said what is the use, Basket goes out with me and comes home and sneezes, Pepe and Alice cuddle each other to keep warm." Wilder wrote Stein in April but after that not until June, when he wrote her and Alice (he often called them by the one word name "Twain") that "my brusqueness in this making my apologies doesn't mean that I'm not truly contrite; it merely means that I don't like discussing my everpresent shabby irresponsibility, and that I want to hurry on and talk of happier things."

July 8th 1936

My dearest Thornton,

Yes we are xcited, and you are funny, Alice and I laughed a lot, I am pleased on the whole that you are giving up the University of Chicago for a bit and going to Hollywood, I wish we could be there together, it would be fun, listen Thornton, could they do The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas at Hollywood, that might make a lovely film, I do not know what makes lovely films but that might and they could shoot the background here and in Paris and we could be taken in Hollywood including the puppies Basket and Pepe and we would have enough money to make a leisurely trip across the continent and the Mississippi valley taking on a college boy for the more difficult driving and then we could have an installation in Washington Square and go to and fro for ever. Do you think there is anything in it, I am not just perfectly sure there isn't, and I have done a new chapter bringing Picasso up to date and it's pretty good.

I'd love you to put us on the Hollywood map, but don't think about it twice only perhaps there is something in it.

All that about money was to clear my mind about that chapter romanticism and money and I finally got it right, in a last one, which perhaps they will not buy beginning with it is funny about money. And then going on about man and animals ending with but the thing no animal can do is count, and the thing no animal can know is money and so long as the earth turns around there will be men on it and they will count and they will count money. The queen was in the parlor eating bread and honey the king was in his counting house counting out his money, counting is funny. And then it goes on I think I am getting it clear and then I have to do more about romanticism, as they are going to have a revolution in France I may find out more about that, well anyway, I hope Detroit is a success, I love to be a success, and I love to have all of them be a success along of me, I like that, oh how I do like that and you do not mention it but I guess you have sent the ms. to Random House by now, they are going to do a volume of selected selections in the Modern Library next spring, putting in all the things of mine that make a volume, if you have suggestions will you, but perhaps oh certainly we will see you before then. France is sad, hard xcited just a little lifeless and sad and the weather is rotten but we love you oh how we love you all of us

Gtrde

chateau le colombier culoz where they lived in 43-44

Thornton was planning a trip to Los Angeles that never materialized that year because of the death of Irving Thalberg four days after this letter was mailed.

September 10th 1936

My dear Thornton,

I just read in this morning's paper that Wodehouse says they give him $104,000 for doing nothing at Hollywood they keep him there but they do not use what they ask him to do, now that would just suit us fine, we want a payed which is à la mode here now, and of course we are not valuable like he is, but for considerable less we would write dialogue and titles that they do not want to use, not at all do we insist they use our works printed or unprinted not at all, we just want to run around and do nothing and be payed largely for it, that is as everything they do not want, it is a pleasant xtravagance and we are just pining for pleasant xtravagance, so keep your eyes and ears open, if they want us we will come, we would love to be payed largely and we are kind of tired of just staying here besides it is coming too high to live in Europe like that, we are nutting in the woods and then Alice makes cakes of the nuts, which is a pleasant life too, but a paid vacation and it might be with you dear Thornton and lots of love

Gtrde

This is the first in a series. You can purchase the collected letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder here.

in her studio, 1920

"Black Books" - Nils Lofgren (mp3)

"I Won't Be Left" - Tegan and Sara (mp3)

"The Book of Love" - Marissa Nadler (mp3)

alice b. toklas