A Winding Literary Hoax

Many names in this story. You can listen to it on the page; it says it’s a 22 minute listen.

The erotic poems of Bilitis

A lush translation of this late-discovered lesbian poet added to the legacy of Sappho, but there was a trickster at work

In 1894, a German archaeologist named Herr G Heim made a groundbreaking discovery. On the island of Cyprus, he excavated a tomb that belonged to a hitherto unknown ancient female poet by the name of Bilitis. Carved on the walls surrounding her sarcophagus were more than 150 ancient Greek poems in which Bilitis recounted her life, from her childhood in Pamphylia in present-day Turkey to her adventures on the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus, where she would eventually come to rest. Heim diligently copied down this treasure trove of poems, which had not seen the light of day for more than two millennia. They would have remained little known – accessible only to a small, scholarly audience who could decipher ancient Greek – had a Frenchman named Pierre Louÿs not taken it upon himself to hunt down Heim’s Greek edition, hot off the press, and translated Bilitis’s poetry into French for a broader reading public that same year (published as Les Chansons de Bilitis or The Songs of Bilitis). Bilitis might have been an obscure historical figure – no other ancient author mentions encountering her or her poetry – but the cultural and literary significance of Heim’s discovery was not lost on Louÿs. For, in several of her poems, Bilitis revealed that she crossed paths with classical antiquity’s most renowned and controversial female poet: Sappho.

Art Nouveau painting of people by the sea, with a woman playing a lyre and others swimming and relaxing on the beach. — *From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris*

Sappho (c630-c570 BCE) lived in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, where she composed lyric poetry – songs performed to the accompaniment of the lyre. Her poetry was widely admired throughout antiquity. Plato dubbed her ‘the tenth Muse’. In the 1st century CE, the Greek philosopher Plutarch recalled listening to Sappho’s poetry performed at symposia – wine-drinking parties – remarking that her words were so beautiful, he was moved to put his wine cup down while he listened.

Photograph of ancient papyrus fragments with Greek text displayed in a black frame on a white background. — *A 3rd-century Egyptian fragment of Sappho’s poetry from papyri found at Oxyrhynchus (modern-day Al-Bahnasa in Egypt). Courtesy the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK*

Sappho was significant enough to have her work copied by scholars at the Library of Alexandria a few hundred years after she lived – the same scholars who first systematised Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into the books we are familiar with today. Of the nine book rolls of Sappho’s work these scholars produced, only a sliver survives. There is one complete poem, the so-called ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’, in which Sappho prays to the goddess of love to bring a female lover back into her good graces. The rest are scraps. Our knowledge of her poetry relies largely on papyrus fragments and partial quotations from later authors. As the classicist Emily Wilson put it in the London Review of Books: ‘Reconstructing Sappho from what remains is like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw.’

Among these precious fragments, we find some of the most stirring and exceptional representations of desire in all ancient Greek literature. In fragment 31, for example, Sappho sees a man sitting across from a woman and listening to her sweet voice and lovely laugh. She compares him to a god, but then this man, ‘whoever he is’, quickly fades to the background, and Sappho spends the rest of the fragment expressing in hair-raising detail the effects that beholding this woman has on her:

… oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead – or almost
I seem to me …

(All translations of Sappho by Anne Carson)

Passionate desire, what the Greeks called eros, is no trifling matter for Sappho. In fragment 130 , Sappho calls eros the ‘melter of limbs’ who habitually stirs her, a ‘sweetbitter [glukupikron] unmanageable creature who steals in …’ If we are accustomed to think of love as bittersweet, Sappho inverts this: eros starts off sweet (gluku) but turns bitter (pikron), as some distance or barrier often comes between Sappho and her female loves, as in fragment 31 above.

We find expressions of the devastating stakes of eros among male lyric poets, too, but in those contexts, the poets sing of desire for beautiful male youths or ‘beloveds’. In classical Greek culture, this form of male homoeroticism, known as pederasty, is elevated as the most admired, virtuous, manly form of love, even superior to heterosexual relations. From our earliest Greek literary sources onwards, women’s desires and bodies are problematic. According to the poet Hesiod, Zeus invented the first woman – Pandora, a ‘beautiful evil thing’ – as a punishment for men. Her opening of the jar – not a box but rather a pithos, a giant storage jug as big as the human body – symbolises the misogynist view of women as leaky containers whose insatiable appetites, whether for food or for sex, must be controlled and regulated by men.

Ancient Greek pottery shows a seated figure reading and four standing figures, decorative red-figure design on a black vase. — *A hydria (water jar) possibly depicting Sappho reading and surrounded by attendants. Greek, c450 BCE. Courtesy the British Museum, London*

poem titled ‘Types of Women’, by Sappho’s contemporary Semonides of Amorgos, showcases this strain of misogyny on steroids. The poem attacks women through the form of a catalogue, listing different types of women and the animal-antecedents to whom they owe their shameful, negative traits. The only acceptable type of woman Semonides describes is the bee-woman, the ideal wife who directs her desire entirely towards enriching her husband’s household by bearing him legitimate children. This ideal woman never so much as mentions sex when in conversation with other women.

In comparison with this misogynist tradition, Sappho’s representation of women and desire could not be more different. Take fragment 16, which opens thus:

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
what you love.

In these lines, Sappho articulates an expansive vision of beauty. She lists the different kinds of armies that men find the most beautiful, using the form of the catalogue to invoke Homer’s Iliad, a war story whose plot and heroic values are underpinned by the violent exchange of women as property between men. Sappho does not tell us whether or not she thinks armies are beautiful. She simply says that the most beautiful thing is what(ever) we love (and therefore subtly claims that men think armies beautiful because they love war).

Sappho recreates through memory a single person who is beautiful because she is loved

She then explains her point by citing the example of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, on behalf of whom the Greeks fight the Trojan War. Accounts differ as to whether Helen sailed to Troy willingly to be with the Trojan prince Paris or was forcibly taken. Rather than castigate Helen as the epitome of evil – female desire – as most traditions do, Sappho simply states that she left behind her husband, children and parents, and sailed to Troy, because something (the poem is fragmentary; perhaps desire itself?) led her astray.

Art Nouveau painting of two individuals playing a pan flute together against a backdrop of blue sky and clouds. — *From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris*

The point is this: even she who ‘overcame everyone in beauty’ pursued what she found the most beautiful thing on earth, what(ever) she loved. And this, Sappho says, reminds her of a woman named Anaktoria, who is gone. Sappho says:

I would rather see her lovely step
and the motion of light on her face
than chariots of Lydians or ranks
of footsoldiers in arms.

For Sappho, the beauty of armies pales in comparison with the beauty of Anaktoria because Sappho loves Anaktoria. ‘Ranks of footsoldiers’ behold women as exchangeable, dehumanised objects of beauty, not love. Sappho recreates through memory a single person, Anaktoria, who is beautiful because she is loved. What makes Sappho’s articulation of eros so exceptional, then, is how she challenges the dominating, misogynist attitudes about women and their desire as expressed by the male-authored Greek literary tradition. As the classicist Ella Haselswerdt writes in ‘Re-Queering Sappho’ (2016):

Sappho’s fragments show us eros and pleasure for their own sake, not as an exchange of property, the exploitation of one for the sake of the other, or in order to achieve virtue in the eyes of a moralising philosopher like Plato or Aristotle.

From antiquity onwards, however, Sappho’s expressions of lesbian eros attracted a medley of misogynistic and homophobic responses. In the 5th century BCE, following the tradition of pathologising women’s desires (whether homo or hetero), Athenian comic playwrights transformed Sappho into the stock character of a sex-crazed woman, insatiably hungry for men. In his Heroides, a collection of literary letters in which female heroines express their grievances to the men who have mistreated them, the Roman poet Ovid composed a letter in Sappho’s voice. His version of Sappho claims that her love for a young boatman named Phaon surpasses the thousands of loves she has had with girls on Lesbos. The ancient biographical tradition performs the ultimate act of heterosexualising Sappho by claiming that she leapt to her death from the cliffs of Leucas because Phaon would not reciprocate her love. Flash-forward to the late 19th century, when archaeologists were beginning to find papyrus fragments in Egypt containing new bits of Sappho: as Miriam Kamil writes in ‘I Shall — #$% You And *@$# You’ (2019), many English translators censored Sappho’s lesbianism by changing female pronouns to male.

Given this history, it is difficult to overstate the significance of Heim’s discovery of Bilitis’s poetry: here, at last, was the material evidence and textual perspective of a female contemporary to Sappho and her lovers.

The catch? ‘Bilitis’ was fake.

Bilitis’s poetry and the story of its discovery were all the invention of Pierre Louÿs, the man who purported to have translated her poems for the first time. We might be tempted to classify Louÿs’s concoction as a forgery, a text created by a person who intends to deceive an audience by passing it off as something other than what it is. However, upon closer inspection, The Songs of Bilitis is a thinly veiled literary hoax, a creation that is more of a literary game than a genuine attempt at deception.

Louÿs was no stranger to the contemporary literary scene as both a translator and an imitator of (authentic) ancient texts. He also happened to be close friends with Oscar Wilde, sharing with him literary interests in art’s power to imitate and deceive, as well as erotic interests in sexual tourism in French-colonised Algeria. Only one year before releasing The Songs of Bilitis, Louÿs had published a French translation of epigrams by the 1st-century BCE poet Meleager of Gadara (now the city of Umm Qais in Jordan). It is likely that Louÿs found inspiration for fabricating Bilitis in the genre of the epigram itself. Epigrams are short poems originally written upon objects such as pots, walls or tombs – the site of Bilitis’s discovery. As a ‘lower’ literary genre, epigrams are often sexually explicit. Louÿs lifted some of Bilitis’s songs wholesale (with minor tweaks) from the erotic Book 5 of the Greek Anthology, a collection of thousands of Greek poems. Finally, by composing epigrams under the name of Bilitis, Louÿs took his cue from an ancient authorial move associated with the epigram: some epigram authors, remaining anonymous themselves, composed epigrams pseudonymously, that is, by attaching someone else’s name (often that of a dead author) to their epigram. Some of the epigrams in the Greek Anthology purport to be composed by Sappho herself, something Louÿs no doubt had in mind as he chose ‘Bilitis’ for his authorial mask.

The book was published amidst intense cultural debates about the quality and nature of Sappho’s lesbian desire

Louÿs ‘plays’ the forger and wants his readers to appreciate the cleverness of his performance. One clear example of this lies in the fiction Louÿs creates around the poems’ provenance. In The Songs of Bilitis, Louÿs inserts a prefatory ‘Life of Bilitis’, in which he narrates how Herr G Heim excavated Bilitis’s tomb and brought her poetry to light. The choice of this name encodes a clever joke: when read with a German pronunciation, Herr G Heim becomes Herr Geheim, aka ‘Sir Secret’. The real origin of Bilitis’s poetry – not Herr G Heim’s pickaxe but Pierre Louÿs’s pen – is a secret lying in plain sight for clever readers to detect. We also learn from this preface that Bilitis had a Greek father and a Phoenician mother, but that she might have never known her father, given that he is nowhere mentioned in her poetry. It is tempting to see Bilitis’s dubious paternity as another place where Louÿs tips his hat as Bilitis’s literary progenitor.

Art print of a nude dancer with flowing ribbons flanked by two red figures playing flutes against a dark sky. — *From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris*

Another playful way that Louÿs generates an aura of mystery around Bilitis’s poetry is the inclusion of a table of contents that labels some of the poems ‘untranslated’. Readers who are taken in by the ruse might believe that, given the sexual nature of many of the songs, some of them were too explicit to translate for a popular audience. But for readers who get the game Louÿs is playing, this performance of self-censorship puts Bilitis in the same category as actual ancient writers such as Catullus, Martial or Juvenal, whose sexual obscenities were handled in 19th-century translations by leaving them in untranslated Latin.

Even if The Songs of Bilitis was more of a literary hoax than a forgery, Louÿs nonetheless followed the forger’s playbook in targeting the desires of his contemporary audience. Not only did his ‘discovery’ hit the shelves as new papyrus fragments of Sappho’s poetry were being excavated in Egypt, but the book was also published amid intense cultural debates about the quality and nature of Sappho’s lesbian desire. For Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien – two prominent lesbian intellectuals (and close friends of Louÿs’s) – it was irrelevant that Bilitis was fake: they praised Louÿs for representing an unequivocally lesbian Sappho, and they went on to publish their own translations and imitations of Sappho’s poetry.

The greatest badge of honour for Louÿs’s literary creation, however, came from its most incendiary critic: the German philologist giant Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. In 1896, Wilamowitz published a scathing 16-page review of The Songs of Bilitis. His ire did not mellow as time passed, for he reprinted this same review as the centrepiece to his monograph Sappho und Simonides (1913). The opening of the review is worth quoting in full (my translation from German):

A volume of French poetry, some of which is disgustingly lewd, may seem unsuitable for review in this place: but I find it worthy of consideration, and seize this opportunity to address matters long dear to my heart. I’m concerned with the purity of a great woman: I’m not afraid to put my hands in shit.

The ‘great woman’ Wilamowitz refers to here is not Bilitis, of course, but Sappho. Bilitis is the filth that has corrupted her ‘purity’, by which Wilamowitz means Sappho’s (hetero)sexual chastity. In this regard, Wilamowitz used his review of contemporary French poetry to rekindle an argument made about Sappho in the early 19th century by the scholar Friedrich Welcker. Welcker wrote a book called Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheil befreyt (1816), or ‘Sappho: Freed from a Prevailing Prejudice’, in which he argued that Sappho was not, in the lingo of the time, a ‘tribade’, but rather a schoolteacher preparing girls for society and marriage with men. Wilamowitz follows the path paved by Welcker, claiming that it is later readers such as Louÿs who bring their own ‘unnaturalness’ (Unnatur) to Sappho’s poetry.

Wilamowitz’s fiery takedown did not succeed in quashing the hype

The motive of Wilamowitz’s review is to purify Sappho of lesbian eroticism via her association with Bilitis (whose primary female lover is not, in fact, Sappho, but rather someone called Mnasidika, whose beauty Sappho herself praises in fragment 82a: ‘Mnasidika more finely shaped than soft Gyrinno …’). Curiously, however, most of his review is spent criticising various poetic and linguistic aspects of Louÿs’s poetry. Wilamowitz plays the philological critic in unveiling the many anachronistic details littered throughout the poems, observing that they suit more the literature of the later Hellenistic and imperial period (when Greece was under Roman control) rather than the ‘true Hellenic’ (ie, classical) spirit of Sappho’s time. Wilamowitz is as upset at Louÿs’s anachronistic mixing of literary genres and language as he is by Sappho’s sexual mixing with Bilitis. For him, The Songs of Bilitis presents both a moral and textual threat to a supposedly pure Sappho. Wilamowitz’s review promulgates a misogynist, homophobic theory about Sappho, and it cloaks this mission in the seemingly objective rhetoric of classical philology.

Wilamowitz’s fiery takedown did not succeed in quashing the hype around The Songs of Bilitis. In fact, the opposite occurred. Louÿs himself cited Wilamowitz’s review in the bibliography to the expanded 1898 edition of The Songs of Bilitis. Why would Louÿs draw attention to such negative reception? Wilamowitz’s eye as a philologist laid bare for readers all the potential sources that Louÿs imitated as he composed his fake ancient poems, thus highlighting the scholarly work that went into making Bilitis. Wilamowitz takes Louÿs’s poems so seriously as imitations that he treats them as if they actually were translations of authentic ancient Greek poems. The critic’s takedown becomes the forger’s badge of pride.

Black and white photo of an elderly man in a suit sitting on a chair in front of bookshelves. — *Professor Dr Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, c1917. Courtesy Wikipedia*

Still, Louÿs’s bold citation of Wilamowitz’s homophobic review should give us pause. If Wilamowitz was concerned to carry Welcker’s torch and purify Sappho from the taint of female homoeroticism, Louÿs did not exactly free Sappho from male-centred, misogynist approaches to her poetry, a tradition that, as we’ve seen, was underway already in classical antiquity.

Although he represented a homoerotic Sappho – and received praise from contemporary lesbian readers for doing so – Louÿs in fact had drawn inspiration for the character of Bilitis from his sexual involvement with a 16-year-old Algerian girl. Louÿs invented a literary fiction that fit squarely in a 19th-century French literary tradition of male-authored, voyeuristic, orientalising portrayals of lesbian desire, a tradition grounded in the material conditions and power dynamics of European colonialism and sexual tourism. In this regard, Sappho and Bilitis were simply springboards for Louÿs to cater to a European readership hungry for images of the exoticised lesbian other.

These lesbians took the licence that they, too, could participate in the contested afterlife of Sappho

But this is not the end of Bilitis’s story. Some 60 years after the ‘discovery’ of Bilitis, a remarkable coincidence occurred, igniting a new legacy for Bilitis that Louÿs could never have predicted. In 1955, The Songs of Bilitis, previously available only through limited, expensive and privately printed editions, was republished by Avon, a press that sought to rival Pocket Books (the first mass-market paperback publisher in the United States) by making a wider range of literature – from science fiction to smut – accessible to a popular audience in the form of cheap paperbacks. That same autumn, four lesbian couples gathered in San Francisco to form a secret club. They desired a space where lesbians could socialise beyond the surveillance of their parents, families and employers, and outside of gay bars, which were frequently subject to police raids.

When it came time to make a name for their group, they had to be careful not to pick anything that could put their members at risk, given the intense homophobia of the McCarthy era. Nancy, a factory worker whose last name we don’t know, suggested ‘Daughters of Bilitis’. She was met with blank stares. Nancy explained: she had encountered a translation of Bilitis’s poetry in a volume by Pierre Louÿs. She had brought that very volume with her to the meeting. What intrigued Nancy was that this Bilitis was a contemporary of the ancient Greek poet Sappho on the island of Lesbos in the late 7th century BCE. Nancy’s partner Priscilla chimed in: ‘“Bilitis” would mean something to us, but not to any outsider. If anyone asked us, we could always say we belong to a poetry club.’ The women agreed to name themselves after this obscure figure. Thus was born the ‘Daughters of Bilitis’ (or DOB), a group that would become the first lesbian social-political organisation in the US, active until 1995.

It is easy to take a cynical view of these lesbians’ decision to name themselves after a fictive ancient lesbian. The women were cognisant of the fact that Louÿs had invented Bilitis, but that did not deter them from making something out of what was available to them – and conducive to their precarious social conditions – at the time. If these lesbians took anything from Louÿs, it was the licence that they, too, could participate in the contested afterlife of the fragmentary Sappho. Unlike Louÿs, they would author a chapter under Bilitis’s name by and for lesbians.

Lit Hub Florida!

Waiting for lunch to digest so I can go work on the driveway while the temp is over 10 degrees, I’m reading my weekly Literary Hub newsletter. And what to my eyes should appear, but them saying today is National Florida Day! I’d still rather not be in Florida (too humid for my sinuses,) but the idea is pretty good, in and around the doom and violence in some of the day’s events. There is all sorts of stuff on this page, including Dave Barry, but skip to following pages for better bits of escape. I’m going to post a snippet about FL literature (yes, literature comes from FL, too, and it’s darned good! I love Carl Hiaasen!)

Snippet:

Today, January 25, is National Florida Day.

Despite being the epicenter of contemporary American book banning, Florida has a lush literary history, and is the subject of ongoing fascination for both writers and readers across the country. To celebrate the literary pedigree of the Sunshine State, and to combat the winter weather that is burying pretty much everyone else this weekend, we present to you a Florida reading list. This is by no means meant to be complete, of course. Just a little something to get you warmed up:

Joy Williams, Ill Nature
Amy Hempel on Ill Nature: Joy Williams lived for years in Florida, in the Keys, and was lucky to have known parts of it that no longer exist. This is one of the occasions on which her anger is also a form of mourning. “Neverglades” chronicles the destruction of an enormous percentage of this singular ecosystem, leaving it “a horror show of extirpated species.” Of Big Sugar’s role in its destruction, Williams suggests we “think of the NRA with a sweet tooth.” “That the Everglades still exist is a collective illusion,” she writes, “shared by both those who care and those who don’t.” She describes the state as “attuned to growth, on autocatalytic open throttle.”

Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

Richard Deming on Dust Tracks on a Road: Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, located outside Orlando, was one of the first towns in the United States to be incorporated and run by African Americans. She described it as “a pure Negro town— charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all.” Zora’s handsome father, John Hurston, a rugged, physically commanding Baptist preacher with a gift for lyric turns of language—perhaps the one gift he passed down to his daughter—would even become a three‑ term mayor in the town.

Eatonville had been a defining place for her, and although she would be forced to leave it as a teenager, it stayed with her for as long as she lived. The town and its habits, its inhabitants, all pressed knowledge and lore into the topographic folds of her mind. On benches and apple boxes and milk crates sat people at Joe Clarke’s store, the “heart and soul” of the town. When it was really humid, they gathered on the porch, shirts loosened, shooing big Florida flies, and fanning gently their foreheads. Inside and out, people talked and gossiped, telling tales large and small, real and invented.

Lauren Groff, Florida

Grace Flahive on Florida: Some books are books. Other books are places. More than any story collection I’ve read in my life, Lauren Groff’s Florida feels like tearing through the page and stepping into a fully realized portrait of the state, living and breathing and dangled with Spanish moss, as panthers pass through the shadows. In “The Midnight Zone,” a mother staying in a remote cabin with her two young boys falls from a stool and hits her head and finds herself traveling outside of her body, amongst the thick of the trees. In “Eyewall,” a woman hunkers down as a hurricane slams her home, and when the storm passes, a miracle is revealed: a single, intact chicken egg sits, gleaming, where the front steps had been.

These stories are rich, at times hallucinogenic, and unforgettable.

Carl Hiaasen, the whole oeuvre

Neil Nyren on the works of Carl Hiaasen: The books are all set in Florida, because of course they are. Besides being the place where Hiaasen was born and raised, and lives in and loves, it is a place utterly unique in both its natural beauty and its level of venality. “Every pillhead fugitive felon in America winds up in Florida eventually,” muses a detective in Double Whammy (1987). “The Human Sludge Factor—it all drops to the South.” Another detective in Skinny Dip (2004), who is originally from Minnesota, concurs: “[In the upper Midwest] the crimes were typically forthright and obvious, ignited by common greed, lust or alcohol. Florida was more complicated and extreme, and nothing could be assumed. Every scheming shithead in America turned up here sooner or later, such were the opportunities for predators.” Tied to that, gloats a crooked (and entirely uncredentialed) plastic surgeon in Skin Tight (1989), “One of the wondrous things about Florida was the climate of unabashed corruption. There was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you.”

Dantiel W. Moniz, Milk Blood Heat

Grace Flahive on Milk Blood Heat: Each of the stories in Dantiel W. Moniz’s collection are the type you experience twice. First, you inhale the story (Moniz’s spellbinding prose doesn’t offer any slower option). Then, each story lingers within you, as your mind digests the inflection points, the double meanings, the emotional dynamics that Moniz has laid bare.

Set primarily in Jacksonville, Moniz’s stories trace the contours of her characters’ inner lives, including private pains and unspeakable secrets, showing us ordinary people with extraordinary things broiling just beneath the surface. Each protagonist grapples with something too dark and unwieldly for one person to carry—girlhood grief, the loss of a pregnancy, hate spun from faith, and a near-death experience, just to name a few. But Moniz’s characters find agency in the impossible—in “Tongues,” a young girl defies her community’s hypocrisy, and in “The Hearts of Our Enemies,” a mother delivers a delicious act of retribution. The collection’s title hints at the visceral stories within, and the prose delivers—as well as milk, blood and heat, this is a fully embodied world of sweat, tears, ocean water, and tiny, haunting limbs. As a reader, I let myself be swept away. As a writer, I was taking notes on Moniz’s endless skill.

An Interesting Bit!

Telling of the Scuba Spider & the Slow-Motion Climate Crisis Storm by Jerileewei

How a French Quarter Phantasm Teaches Writers to Stop Drowning Their Audience Read on Substack

Recently some of the Cajun Chronicles Podcast Corporation writer staff enjoyed a well attended writers conference at a ritzy island resort about as far away from Louisiana as you can get. Some of us were aware of the show Mother Nature was putting on there. Not only in terms of their native flowers and fruits, but also the job certain natural Apex Micro-Predators play around the world in the grand scheme of pest control and climate change globally.

Once home, those lessons and lessons about writing creative technical content were sources of wonderment and inspiration. Louisiana is no stranger to all things buggy, nor the climate change side-effects we have always been experiencing with rising waters all around us. Similarly, those among us struggle with solutions to writing and broadcasting the messages we all need to heed on such important topics.

Great Heron casting a scary shadow over the bayou for the Scuba Spider.

A Fishing Spider Story Exercise In Creative Nonfiction Oddity

The thing about the Louisiana bayou country is that its weirdness is not just for show, cher. It’s a matter of absolute, high-stakes survival. It is an ecosystem that has perfected the art of the improbable. Take the Dark Fishing Spider, Dolomedes tenebrosus, the one whose leg span can cover half your hand. She is one of the largest spiders in North America, yet she operates with the silent precision of a naval scout.

You’re floating placidly in the moss-draped gloom of the Atchafalaya Basin, and there she is, perched carrément (directly) on a gnarled bald cypress knee. Her nickname is Scuba Spider. Unlike her cousin, the Six-spotted Fishing Spider (D. triton), who is a permanent waterside resident, D. tenebrosus often wanders about. She’s basically a French Quarter phantasm land tourist with aquatic superpowers. Uniquely, her front four long legs still rest on the water like silent radar antennae.

Here’s the first oddity: She doesn’t spin a trap-web to catch supper. She uses the very surface of the water as a vast, vibrating, liquid snare. That surface tension, which allows a single droplet of dew to hold its perfect sphere, is her hunting ground. To your amazement, a Yellow Fever (Aedes aegypti) mosquito lands, an unlucky Cocahoe Minnow (Fundulus grandis) minnow surfaces, or you see a mayfly struggling.

Those water disturbances, even a tiny ripple, are all the information she needs. She bolts across the water, comme ça (like that), defying gravity and the laws of physics with a waxy-haired gait, grabs her prey, and retreats just as swiftly. She is an apex-predator extraordinaire! As an Eight-Legged Lagniappe

The truly bizarre part of her story happens when danger comes. If a hungry Great Heron swoops too close, or a massive Alligator Gar glides by, this spider doesn’t run toward the shore. She, as we say in Cajun French, simply plonges (plunges/dives). Happily, for her, she’s not drowning. She’s engaging in a peculiar act of biological brilliance.

Her entire body is covered in fine, dense hairs. As she slips beneath the surface, these hairs trap a thin, glistening layer of air, her personal silvery scuba suit, that surrounds her like a portable bubble. She becomes a living submarine. She can cling to an underwater root, or the submerged bark of a Bald Cypress tree.

There she sits, breathing her little pocket of swamp-air, and waiting out the trouble for up to half an hour. She makes the L’Affaire Fini threat simply disappear. That fact, c’est vrai (that’s true), is a mighty fine trick.

Now, here is where the bayou’s natural spider oddity connects to a deeper, more human reality. She shows how to tell scientific facts about climate change and its effect on nature factually without putting your audience to sleep. That’s because the constantly-evolving existential crisis of the climate often feels a lot like that of the ol’ White Heron. It’s a huge bad case of the vois-là, an inevitable danger that you can’t run away from.

The way some creative technical writers are trying to capture that reality is just as strange as a certain spider species’ scuba dive. When you can’t outrun the misère (misery/trouble), you have to find a new way to tell the story.

Silloette of Great Heron and its shadow over the image of a sinking Louisiana into the bayou and a Scuba Spider.

This is so much like very act of writing creative nonfiction through the climate crisis has its own set of odd, profound, and fun facts:

Odd Fun Facts of Writing the Existential Reality

1. The “Slow Violence” Problem Demands New Forms

The climate crisis rarely involves a neat, dramatic explosion. It’s mostly “slow violence.” The gradual, almost invisible rising of the water, the creeping salinity, the erosion of the marsh. The odd challenge for the Louisiana writer, is that they have to invent entirely new, often experimental, narrative techniques just to make a slow-motion disaster feel as urgent as a gunshot.

This is why you sometimes see writers like us using techniques like fractured chronology, list-memoirs, or braided essays. They are desperate attempts to make the un-dramatic and continuous nature of environmental trauma feel viscéral (visceral) to the reader.

2. The Rise of the “Carrier Bag Narrative”

Forget the epic traditional story of the single hero conquering the storm. Many climate writers are advocating for author Ursula K. Le Guin’s concept of the “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” The odd fun fact here is that the best climate stories shouldn’t have a single, satisfying plot arc (a triumph!). They should be a messy “bag” full of diverse voices, ongoing processes, small acts of loss, and fragments of hope.

Strive for mirroring the complex, non-linear reality of the crisis. This form rejects the idea that a single person can ‘solve’ the problem, instead emphasizing the power of collective, ongoing endurance. (snip)

Opinions, Please?

(I just read this beautiful substack; his stuff is always beautiful, but this one struck me as one I want to share here. -A.)

The Bridge of Quiet Things: How a Family Found Each Other in the Stillness by Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA

null Read on Substack

📖 A Lived Truth

This is not a work of fiction. It’s from my clinical notes, drawn from the quiet corners of a family learning how to listen, how to see, and how to love. What follows is Maya’s story—and ours too. It began with misunderstanding and grew into music. It was shaped by silence, and strengthened by learning how to hear what was never said out loud.

—

🧠 Main Characters

• Maya (17) – A brilliant, autistic teen who expresses herself through music but struggles with verbal communication and sensory overload. Her inner world is rich, but rarely understood.

• Daniel (45) – Her father, a pragmatic man who misinterpreted Maya’s behavior as defiance. He’s emotionally shut down but carries deep guilt.

• Leah (43) – Her mother, who tried to advocate for Maya but became isolated in the process. She’s exhausted, but still hopeful.

• Eli (15) – Maya’s younger brother, who felt invisible growing up. He’s witty, sarcastic, and secretly protective of Maya.

—

I. The Fracture

The house had grown quiet over the years—not the peaceful kind, but the kind that echoed with things unsaid. Leah sat at the kitchen table, her fingers wrapped around a chipped mug, staring at the steam like it held answers. Upstairs, Maya rocked gently in her chair, headphones on, fingers twitching over her keyboard. Her music was her voice now.

Eli moved through the house like a ghost. He didn’t slam doors or raise his voice. He just existed in the spaces between tension. And Daniel—he hadn’t been home in months. He lived alone now, in a small apartment filled with regrets and unopened letters.

Maya had always been different. Brilliant, but misunderstood. Her silence wasn’t emptiness—it was survival. Her meltdowns weren’t tantrums—they were overload. But Daniel never saw that. He saw defiance. He saw rebellion. And slowly, the family unraveled.

—

II. The Breaking Point

It happened at school. Maya, overwhelmed by noise and light and chaos, collapsed in the hallway. Hands over her ears, rocking, humming. Someone filmed it. Of course they did.

Eli found the video first. He didn’t speak. Just slid his phone across the table to Leah and walked out.

That night, Leah called Daniel.

“She was screaming,” she said. “And no one heard her.”

Daniel arrived the next morning. He stood in the doorway like a stranger. Eli didn’t look up. Maya didn’t come down. Leah didn’t cry. Not anymore.

“She doesn’t talk much,” Leah said. “But she plays.”

Daniel didn’t understand. Not yet.

—

III. The Song

Eli knocked on Maya’s door. “Can I record you?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t say no.

He sat on the floor, phone in hand, and watched as Maya’s fingers danced across the keys. The melody was aching, defiant, beautiful. It was everything she couldn’t say.

He uploaded it that night. The Quiet Between Us.

The video spread. Comments poured in. People who felt seen. People who understood.

Daniel watched it on repeat, tears streaking his face.

“I didn’t know she could feel like that,” he said.

“She always did,” Leah replied. “You just didn’t know how to listen.”

—

IV. The Shift

Daniel knocked on Maya’s door. She didn’t look up, but she didn’t turn away.

“I heard your song,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you sooner.”

Maya reached for her keyboard. Played a single note. Then another.

Daniel sat beside her, silent. Listening.

Leah watched from the hallway, hand over her heart.

Eli uploaded another video: The Quiet Between Us – Live.

They began to change. Slowly. Imperfectly.

Daniel stopped trying to fix. He started trying to understand.

Leah stopped carrying everything alone. She let herself be held.

Eli stopped disappearing. He became the bridge.

And Maya? She kept playing.

—

V. The Reconnection

They sat together in the living room. Maya played. Eli recorded. Leah smiled. Daniel closed his eyes and listened.

No one spoke. But everything was said.

They weren’t perfect. But they were real.

And in the quiet between them, they found something louder than words.

They found each other.

🎵 Epilogue: The Song That Speaks (Follows graphic)

—

🎵 Epilogue: The Song That Speaks

Maya’s music became a language for others.

Eli started a podcast for neurodivergent families.

Daniel and Leah spoke at workshops. Not as experts—but as learners.

Their story wasn’t about fixing.

It was about listening.

About loving each other—not in spite of difference,

but with it.

Because love isn’t always loud.

Sometimes, it’s quiet.

And sometimes, the quiet is where love begins.

This is more than a story. It’s a lived truth. Signed not with ink—but with the quiet strength of love, survival, and rediscovery.

In Honor and Memory

Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’

Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Mars-Jones and more recall the high style and libidinous freedom of a writer who ‘was not a gateway to gay literature but a main destination’

‘He showed me gay fiction could also be high art’

Alan Hollinghurst

British novelist

Edmund White’s luminous career was in part a matter of often dark history: he lived through it all. He was a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a “cure”; he was a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York; he was a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and 90s. All these things he wrote about, in a long-term commitment to autofiction – a narrative adventure he embarked on with no knowledge of where or when the story would end. He is often called a chronicler of these extraordinary epochs, but he was something much more than that, an artist with an utterly distinctive sensibility, humorous, elegant, avidly international. You read him not just for the unsparing account of sexual life but for the thrill of his richly cultured mind and his astonishingly observant eye.

What amazed me about A Boy’s Own Story, when it came out in 1982, was that a stark new candour about sexual experience should be conveyed with such gorgeous luxuriance of style, such richness of metaphor and allusion. This new genre, gay fiction, could also be high art, and almost at once a worldwide bestseller! It was an amazing moment, which would be liberating for generations of queer writers who followed. These younger writers Edmund himself followed and fostered with unusual generosity – I feel my whole career as a novelist has been sustained by his example and encouragement. In novels and peerless memoirs right up to the last year of his life he kept telling the truth about what he had done and thought and felt – he was a matchless explorer of the painful comedy of ageing and failing physically while the libido stayed insatiably strong. It’s hard to take in that this magnificent experiment has now come to a close. (snip-MORE)

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Jonathan Joss: Three roles the late US actor was known for

Ian Casey BBC News

US actor Jonathan Joss, known for his roles in King of the Hill and Parks and Recreation, has died aged 59.

Joss was shot dead, in what his husband called a homophobic hate crime, although police in Texas say there is no evidence of this.

Joss’s broad career spanned different genres and platforms, appearing in films, sitcoms, animations, stage productions and more.

He has been credited with increasing representation of Native Americans on screen. Here are three of the notable performances he will be remembered for.

John Redcorn in King of the Hill

In the animated sitcom King of the Hill, Joss voiced the character of John Redcorn, a Native American “licensed New Age healer” from season two onwards.

The sitcom centres around the Hill family and is set in the fictional town of Arlen, in suburban Texas.

For the first four seasons, Redcorn is having an affair with Hank Hill’s neighbour, Nancy Gribble. Nancy’s husband Dale is oblivious.

While a flawed character, Redcorn is known for his kindness and calm persona, and for championing his Native American heritage.

In season four, during perhaps his most notable storyline, Redcorn reveals an ongoing battle between his tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, saying he hoped to regain Native American land from the government.

Considering Redcorn a “true friend”, Dale decides to help him with the lawsuit filed against the government, by introducing him to the Freedom of Information Act.

Redcorn then permanently ends his14-year affair with Nancy, out of respect for Dale. The affair is not revealed to Dale and he happily heads home with Nancy.

Full story: King of the Hill and Parks and Rec actor shot dead

Author Dustin Tahmahkera once described Redcorn as “arguably the most developed and complex indigenous character in US sitcom history, thanks in critical part… to the on-and-offscreen work of Joss”. (snip-MORE)

I Found This Beautiful To Read, So I Want To Share

The writing style is frank. The title directly beneath is the link. -A

“Sex, Love, And Longing In 1970’s New York: Edmund White on His Past Lovers“

“He was a Peter Pan, the puer aeternus. I was abject in my longing for him.”

By Edmund White

Throughout the 1970s I was in love with Keith McDermott, ten years younger than me. When I first met him, I was living in a third-floor walk-up studio on Horatio Street in the West Village. He was living across the street with Larry Kert (he’s dead), the original young male lead in West Side Story. I was one of Larry’s rainy-day fucks—he’d call me midday or early evening when he was horny and the weather forbade open-air cruising (snow, rain, or tropical heat).

Maybe I met Keith at Larry’s or through someone else; I don’t remember. Keith was living rent-free with Larry. They’d started out as lovers but now, after a year, Keith was expected to help in maintaining their big, luxurious apartment by cleaning and doing chores—and disappearing when Larry had a trick he was bringing home.The sound of the whirring wheels as he came racing around the corner and glided to a halt became the very whisper of desire for me.

Keith wanted to move and I had a lead on an eight-room prewar apartment on the Upper West Side, a block away from Central Park and just four hundred dollars a month. The landlady lived downstairs from us and had decided to rent only to gays—but, what narrowed the field, gay men without dogs. In those days gay couples had dogs, not yet children. We were too poor and unsettled to think of wanting a dog. It never crossed our minds.

Keith was a famous beauty (famous in the West Village and Fire Island among gay men). He was blond, blue-eyed, just twenty-one, and perfectly formed (an expert gymnast). In good weather he rode his bike everywhere. The sound of the whirring wheels as he came racing around the corner and glided to a halt became the very whisper of desire for me. He was fleet, funny, and so handsome that Bruce Weber, the most famous photographer of handsome men back then (Abercrombie & Fitch, GQ, Calvin Klein), took his picture. Weber’s men, often nude or in wet white underpants, were twenty-something, athletic, Ivy League, and passably heterosexual—perfect eye candy for gay men of the period, who liked their men to be iconic and unobtainable, i.e. straight.

Of course I wanted to sleep with this beauty, but he found a way to forestall my lust. He said he was sick of “meaningless” sex and invited me to join his chastity club. We could sleep side by side as long as we never touched. I was content to have that constant access to his beauty and company—and he was happy, I guess, to reap the devotion of a fit, charming, bewitched man in his early thirties who was just publishing his first novel. Before long we were living in our vast eight-room apartment. Whenever I would buy an ugly but big dining room table and six high-backed chairs at Goodwill, Keith would be so outraged that he would drag the furniture out the front door into the hallway. He was a resolute artist and had a horror of looking or being middle-class.

Keith was careful with his “instrument,” i.e., his body. He drank tiny cups of liquid buffalo grass, ate sparingly, mainly vegetables, and visited the gym daily for two hours, where he’d twist and turn on the exercise rings, climb ropes, and strengthen his arms and core, his shoulders and legs, but he never wanted to become a heavily built muscleman. He was a Peter Pan, the puer aeternus. I was abject in my longing for him. I can’t bear to recall the scenes of my crawling toward him, arms outstretched, or the moment when I saw him as an emanation of God. Once I organized an orgy of several guys I dragged back from the Candle Bar in the neighborhood, hoping to be able to touch Keith in the melee. It worked.I can’t bear to recall the scenes of my crawling toward him, arms outstretched, or the moment when I saw him as an emanation of God.

Larry Kert had had a cruel streak—maybe that had rubbed off on Keith. Or maybe my idolatry was just that absurd and I needed vinegar poured in my wounds. I suppose some of the mystical strains in Nocturnes for the King of Naples, the book I was writing then, were a spillover from my almost religious love for Keith.

And then Keith was cast in the Broadway hit Equus, in which he was naked onstage eight performances a week for years. Dirty old men would sit with binoculars in the front row night after night. A pimple on his ass would send Keith into an anxiety attack. He was brilliant in the role; I saw him in the play dozens of times opposite Richard Burton or Anthony Perkins. It was such a titanic strain (no colds, no hemorrhoids, no weight gain or perceptible loss), thousands of lines, gymnastic feats blinding the “horses” (dancers dressed as stylized horses), rowdy adolescents seated in the cheap seats onstage making wisecracks, kids who were so used to TV that they thought these performers, too, couldn’t hear their remarks. His life became one of iron discipline. I like to think he even came to appreciate our domestic life.

He moved to Los Angeles but was a little too openly, rebelliously gay for Hollywood in those days (no one wanted to see the fag kiss the girl and there were almost no gay roles in the seventies). Then I moved to Paris for sixteen years. When I came back to New York in the late nineties, Keith was living with a sweet, talented Israeli painter; he’d mellowed, was just as funny as ever, became a close associate of the avant-garde director Robert Wilson.

Keith himself directed plays at La MaMa and had published a book. We’re great friends. He insists that I helped form some of his tastes in music and literature. His own curiosity and experience in so many domains of the arts, however, didn’t need my influence, I’m sure. When I told him I’d be writing about him in my sex memoir, he said, “Just say I have a big dick.” That’s easy—his dick is huge.

________________________________

Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization (in Which Case We Need More Literature!)

Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization (in Which Case We Need More Literature!)

Watch on the page, here’s the text (not the 4 minute video transcript):

Ray Bradbury had it all thought out. Behind his captivating works of science fiction, there were subtle theories about what literature was meant to do. The retro clip above takes you back to the 1970s and it shows Bradbury giving a rather intriguing take on the role of literature and art. For the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, literature has more than an aesthetic purpose. It has an important sociological/psychoanalytic role to play. Stories are a safety valve. They keep society collectively, and us individually, from coming apart at the seams. Which is to say–if you’ve been following the news lately–we need a helluva lot more literature these days. And a few new Ray Bradburys.

Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Rare TV Interview (1975)

In Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945 novel The Blood of Others, the narrator, Jean Blomart, reports on his childhood friend Marcel’s reaction to the word “revolution”:It was senseless to try to change anything in the world or in life; things were bad enough even if one did not meddle with them.

Source: Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Rare TV Interview (1975)