Maybe if we tell some Fortune 500 boards, and the politicians who volunteer to gleam the tea-coloured scum from their toilet bowls, that the hot summers are killing our productivity and concentration they might do something about climate breakdown? I have become a loose cog. I can’t think beyond Love Island. My thesis notes look at me with dead eyes. A thing called useless, that’s me.
I’m writing this with a hot water bottle to my belly as my left ovary is jumpin’. It is probably my endometriosis but imagine if my ovary was actually some sort or oracle and sending me a warning, a direction, a shooting star? In Hermione Lee’s Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing she writes this passage in the chapter on Virginia Woolf's essay On Being Ill. The ill “blurt things out. They turn sympathisers away. They won’t go to work. They lie down. They waste time. They fantasise.” The ill could be the canary in the coal mines.
I know I’m starting to sound like Summer Roberts in the latter days of The O.C., but this capitalism thing is truly shit. Let’s all become loose cogs and cause the carriage wheel to spurn off into a ditch.
Between chub rub, pooling humidity and the Penney’s hot water bottle blotching my belly skin, I lust for November. A jumper under a coat. An eyeliner that doesn’t melt off into a petrol smear. Last week, I was at a book launch and the crowd was cooked tinned fish. I could feel a fat tear of sweat travel down my back, a fast creep down that cavity between fast fashion jersey and no-longer-taut flesh, a proprietary finger.
Dissertation deadlines should never be set for the end of summer. How can I be expected to do anything? All I want to do is continue reading Gone With The Wind. Scarlett O’Hara is about to rock up to the BBQ to try and fuck up Ashley’s life plan with a confession of adoration, but little does she know Rhett Butler is around the corner and about to F L I R T.
I won’t recommend you read Gone With The Wind. It’s not so much an acquired taste, but a conscious choice. When Margaret Mitchell describes the land of the South - so much red earth and yellow rivers - I’m like, “Seize that Pulitzer!”
When Margaret Mitchell describes slaves I understand why this book is not on Audible.
Interesting Mitchell estate fact: African-American novelist Alice Randall published her first novel The Wind Done Gone in the early noughties. It is the story of Gone With The Wind told from the perspective of an O’Hara slave. Think Wide Sargasso Sea. If you google Randall’s book, a legal case pops up: “The estate of Margaret Mitchell sued Randall and her publishing company, Houghton Mifflin, on the grounds that The Wind Done Gone was too similar to Gone With The Wind, thus infringing its copyright. The case attracted numerous comments from leading scholars, authors, and activists, regarding what Mitchell's attitudes would have been and how much The Wind Done Gone copies from its predecessor. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated an injunction against publishing the book in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin (2001), the case was settled in 2002 when Houghton Mifflin agreed to make an unspecified donation to Morehouse College in exchange for Mitchell's estate dropping the litigation.”
As part of the agreement with the estate, Randall’s book must bear the words ‘unauthorized parody’ on the cover. What an especially cruel legal flex.
In 2001, two women were photographed protesting Randall’s appearance promoting the book in Atlanta. “Alice write your own book” reads a sign one woman holds up. The other woman stretches out the confederate flag. Between them another sign stands: “The wind will always blow in Atlanta.”
To read Gone With The Wind and not think the book is due a re-evaluation and conversation is a strange stasis to which a person chooses to cling. To think the world can’t handle a re-evaluation is to be on, and to actively poison and hasten, the losing side.