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Belle da Costa Greene & "Starlet"
May. 28th, 2026 08:44 amHung out with the kiskas and the chickens yesterday, staying as horizontal and on ice as possible. The kiskas have forgiven me for my brief road trip. (They are very odd kiskas, as I have written before; they don't like to be picked up and snuggled, even though I explain to them: This is how you earn your Friskies! I do think they love me after their odd kiska fashion but it's hard to judge that boundary between love and tolerance.) But the chickens were pissed! I had to offer them three corn tortillas before they would deign to take them from my hand.
###
I read a very trashy novel about JP Morgan's librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who was a very fascinating woman:
JP Morgan's library is now a small museum well worth visiting, with its enormous collection of illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance paintings, drawings, & prints, original manuscripts of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Keats' Endymion (among others), and three Gutenberg Bibles, but its chief attraction, in my eyes at least, is the library itself, which is like every fantasy you ever had about a fabulous library in an old mansion:
It is just fuckin' amazing.
And Belle da Costa Greene put it all together.
She was a Black woman (who claimed to be Portuguese) and expert both in illuminated manuscripts and the evasion of custom duties. She and Morgan were very, very close. When asked once whether she'd been Morgan's mistress, she laughed and replied, "We tried!"
(For such a straightlaced capitalist pig—he is said to have inspired Mr. Monopoly in the game Monopoly—Morgan kept some outré company. He was similarly close to the astrologer Evangeline Adams and paid her handsomely for merger and acquisition consultations. And he never signed contracts while Mercury was in retrograde!)
###
In the evening, I noticed that Criterion had some early movies by my director boyfriend Sean Baker.
I watched Starlet.
Starlet is very, very good, and it was very interesting to note how even that early in Sean Baker's career (2012), his signature style was fully intact. Baker makes movies about how innocence prevails in contexts that mainstream culture condemns as morally repugnant. I find his films intensely moving.
Starlet is about the unlikely friendship between a young porn actress and an 86-year-old woman. It stars Ernest Hemingway's great-granddaughter and Sean Baker's actual dog.
At one point, the dog runs away—and I immediately began crying and ran to Doesthedogdie.com to check and see if the dog comes back because if the dog didn't, I would have to stop watching the movie.
Alas! Starlet flies too far under the radar for Doesthedogdie.com!
So, I steeled myself and kept watching—and the dog does come back, and the film has the most beautiful, luminous, poignant ending...
###
My knee feels much better today though it is still far from 100%. In a few hours, I will toddle off to the garden, finish my planting, and put up the solar-powered lamps kindly gifted me by R & J.
###
I read a very trashy novel about JP Morgan's librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who was a very fascinating woman:
JP Morgan's library is now a small museum well worth visiting, with its enormous collection of illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance paintings, drawings, & prints, original manuscripts of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Keats' Endymion (among others), and three Gutenberg Bibles, but its chief attraction, in my eyes at least, is the library itself, which is like every fantasy you ever had about a fabulous library in an old mansion:
It is just fuckin' amazing.
And Belle da Costa Greene put it all together.
She was a Black woman (who claimed to be Portuguese) and expert both in illuminated manuscripts and the evasion of custom duties. She and Morgan were very, very close. When asked once whether she'd been Morgan's mistress, she laughed and replied, "We tried!"
(For such a straightlaced capitalist pig—he is said to have inspired Mr. Monopoly in the game Monopoly—Morgan kept some outré company. He was similarly close to the astrologer Evangeline Adams and paid her handsomely for merger and acquisition consultations. And he never signed contracts while Mercury was in retrograde!)
###
In the evening, I noticed that Criterion had some early movies by my director boyfriend Sean Baker.
I watched Starlet.
Starlet is very, very good, and it was very interesting to note how even that early in Sean Baker's career (2012), his signature style was fully intact. Baker makes movies about how innocence prevails in contexts that mainstream culture condemns as morally repugnant. I find his films intensely moving.
Starlet is about the unlikely friendship between a young porn actress and an 86-year-old woman. It stars Ernest Hemingway's great-granddaughter and Sean Baker's actual dog.
At one point, the dog runs away—and I immediately began crying and ran to Doesthedogdie.com to check and see if the dog comes back because if the dog didn't, I would have to stop watching the movie.
Alas! Starlet flies too far under the radar for Doesthedogdie.com!
So, I steeled myself and kept watching—and the dog does come back, and the film has the most beautiful, luminous, poignant ending...
###
My knee feels much better today though it is still far from 100%. In a few hours, I will toddle off to the garden, finish my planting, and put up the solar-powered lamps kindly gifted me by R & J.
