Valarie Smith
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valarie.bsky.social
Valarie Smith
@valarie.bsky.social
940 followers 140 following 6.3K posts
Welcome, book lovers! 💙📚

Probably rereading Woolf’s The Waves or listening to the Backlisted podcast. Also a fan of Sam Shepard, Kerouac, Dickens, Steinbeck, Willy Vlautin, Donna Tartt, film noir, Twin Peaks, Elliott Smith, Grimm & folklore. Portland, OR
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valarie.bsky.social
Share a 90s movie you believe needs more love.
Movie poster for Devil in a Blue Dress starring Denzel Washington. On the left, it shows a light skinned Black woman smoking in a blue dress and pearls. On the right it shows a handsome Black man in a pork pie hat looking sideways, presumably at the woman.
November 25, 2025 at 11:20 PM
valarie.bsky.social
Only Keanu and Michael Parker (far right) left now
A photo on the set of the movie My Own Private Idaho. It shows five men in a booth around a black circular table. They are River Phoenix (blond, looking left of camera, in a salmon colored jacket and pants), Keanu Reeves (dark haired and staring directly at camera), Rodney Harvey (dark haired, thick eyebrows, red and white shirt and dark jacket, looking at camera), Udo Kier (looking sideways across the table at River, his hand on Harvey’s shoulder, white jacket dark shirt, burnt orange handkerchief in pocket) and Michael Parker (long blond hair, hooded eyes, dark plaid jacket, elbow on Kier’s shoulder, looking at camera). Kier died today. Phoenix and Harvey died in the early 90s. Reeves and Parker are the only ones left.
November 24, 2025 at 2:36 AM
valarie.bsky.social
I want to make sure @drlauravarnam.bsky.social doesn’t miss this treasure!
A book called Beowulf’s Children by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes. The cover shows a man with a huge gun carrying a swaddled baby and a blond girl next to him.
November 23, 2025 at 9:17 AM
valarie.bsky.social
The neighborhood’s Little Free Library really kicked it up a notch today.
A few books in the library, including Sex and Human Loving, the Erotic Bondage Handbook, Sacrament of Sexuality and Lean In. Several books in the library, including Muhammad, Sex and Love Today, The Male Member and, oddly, Beowulf’s Children.
November 23, 2025 at 9:15 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Excited to welcome this into my extensive Twin Peaks/Lynch collection. Thanks @thetaooftwinpeaks.bsky.social!
The cover of a book called The Tao of Twin Peaks: the Meaning behind David Lynch’s Hit Tv Series, by William Dickerson and illustrated by Gilbert Leiker. The background image is the black and white chevron of the Black Lodge in the series and the forevrkund is an old TV set with the screen showing the chevron at a competing angle. The title and author and illustrator names are in fire engine red; the subtitle and “illustrated by” are written in white. The overall tone is of being off balance, of bringing you into a mysterious world.
November 22, 2025 at 9:42 PM
valarie.bsky.social
What I dream of all summer long
NOVEMBER 20 Wild wind and coursing cloud; feeble gleams of pale sky. John Ruskin, 1875 (Oxford)
November 21, 2025 at 4:26 AM
valarie.bsky.social
These journals of Dorothy Wordsworth’s start in 1800, when she’s 29. She spends much time gardening, cooking, baking and doing laundry. She also walks great distances, day and night, around the Lake District with her brother William, Coleridge and other neighbors, who also often come to tea. 🧵
A photo of the cover of Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, with an illustration of a man and woman both writing with quills at a table on the cover.
November 19, 2025 at 4:46 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Fun fact: you can see them on the poster for Drugstore Cowboy. They’re in the movie which, if you haven’t seen it, is a down-and-out dream.
Photo of the movie poster for Drugstore Cowboy, which shows a dark haired man in a black leather jacket (Matt Dillon) hugging a smiling woman with long dark hair and a sleeveless black Minidress in front of a column in a train yard that has drawings and designs on it. The effect is of a couple in love, but it’s gritty, a little rough.
November 19, 2025 at 12:10 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Nice to think of this in relation to the Lovejoy Columns, Portland friends.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovejoy...
Three concrete supports that held up a car ramp. There are train tracks on each side and a train behind them. The supports were hand carved by a night watchman over many years. They’re beautiful, like wood etchings, and reflect mythological figures, among other things. The ramp was removed and most of the columns have been lost.
November 18, 2025 at 10:04 PM
valarie.bsky.social
A tuxedo cat with a white bib stares out of a linen closet with bright yellow eyes. On the shelf above her is a Halloween lantern of a black cat with big eyes. These mimic the painting I’ve reposted, which show three black cats with big yellow eyes.
November 14, 2025 at 8:48 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Me at the NYRB.com sale. Did I mention you can get up to 40% off?

www.nyrb.com
Photo of an Asian man (Chow Yun-Fat) wearing a suit and sunglasses setting an American $100 bill on fire
November 14, 2025 at 7:59 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Post a non-religious photo you think of as holy.
A dark-haired man (Keanu Reeves) in a navy suit jacket with white button down shirt sits at the foot of a statue holding a blonde man (River Phoenix) who is sound asleep. The blond man is wearing white jeans and a salmon colored jacket. It’s meant to look like Michelangelo’s statue Pieta, which shows Mary holding Jesus after he’s been taken down from the cross. The vibe is that the dark-haired man is protecting the blond one. It’s a still from the movie My Own Private Idaho, which is my favorite movie in the world.
November 11, 2025 at 12:04 AM
valarie.bsky.social
In those earlier years, he and Jessica Lange were one hell of a handsome, fiery couple.
Black and white photo of a tall, handsome man in a dark shirt holding and kissing the head of a shorter, beautiful woman with wet, slicked back hair in a white shirt. His left arm holds her tight while his right hand holds a bottle of beer. It’s a loving photo, but if you know anything about his alcoholism, which probably is the primary reason for the dissolution of their relationship, then it’s a lot more prescient than they realized.
November 10, 2025 at 7:47 PM
valarie.bsky.social
Been looking at old diner menus and am convinced if I incant these words 3x over a cauldron, I'll be transported to 1978 Pennsylvania:

Rye bread, stuffed cabbage, fried clams, open-faced turkey sandwich, flounder, meat loaf, Monte Cristo, croquettes, chicken parm, chipped beef, pierogies, goulash.
A photo of a red neon sign that says BREAKFAST ALL DAY.
November 9, 2025 at 6:38 AM
valarie.bsky.social
This killed me
A bumper sticker that says I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH PTO FOR WWIII
November 9, 2025 at 4:51 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Look at this photo.
A woman with gray hair and clenched fists is in the middle of the street, yelling at ICE officers. She is wearing a long, red, short sleeve dress or tee with a white tee under it. Behind her, and slightly blurry, is a younger man with a white tee, blue jeans and a phone on one hand and the other hand giving the middle finger. To me, this is a powerful photo that speaks to the rage of all kinds of regular Americans to the cruelty of the ICE program.
November 7, 2025 at 10:49 PM
valarie.bsky.social
The cabin Kerouac lived in with Gary Snyder in The Dharma Bums is maybe a 1/2 mile away. I dragged my carry-on luggage through small, winding streets filled with purring BMWs and Mercedes to get there. I was the only person walking.

The shack they lived in was on top of this hill but was torn down.
Photo of an unremarkable piece of residential land. On the right is a plain, rundown brown house, but on the left you see a lot of trees and shrubbery cresting on top of a very small hill. At the top is where Kerouac and Snyder lived for a short time.
November 6, 2025 at 7:10 AM
valarie.bsky.social
I took this photo in front of his Mill Valley, CA home, where he was living when he won the Pulitzer for Buried Child. I love his prose most, but everything he wrote illuminated some aspect of the American myth.

Sam Shepard
Born Nov. 5, 1943
My hand holding up a copy of Sam Shelard’s book Seven Plays, which features a black and white photo of him in his 40s looking pensive, maybe even angry; in the background is the home he used to live in. The garage is in the bottom floor and the living space is on top of it.
November 6, 2025 at 7:10 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Illustrator Ella Baron nailing it in The Guardian: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
A one-panel comic that shows the Statue of Liberty crouched on a dark street in what looks like Gotham. Trump Tower looms in the background. She looks sad, defeated and is holding a handwritten sign, much like a beggar would, that says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But wait! There is Mamdani, like a superhero but also just a normal guy in a suit and long jacket, holding up what looks like Liberty’s torch. He has a huge smile on his face. So do I.
November 6, 2025 at 4:58 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Ooooh, this season’s Orion magazine is about “the natural rhythms of hip-hop” and features work by Jesmyn Ward, Hanif Abdurraqib, Questlove, Missy Elliott and Ross Gay!
The cover of Orion magazine, featuring a Black person’s hand on a white and gray horse. The hand has a large gold ring and watch on it.
November 5, 2025 at 10:17 PM
valarie.bsky.social
Happy birthday, Sam. We’ve never had more need of you.
Over 20 Sam Shepard books lined up vertically on a table with an autumnal bouquet behind it.
November 5, 2025 at 6:41 PM
valarie.bsky.social
Fun surprises: The man on this cover is Don Cherry, the cover design is by Chip Kidd, the graphics were set by a company in my hometown.

The first poem is a beauty:

“The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light.”
The cover of Philip Levine’s Breath: Poems. It says he’s the winner of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. The top third of the book is gray with his name in white; the bottom 2/3 is a black and white photo of a Black man in a subway station with maybe an old music case under his arm. He’s young, his hair cut relatively close, and his eyes look off to the right. Other people wait for the train a little way behind him. GOSPEL The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning chill, a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the streambed. I go higher to where the road gives up and there's only a faint path strewn with lupine between the mountain oaks. I don't ask myself what I'm looking for. I didn't come for answers to a place like this, I came to walk on the earth, still cold, still silent. Still ungiving, I've said to myself, although it greets me with last year's dead thistles and this year's hard spines, early-blooming wild onions, the curling remains of spider's cloth. What did I bring to the dance? In my back pocket a crushed letter from a woman I've never met bearing bad news I can do nothing about. So I wander these woods half sightless while a west wind picks up in the trees clustered above. The pines make a music like no other, rising and falling like a distant surf at night that calms the darkness before first light. "Soughing" we call it, from Old English, no less. How weightless words are when nothing will do.
November 3, 2025 at 2:07 AM
valarie.bsky.social
“Wonderful downpour of leaf”

It’s worth reading the whole thing.
Wonderful downpour of leaf: when the morning sun began to melt the frost they fell at one touch and in a few minutes a whole tree was flung of them; they lay masking and papering the ground at the foot. Then the tree seems to be looking down on its cast self as blue sky on snow after a long fall, its losing, its doing. Gerald Manley Hopkins, 1873
November 3, 2025 at 1:45 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Reading this book, in which the protagonist details her strange experiences in the afterlife. At one point, she is walking through a store now underwater. “The Sound of Silence” still plays on the speaker; she says, “It warbles in the murk.”

What a perfect, clean, precise sentence.
The cover of Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. It shows the silhouette of a crow, which contains the title and author within it, against a bright yellowish-greenish cover. I particularly like the details of the crow: the spindly, pointed claws and legs; the ragged feathers. The illustration is by Denise Nestor.
November 2, 2025 at 2:24 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Celia Fremlin’s biography is quite something.
CELIA FREMLIN (1914-2009) was born in Kent and spent her childhood in Hertfordshire. She then studied at the University of Oxford whilst working as a charwoman. During the Second World War, she served as an air-raid warden before becoming involved with the Mass Observation Project, collaborating on a study of women workers, War Factory. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, moved to Hampstead and had three children. In 1968, their youngest daughter, aged nineteen, took her own life; a month later, her husband did the same. In the wake of these tragedies, Fremlin briefly relocated to Geneva. In 1985, she married Leslie Minchin, with whom she lived until his death in 1999. Over four decades, Fremlin wrote sixteen celebrated novels - including the classic seaside mystery Uncle Paul and Christmas noir The Long Shadow - as well as one book of poetry and three story collections. Her debut, The Hours Before Dawn, won the Edgar Award in 1960.
October 29, 2025 at 6:30 AM