Whosever shall obstinately blame the faith of the Holy See of Rome and its sacrifices, let him be anathema, and let him not be deemed Catholic, but a prozymite heretic, that is to say, Defender of the Leaven.

The unsubmitting spirit celebrated in her epigraph as a sign of human strength, she suggests, may not be exactly the same thing as the freedom of the mind described in the final line of the poem […]

Since Freud's 1910 book on Leonardo da Vinci's sexuality, art history has not let up on artists' homosexual proclivities, as if art making was a form of parturition and birth-giving, the artist not just inspired (impregnated) by the studio muse but incorporating her femininity to the degree that every man is feminine but some more so than others. There may never be an end to Van Gogh's severed ear lobe handed to a prostitute, to Cezanne's femophobia, or to Picasso's venereal infection.

I bought the magazines, ran home after work, filmed myself flipping through the pages—half legitimately fangirling over the boys, half making fun of people like myself who fangirl over the boys.