Mina Loy, Canopy Canopy Canopy, and The Sacred Prostitute

The ever-popular and always-terrific Triple Canopy has a new issue out, and in addition to it being their "literary" issue (or their "not not literary issue"), it includes The Sacred Prostitute! That's a play by Mina Loy, silly. As part of their Immaterial Literature series, TC has reprinted the piece from Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, edited by Sara Crangle, which we were overjoyed about recently.

Triple Canopy tells us a bit about the play:

Loy wrote “The Sacred Prostitute” in Florence, circa 1914, in the midst of an escapade that took her from London to Munich, Paris, Italy, New York, Mexico City, and Aspen, Colorado; in the Tuscan city, the author had encounters with Futurists Giovanni Papini and F. T. Marinetti. Unpublished until the Dalkey edition, “The Sacred Prostitute” has here been illustrated by CF (and modified with a first line from the hand-written draft that preceded the typescript). It’s a play for IKEA, the four-hour workweek, and the Ides of March.

Good thing it's online too then, since Ikea is transforming their bookshelves into display cases (we digress). A tiny excerpt from the start of the play that you can read in full here, wow:

Woman for me is the maze of abortive experience deflecting me from the consummate nucleus—the unique affinity of whose existence no disappointments will ever be able to dissuade me. I went out to meet life open-handed with such good-will, without prejudice, without criticism—I scoured the streets—plunged into society—“touched pitch”—dissolved myself in amorous mysticism—yet, I have never been able to solve the problem of love.

Also an artist! Image at top: L'Amour dorloté par les belles dames: drawing and gouache by Mina Loy, 1906 (Collection of Roger L. Conover), courtesy of Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, by Carolyn Burke.