12/30: round-up
reading recs, quotations, resources, & tweets
Hi. My Friday posts keep coming early because they keep overlapping with holidays.
Here’s what I have for you today—the last post of 2021:
Housekeeping
What I read last week
Quotations
A writing exercise
A resource
Tweets
& I’m telling you now: this post is long. You’ll have to open it in its own window to read to the end.
Housekeeping:
I have a poem out today!
&…
As the year comes to a close,
I’ve been living life like normal. I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions and—this year, especially—having any sort of long-term aspirations feel impossible. Instead, I’m continuing to practice my daily aspiration: Get through the day. Survive it. And, so far, I’ve been pretty successful at fulfilling that.
I have been doing my best to ~be productive~ though—catching up on all the things I’ve long-neglected.
I have:
resold some of my books. (I’ll send you some, too, if you want!)
given away all my too-small pants, rather than expecting my body to magically go back to the way it was at fifteen. If you’re like me, I highly recommend you do the same.
sent mail to all my friends.
gotten on top of my skincare regimen.
watched White Collar in its entirety.
Anyway, it’s not much, but it’s something.
What I read last week:
My Penis, Myself: I didn’t need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me.
When I Came Out to My Parents, Kimchi Fried Rice Held Us Together
how to survive a hotel fire, Angela Veronica Wong
Beloved Integer, Michelle Naka Pierce
The Emily Ratajkowski You’ll Never See (I know myself, and I wouldn’t have read this profile if it wasn’t by Andrea Long Chu, whose work I adore. It ended up being interesting, though.)1
Wanting Bad Things: Andrea Long Chu responds to Amia Srinivasan
What I’m hoping to read this weekend:
Quotations:
That’s a survival adaptation of the oppressed: to take on responsibility for their own suffering so they don’t give up against impossible odds or lash out in ways that further endanger them.
I keep making mistakes like looking at the sky and expecting to see stars when we all know all it really is is a dark cloth with holes.
-Angela Veronica Wong
The cross out is not about forgetting it’s a violent revision.
-Angela Veronica Wong
Memory is a type of translation.
-Michelle Naka Pierce
Memory changes facts.
-Michelle Naka Pierce
Forgetfulness is necessary. I privilege some details over others because complete memory would be fatal.
-Michelle Naka Pierce
Heterosexuality is bad because it’s a mode of diminishment and slow death for women. It’s not redeemable. It’s total depravity. There’s no arguing with it. Everyone’s fucked up on a totally intimate level.
So I have a lot of sympathy for the [1970s lesbian-] separatist position on a personal level because it feels like it’s meaningfully descriptive of something that I felt myself in terms of my own transition. I did feel like it was an act of defiance or an act of just rejection: I have never wanted to spend time with men, least of all myself! And so at some point I just put that into practice. I was my own Second West Coast Lesbian Conference of 1973.
I can’t stand body positivity. I cannot stand it. It is just anathema to me. It’s moralizing. It’s really fucking hard to figure out a way to tell people to change their desires that isn’t moralistic.
The reason that I can’t stand body positivity—not just that I think there’s something very churchy about like staring at like a photo of someone who is fat like you are and meditating your way into affection for yourself—the reason I can’t stand it is because I feel implicated. Because what it says is that my self-loathing—and I don’t mean mine generally, I mean mine, mine, Andrea Long Chu’s self-loathing—is a result of a lack of having had my consciousness raised. I say churchy not by accident, I do think there’s a kind of Protestantism to the notion of, at least we have to try. No, my self-loathing is precious to me, and it is a form of knowledge about myself, and it’s also by its own very structure fundamentally incapable of being fixed through consciousness-raising because self-loathing is a form of consciousness.
There’s this scene that one can imagine if one is a woman, or even if one isn’t, of standing in front of the mirror and assessing one’s body and you don’t like your gut and you wish your nose was a different shape and you have a double chin and you feel like your breasts are too big or your breasts are too small—whatever it is. Now you can run all of your feminist analyses about how this is patriarchy, and it’s body-phobic and it’s fat-phobic and it’s sexist and it’s the cosmetic industry and beauty standards and the media. You can do all of this, and you will not at any point be wrong. But, you also won’t feel better. If anything now you will feel worse, because now you’re ugly and stupid.
Of course you can say any given person’s desire is produced through the interplay of power relations. That’s a truism of the post-Foucault academy: that everything is constructed and it’s all power. It’s not that that’s meaningless. Obviously something like “no fats, no femmes, no Asians” is a desire that has a history, and has a politics, that can be described by reference to political processes: imperialism, white supremacy, and also, like, the world-historical defeat of the female sex are all included in this desire. You can show how history has led to this moment, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that knowing that is going to do anything.
The question of whether sexual desire is different from other kinds of desire in degree or kind is a really, really good question. My first impulse is to say well, sort of, you know, of course everything is sexual, all desire has the shape of sexual desire. But I think it might sort of be the reverse actually. I’ll put it this way: it’s very easy to show how lots of things that are not sex are in fact about sex. It’s also very easy to show that sex is very rarely about sex. Like people don’t have sex because they are experiencing intense erotic fixation on each other. They have sex because they’re bored, or they’re nervous, or they’re trying to renew a sense of kinship that is at risk of unraveling. You have sex for all of the kind of reasons that you might do anything, which is to say usually for sort of kind of oblique and ordinary and banal reasons.
Also, The New York Times published an essay this week wherein the writer talks about how much she hates her husband, among other things.
And, first of all: straight people, are you okay?2 Do you realize it doesn’t have to be…like this? Second of all, I really liked Roxane Gay’s reflections on it:
I’m always curious about people who catalog their hatred/frustrations of/with their spouse. I wonder what the other person would say. So many people seem so desperately unhappy in their marriages (I am speaking more broadly, now) and they speak with such… certainty when saying that everyone will eventually be as unhappy as they are. It kind of scares me. I’ve been married for eighteen months now. I am in a toddler marriage and this is my first (only) marriage which is to say I am no expert. I both like and love my wife. I find her endlessly interesting. I learn new things about her every day. We argue once in a while but we’re getting better at navigating conflict. Mostly, we have a lot of fun. We laugh all the time. We cheer each other on and vent to each other on challenging days.
Day before yesterday, we were traveling after two days with my family in Orlando to spend a couple days with hers further South. All great because we love our families and all get along. We drove and stopped at a gross service area on the highway. While I walked Max in the dog park, Debbie went into the service area where it was sheer chaos; it was hot and few people were wearing masks which was just… mind blowing at best. There was more driving and traffic and then a hotel that wasn’t… great and another hotel that was better though our room was next to some very loud people. Our sweet puppy was cranky which is so rare that we felt terrible for him and tried to soothe him and then we had some family time that was lovely and by the end of the day we were FRAZZLED. We could have had a hell of a fight but instead we retired to our room and studied this truly hideous art on the wall, treating it like a Rorschach test. I thought it was the inside of a seashell and she saw a rooster, phlegm, and some other thing I am forgetting.
We laughed and watched Die Hard 3 and drank soda pop. I am not being pollyanna-ish here. It’s not in my nature. This is how it is and we’re really lucky, I guess. Then I read essays like this and think, “Is this what the future holds?” It seems… miserable and distinctly unappealing. I don’t want to believe misery is inevitable or compulsory. I do know my wife hates throat clearing and ice clinking but I don’t think she wants to murder me. Yet. I don’t know… guys, if you’re in an unhappy marriage, or if you feel like you’re merely existing, or if you feel more frustration and anger than joy, maybe it’s time for a separation. I know it’s rarely that simple, but maybe sometimes it is. I don’t ever want to believe that marriage, or any long term relationship, demands unhappiness or white-knuckling it from one fleeting moment of joy to the distant next. If you can, if you want something different, find you someone you actually like, who does their fair share of everything in your relationship without expecting to be micro-managed. It’s great!
A writing exercise
on imagery. (From my teaching days.)
Think of something beautiful, startling, or grotesque you’ve seen that you couldn’t turn away from. It could be a flock of birds rising from a snowy field or a deer skull on the side of the road, a clear vase on a basement shelf in which a spider has built a web or an evening shadow that crossed over a beloved’s face. Take five minutes to jot down every concrete detail you remember from that scene, no matter how small or insignificant.
Here is a poem by Ezra Pound3 that emphasizes the image as the crucial and working element of a poem.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.After you write down everything you can remember, go back through your draft and interrogate each and every detail: which ones are significant? Which are superfluous? Which details imply other details? Cut all those details that are just facts about that scene, and leave all of those details that ascend to the level of images. Remove all explanation, what we would call exposition, out of the poem. Allow the images to stand alone.
A resource:
Joanna Lobo’s last newsletter offers advice when commissioning editors:
Don’t be overly familiar with an editor unless you have established that type of relationship. It’s still business and money at the end of the day.
Don't pitch five stories at once — perhaps they are all great, but more often than not, editors will simply feel you have scrambled together anything you can for the sake of a commission. Quality over quantity please.
Get our names right.
If you get a no from an editor, don't pitch a new story five minutes later - give it a day and then go back. Again, because it feels like you are just grabbing at any story for us to commission rather than what is write for our publication.
Don’t send lengthy paragraphs — a great story doesn’t need them. Provide a working headline, a short synopsis of what you would say and why you are the best person to write it.
Don’t chase up same day unless it’s time-sensitive, we get A LOT of pitches. Having said that, don't be afraid to chase us up if we haven't replied.
Always, ALWAYS put time-sensitive in the subject line if it indeed is time-sensitive.
Look at our publication before you pitch — see what the latest stories are so that you don't pitch the same thing.
Remember, we are human beings, just like you.
Tweets:
That’s it, folks. Thanks for reading.
-Despy Boutris
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& then, following this profile that managed to get me to like(?) EmRata, I proceeded to go read a lot more Chu.
who, in case you didn’t know, was a fascist—so we hate him. As with many writers, though, I follow the code Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater, so I’m still using this Imagist poem. For further reading, though, check out Matthew Feldman’s Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda.