4/7: round-up
memes, book recs, quotations, tweets, & etc.
Happy Thursday!
Someday I’ll get back to my M/F posting schedule, maybe—but today’s not that day.
Here’s what I have for you:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
Apparently I have too much time on my hands so I have made a meme account on Instagram.
Please look at how funny these are.
Buy some books!
I’m ~spring cleaning~ which means organizing my bookshelves. If anyone in the US is looking for things to read, I hope you might consider snagging 5 new-to-lightly-used books for $30 on my website. It’s a good deal and allows me to ensure that my beloved books go to good homes!
What I read last week:
A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray Belcourt (essential reading, I think, and especially for those of us who live in the US and Canada)
The Book of Extraordinary Deaths, Cecilia Ruiz
Love Poems, Annie Paradis
What I’m watching:
The new Julia Child show on HBO is SO GOOD pls watch it with me
Quotations:
Stories without an audience do not survive.
-Jill Stauffer
I need to honor the intimacies of the unwritten.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Love has a tendency to shatter.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Let’s start with the body, for so much is won and lost and lost and lost there.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
I didn’t know what to do with my agony, so I did what most do with the at once unknown and menacing: I waged a war on it, on myself.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Loneliness is a kind of dysphoria with the world.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
To be queer is to worship loss.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
I believe beauty is in short supply.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
I feel savaged by language.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
I have faith in the emancipatory power of rage and little else.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
So much of being alive in the Americas is about playing dead.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
We need to keep watch of our own pleasures.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
I realized that love can be mediocre and a safe comfort, or it can be unhinged and hurtful. Either seemed like a good life.
-Terese Marie Mailhot
And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?
-Maggie Nelson
How to account for the love that bubbles up where it is banned?
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
What is chronic loneliness if not the desire to exist less and less, to deplete little by little?
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.
-Maggie Nelson
A body isn’t a body but a battlefield.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
If I try to compose anything but sad poems, I fear it’ll be akin to a widower trying to convince others that he has found happiness again by wearing a T-shirt that says HAPPINESS.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Why poetry? It allows for a romance of the negative that doesn’t foreclose the possibility of a non-cruel kind of optimism.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
What does it mean to require what breaks you?
-Judith Butler
Suicide emerges as a political response to structurally manufactured sorrow where joy has been shut out of everyday life for a long time.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
How any of us survive a world always against us, against what we signify and make imaginable, is a sociologically significant act.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
I […] want to be able to talk about suicide as both devastating and as a kind of politically charged reaction to a world that makes living at the intersections of social loci untenable.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Suicide prevention […] needs to entail a radical remaking of the world.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Listen: to be lost isn’t to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn’t only now and here. There is everywhere and somewhere too.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
My story was maltreated.
-Terese Marie Mailhot
Death, no matter how much it decorates our lives and this planet, regardless of the vast territory it stakes out in all of us, is always a badlands, a devastated and devastating environment in which no one wants to linger.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Poetry made room for me to grieve. A river of longing flowed through me. I feel its frenzied waters right now.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Tweets:
Have a great day—
-Despy Boutris