on reading for pleasure
i declare that 2023 is the year i'll relearn to read in a chill way
Happy Friday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Submission opportunities
A 2023 goal
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I’m finishing up the winter issue of The West Review. I’d love to consider a few more poems, if anyone wants to submit.
& a hybrid essay:
& a poem (loosely defined) for the end of 2022:
Submission opportunities:
(with thanks to Erika Dreifus)
January 15 is the deadline for queries for the Look2 Essay series at PLOUGHSHARES, which “seeks to publish essays about underappreciated or overlooked writers. The Look2 essay should take stock of a writer’s entire oeuvre with the goal of bringing critical attention to the neglected writer and his or her relevance to a contemporary audience….The writer can be living or dead and from anywhere in the world (if there are good English translations available). Essays should make note of biographical details that are pertinent to the writer’s work.” Payment: “$45/printed page, $90 minimum per title, $450 maximum per author,” plus copies and a subscription.
On reading for pleasure:
My reading is hoarding, accumulating, storing up for the future, filling the hole of the present.
-Susan Sontag
Like, same. Just this morning, I was telling a friend that reading Tegan & Sara’s High School yesterday was my first experience of reading-for-pleasure in probably six years. In graduate school, I described myself as a rabid reader rather than an avid reader—what I did was (and remains) much more disgusting than just “reading often”; it was about gobbling down as many words as I could, foaming at the mouth, desperate for more knowledge. Even still, for me, reading as an activity means constant annotating, and googling, and photocopying, and making notes for later research—obsessive, almost, like a form of hypergraphia. Like with Sontag, for me, it’s a lot of hoarding for the future.
So this year, my goal is
to read more books that won’t necessarily make me “smarter,” or align with my research interests, or inform my own writing. I want to read some books that seek only to entertain. The vibe (at least sometimes) is: no critical thought; just vibing. I’m going to start by rereading the Twilight saga.
If anyone else has any book recommendations in this vein, please leave a comment below or reply directly to this email—I’d love to hear them!
What I’m reading:
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Franny Choi (5 stars)
High School, Tegan and Sara (5 stars)
To read:
Quotations:
Before the apocalypse,
the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses. Border fence
apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in the textbook’s
silence.
-Franny Choi
I was born from an apocalypse / and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began / when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor. It began when a continent / was drawn into cutlets.
-Franny Choi
Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.
-Franny Choi
This year was a layer cake of catastrophe long before any of us could, / biologically speaking, have been imagined.
-Franny Choi
I have no condition but this:
ill-timed optimism, a disturbing tendency
toward pleasure.
-Franny Choi
If I write, there’s nothing
to be done, it’s a bird in the hand, i.e.,
worth its weight in dead bird.
-Franny Choi
I cut
an onion, and it’s onions all the way down, and that’s a fine
reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after the empire
congratulates itself on persisting again.
-Franny Choi
[Her] perfect face / swings back into the orbit of my grief—
-Franny Choi
Come in, I whisper
to the wailing in the attic, Come in to the thunder,
to any sound that’ll shake me from doom’s haze.
-Franny Choi
As a child,
I couldn’t believe my luck: born
in the best country on Earth.
Now I know better.
-Franny Choi
I’m adrift and sunken and just need
to feel at home in something—
-Franny Choi
What’s the point of grieving in the future tense?
-Franny Choi
Sliced from bone, my life
hung like a jaw—faultless. And
unforgivable.
-Franny Choi
Someday we’ll lie in dirt.
With mouths and mushrooms, the earth
will accept our apology.
-Franny Choi
I call myself a rotted-out bulb, and soon enough
I’m hauling out the wet stuff, cracking my compost heart
under a shovel’s faceless verdict.
-Franny Choi
Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run
to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved,
and I crumple into carcass.
-Franny Choi
I am loved
by pheromone if nothing else. By accident at best.
-Franny Choi
The shock of a citrus sky in midwinter. The way a phrase’s shape can hook itself through your lip for weeks.
-Franny Choi
made of / the unforgivable future, and the unforgivable past, i bloom, / bloodless, and ready to feed.
-Franny Choi
In many instances, copyright is just a euphemism for corporate control. But this is not always the case. I think it can play a pivotal role in the protection of the work of artists, writers, musicians, and other “creators.” But there are varying ideas about just what that “protection” actually means and how it operates. It was clear from the ancient days of the record industry’s early “defeat” of Napster that a wave of unstoppable change was upon us. And much of this has been truly productive. The use and misuse of the notions of ownership are ongoing and vexing. But I think the idea of transformation, the so-called public domain, and the ways that images and words are fluid and changing have been and should continue to be methods and sites that both produce and reproduce cultural lives.
With a few very obvious exceptions, I seldom create issue-specific works. In the broadest sense, I try to make work about how we are to one another: work that engages our adorations, contempt, pleasures, and punishments. As far as the chaos that you mention, of course my work is susceptible to the chaos. I’m susceptible to the chaos. Bodies are susceptible to the chaos. And this chaos should be a shock to no one. And if it is, they have not been paying attention, both to recent events and the world’s long history of brutal subjugation, shaming, and destruction.
The thing about "no" — I'm sorry, I can't. Not right now. I don't have the bandwidth / time / energy / spoons today — is that it's supposed to be a full sentence, but it hardly ever is. There's the initial "no" to take personally. That's the part where people feel it as rejection, at best, and an indictment on their characters, at worst.
As we clamber along the shore in our waterlogged dive boots, I think abstractly about the jellies and touch, about the beauty of something you can only appreciate from a distance and the curious way that something can hurt you from far away, even if you don’t see its tentacles. I don’t think about my parents just then. I’m enjoying the sun and sea and the spectacle of the mauve medusas dotting the blue.
Chasing the burn of weed smoke with stolen alcohol, we’d lie back in the field looking at the stars, spooking each other with unreliable sightings of coyotes in the distance. It didn’t feel dangerous, because we were together.
-Sara Quin
Her [future girlfriend Alex] directness was disarming, and I wanted to be disarmed.
-Tegan Quin
“I promised him I wouldn’t hook up with another boy.”
“What about hooking up with me?”
“You’re a girl, it’s different.”
I hated that difference, the undisputed truth of it.
-Sara Quin
Tweets:
Finally:
please consider buying some lightly-used books (US only) to help me pay TWR contributors! 100% of funds go back to other writers in our community.
I'll be watching you to see how the hell you can manage this because I never can! "So this year, my goal is to read more books that won’t necessarily make me “smarter,” or align with my research interests, or inform my own writing. "