round-up: 10/10
housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Thursday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m buying
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, as they have been for a year, and the violence remains appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Pro-Palestine International Student Says He Faces Deportation After Second Suspension
Bowen: Year of killing and broken assumptions has taken Middle East to edge of deeper, wider war
A Curated List of 20 Palestinian Short Stories, in Translation, Online
Housekeeping:
One of my dear friends is working to create an inclusive community space for LA artists and creative people and is looking to hear people’s thoughts, both in and outside of the city. If you have a few minutes, please fill out this survey!
I mentioned this last week, too, but I had three poems come out last month, which is thrilling because it’s been a long time since I have submitted work and, therefore, a long time since anything has been released into the world. Here they are again.
This is one of my favorites. Editor Simmons Buntin asked me to record myself reading it, too, so—for audio-minded folks—I can read it to you below.
And a few more recent publications:
What I bought this week:
Liquid smoke (so I can make vegan bacon)
What I lusted after:
Anyway.
Happy October. I liked this list of ins/outs from Hannah Connolly.
Ins:
Pumpkin spiced everything
Burgundy
Comfy chic
Skincare as makeup
Doing things just because you want to, not because they will benefit your career/fitness/reading goals
Sending love letters to friends
Celebrating every tiny thing that happens to you, or your loved ones
Celebrating every tiny thing that happens in the world
Celebrating just to celebrate, because this life is precious and we are so lucky to live it
Lana Del Rey
Lit Girl Fall
Being cynical about social media trends whilst also engaging in them (nuance is everything)
Following illustrators and artists and people who create beautiful things online
Donating
Complimenting strangers
Radical self-compassion
Buying magazines
White wine spritzers
Loafers, and velvet, and trench coats, and blunt bobs, and saying ‘yes’
Outs:
Doomscrolling
Saying ‘no’ to plans to protect my ‘peace’ (what peace? Life is short; go to the party)
Feeling self-conscious
Drinking too much caffeine
Doing something just for Instagram (ew)
Complaining about things you can’t change
Aperol Spritzes (they had their time)
Going out in the rain without an umbrella/raincoat
Luke-warm tea
Literary snobbery
Wearing uncomfortable things (clothes, shoes, friendships)
Not listening to the news because it’s ‘depressing’ (come on!)
Living according to your fears instead of your hopes
Impulse spending
Back-handed compliments
What I’m listening to:
The Paris Paloma kick continues. I’ve been listening to this ad nauseum. She’s coming to LA in the spring, if anyone wants to buy two tickets and invite me. Or send $55.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
The idea that survivorhood is a thing to fix, cure, or get over, and that a cure is not only possible and easy but is the only desirable option, is a foundational belief in mainstream ways of understanding survivorhood and survivors.
-Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The Good Survivor is someone I’ve never met in person, because they don’t exist. But their archetype haunts me and many other survivors I know. We beat ourselves up for not being them. And often, unfortunately, our partners, friends, co-workers, and comrades want us to be that good, quiet, all-better survivor too.
In contrast, the bad survivor is the one who’s still “broken,” still freaking out, still triggered, still grieving, still remembering. Still making you remember. They have a panic attack during the action, they think they can perform a certain sexual act but disassociate or throw up anyway, they tell you terrible stories that haunt your dreams, they’re pissed off at the local rape crisis center for being racist or transmisogynist or just fucking inadequate. They haven’t forgotten shit. Bad survivors see the secret insides of rape culture every day, and talk about it. They’re the femme with baggage you scroll past on Tinder because they look like too much drama. They’re the survivor who kills themself and who is described later in sorrowful tones as “broken, but now at peace.” They’re the bitch, the hysteric, the dyke. And often, as survivors, we don’t want to be them, because being them means being not healed. It means that we’ve failed at surviving.
-Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
I wanted to interrupt the cycles of abuse and intergenerational violence in my family. I wanted to grow up to have relationships that weren’t violent. To know pleasure, not martyrdom. Most of all, I wanted to be happy, and I wanted to know freedom, joy, and liberation. Even though and especially because I had no idea what those things actually felt like.
-Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
i can’t stand to hear kamala’s voice. i know it. i know i sound exactly like that long ass tweeting weirdo who said she couldn’t vote for bernie sanders because her father used to yell at the dinner table and it was reminiscent of bernie, but i ask you do me the respect of noticing the stark differences between kamala and bernie. i can’t stand to look at her. i can’t tolerate to hear her. does she pop pills and ramble on stage? who the hell cares. i am terrified of the things she says diplomatically. i have never felt so skeezed out when a woman is speaking. it’s like when i am scared of a man. she’s grinning and letting people burn.
ptsd has ravaged my body and i am tired of it. i would chart out for you when the decay started but that goes against a decision i just made for myself in the last ten minutes about it: i will never speak of trauma again. i am sick of it. it fills my body.
i am terrified of the men at my job. two years ago, my first week on the job, i was felt up by a patron. i was helping him with a job application and he flipped my skirt up. i was too scared to do anything about it. and that alone was proof that i haven’t gotten anywhere in maturing, in aging, in healing. men have brought me gifts at my job, i have hid in other buildings owned by my employer because a freak show of a man calling me cherry doll is blocking the entrance to the library. i feel under a microscope. the pay is excellent. that’s how they get you.
I just went to sell some clothes the other day—which, you know, is a humiliating exercise that I decided maybe will never be repeated. I’ll just donate things. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why buyers take what they take. It feels like a personal rejection. They’re just like, “We don’t want your stuff.”
I love life, and I feel the world is a blessed, holy place. But I started to prefer the world that I had made, and I couldn’t wait to go there every day. Writing the book was the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything. What I’m trying to say is that it was never an exercise in looking at the actual world as I have known it but in constantly inventing a new world that was appearing before my eyes.
I’ll confess at this moment, right now, that I really love the unit of my nuclear family—my son and my husband, the three of us. I feel like it’s become a bulwark against whatever is negative about contemporary life and the outside world’s disposabilities and violence and commodifications. Three people can make something that’s really insulated and beautiful.
Everything happening in the world right now is so violent and is always moving faster than the speed of my thoughts and as much as I want to stay engaged and up-to-date, I physically and psychically cannot. I am certain my brain is not meant to process grief, destruction, and content on this scale because I feel it shutting down, or at least looking for an alternate, different sense-oriented place to dwell, if only to have a chance at some peace.
I think you should write about the things you’re obsessed with.
As bell hooks says, we are a deeply loveless society - we are desperately scrambling for a facsimile of the feeling of belonging, of closeness, of something bigger than ourselves. I think that’s where those perpetual unanswerable questions about the human condition come from. We’re trying to heal that conundrum. If it’s not a celebrity obsession, it’s drink, drugs, an unhealthy intimate relationship. Everyone has their poison.
I think unfortunately, in most cases, with the really canonical people, it’s as if their undeniable brilliance as public figures and artists necessitates that they aren’t able to cultivate the qualities that make someone a decent, even-keeled person to be around interpersonally. But that’s just a loose theory of mine.
I don’t believe in the adage that you have to suffer for your art. I always discourage that in people that I teach, particularly young people. We need a canon of joy. Joy doesn’t have to be flat or facile. What if we could write as beautifully and deeply about joy as we do the heavier emotions?
We make art because we are wrestling with the impossibility of the world and ourselves and our relationships to each other and that’s never going to change.
The ‘monster’ idea is a fairytale we like to tell ourselves because we don’t want to reckon with the fact that we know these people. These people are our fathers and our partners and our sons. We don’t want to confront that. It is easier to silo them off and pretend that perpetrators are a different, alien species entirely divorced from people we have in our circles.
By the time someone has gone to jail for something, you’re trying to get them to unlearn. And people are bad at unlearning. It’s really difficult. It’s easier to learn.
We are all, I believe, looking for something to worship in a society that no longer values religion nearly as much as it once did. You need something that makes you crane your neck up in awe. If it’s not religion, then it’s a celebrity or a sports team. We all want to feel like there’s something bigger than us.
This constant need to define one’s self and aesthetics and specific playlists and items of clothing is the apex of neoliberalism. Clean girl, feral girl summer and what have you - can you tell I’m a millennial? The internet hasn’t invented behaviours, but it makes it so much easier to observe trends. We all fall foul, as you said. We’re all just trying to feel something. We reach for hyperbolic language to feel something.
It’s really hard, because communities are not supposed to be as large as the ones we find ourselves in. Way way way back when, before they built modern cities and societies, people lived in these communities of 40, 50, 60. That’s what we are built for. That’s our limit for building profound bonds. We live these transient lives - I’ve moved so many times. Our sense of responsibility and care - our ability to repair and support - for the people outside of our nuclear families is almost completely gone.
The thinness isn’t explicitly glamorized, but it’s ubiquitous enough to feel like a prerequisite for sensuality. Rooney—whose precise economy with words is duly commended—lavishes attention on “the firm upturned bowl of [Frances’s] stomach,” Marianne’s “narrow and delicate” body, and Eileen’s “slim white arms like reeds, like branches.” (Meanwhile, an incidental Conversations With Friends female character’s thighs are described as being “pocked like the texture of whipped cream.”) Intermezzo’s 20-something student and occasional sex-worker character, Naomi—a hardier, somewhat less ethereal protagonist, whose boyfriend deems her “a carnivore”—tucks into a “family-size bag of Doritos.” But even while she’s eating, the “smooth obtrusion” of her prominent ankle bone is noted.
Most writers tend toward some degree of stylistic repetition, but these characters are not just thin—they are often starving. Frances drinks black coffee and makes a habit of working through lunch, while Marianne survives all day on “a tangerine and a piece of unbuttered toast.” Over the course of Conversations With Friends, Frances admits to having “a troubled relationship with my body” that evokes immediate empathy. But is it possible, in Rooney’s world, for a fat—or even non-painfully-thin—protagonist to suffer in ways that aren’t externalized through increasing smallness? Does a woman’s pain still matter if her appetite doesn’t diminish and her bones don’t show?
To find yourself outside the narrow space that Rooney has carved out for her protagonists by virtue of your biography or identity is not unique. In a 2021 essay for Electric Literature titled “I Love Sally Rooney’s Novels, But They Aren’t Written for Me,” Malavika Kannan notes that Rooney’s focus on “white, pointedly thin, elite-educated women with miraculously attractive lovers” leaves her wondering: “Where are the Normal People of Color?” Still, there is something about the emphatic physicality of Rooney’s characters that makes you wonder whether a fat Rooney heroine could ever exist.
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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