round-up: 10/17
housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Thursday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m watching
What I’m reading
Quotations
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is 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:
UN pleads against further violence after Israeli strike kills top Hezbollah leader
What the Deliberate Targeting of Libraries Reveals About the Nature of War
When The World Falls in Around You or, Vows to My Palestinian Wife on Our Wedding Day
On the Dangerous Weaponization of Antisemitism Against Pro-Palestine Protests
Places to donate:
Lebanon:
Lebanese Food Bank: https://www.instagram.com/lebfoodbank/?hl=en
The Zahra Trust: https://www.instagram.com/thezahratrust/?hl=en
Beit El Baraka: https://www.instagram.com/beitelbaraka/?hl=en
Animals Lebanon: https://www.instagram.com/animalslebanon/?hl=en
Palestine:
Grassroots fund for displaced Gazans in Egypt: https://www.instagram.com/dylankforster/?hl=en
Healing Our Homeland: https://www.instagram.com/healing.our.homeland/?hl=en
Watermelon Relief: https://www.instagram.com/watermelonrelief/?hl=en
Housekeeping:
I love her. I need her.
What I’m watching:
I’m finally watching the newest season of Hacks and am enjoying it tremendously. I just watched this scene. Iconique!
Also this:
What I’m reading:
Females, Andre Long Chu
Curious Wine, Katherine V. Forrest
Quotations:
what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses
the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west
boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love
how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how
it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was,
at the time, unlivable.
When I was younger, I was very much drawn to a gay canon that, for historical reasons, was largely focused on narratives of coming out, and shame, and ostracization. Those books brought me a lot of comfort because that’s how I felt growing up. But—and I don’t know how much of this is owing to my personal trajectory or to the larger cultural trajectory—by the time I started writing fiction seriously I didn’t have any interest in writing those kinds of narratives.
It seems simplistic to say, Oh, we don’t need those stories, our society is more accepting now, because that’s not necessarily true. I think we’re in a moment of cultural regression when it comes to different sexualities and gender expressions. But I was more interested in seeing what you could do with a story about gay men in which those elements were not part of the central narrative. What would you be left with? Would there be anything inherently “gay” left? I found that there was. These characters may not be thinking about their sexuality, they may not be forming their identities primarily around it, but they’re still viewing the world through a specifically gay sensibility, and it’s molding their experience in surprising ways. I sometimes feel contemporary gay fiction finds increasingly creative ways to return to those original narratives, and I lose patience with that, because I think there are more interesting ways of activating a gay character in a novel.
One option: Untold suffering. The other option: Flattering awareness that you represent a world of possibilities in the eyes of someone else. I think the choice is clear.
To desire for me. Desiring and being desired feel inextricably entangled to me. I read somewhere that a lot of women derive pleasure, narcissistically, from being desired. I think it’s more universal than that. Everyone wants to be wanted. But I have also learned to associate being desired in ways I can’t reciprocate with painful, embarrassing situations it’s hard to extricate myself from. Being desired feels cheap sometimes, easy to provoke in mindless ways. It’s kind of the negative of feeling, being looked at, being felt for, being made up in someone else’s imagination. I’d always choose desiring because I desire someone who is better than me, a sure route to disappointment, ok. But also because that feeling is the craziest thing in the world. There’s nothing I can say about desire that won’t sound really cliché, but there is absolutely nothing else that feels that good.
Stacy and I had been together ten years by the time we got married, which meant that our handwritten wedding vows were less pie-in-the-sky relationship aspirations, and more like a highlight reel of promises we'd been keeping a long, long time. She said, "I would do anything for you, at any time, for any reason — or for no reason at all." And I cried because it's true. Because when I want a long walk, or a very specific pair of socks I saw on my favorite basketball player, or an entirely new career, she'll do anything in her power to give those things to me. She values my safety and happiness over everything. She wants to be an active participant in those things.
Is it shocking to know that as a former slut and infrequent dater I love fictional love? I am, unfortunately, a romantic at heart. It’s why I read fanfiction, and why I wrote a novel that is an homage to romantic comedies. I believe in love, I just don’t really believe in it for myself.
It used to be that whenever another person requested something of me — a long, unstructured lunch date at a restaurant where I could barely afford to eat, help with coursework while I was barely fighting to juggle my own assignments, or attendance at a lengthy religious ceremony many miles away from home that was certain to make me miserable — my instinct was to say yes.
I’d agree instantly without thought, and then spend weeks fuming and freaking out, wishing that I could get hit by a car or that someone near me would fall terrible ill so that I wouldn’t have to follow through on my agreement. Sometimes I’d impulsively quit at the last second because I couldn’t bear the pressure, inconveniencing everyone and not sparing myself a single moment of anticipatory anxiety or post-cancellation guilt.
My lesbianism is intertwined with my anxiety, with my grief, and with my pleasure.
In Chicago, I feel very attractive, but in the way that people think I am freakish and do not want to be my friend, lover, consistent fucker. They want to watch from a distance, mostly. And when they do want to get close they just want to have sex (the type of sex where only what they are feeling is what matters and also no more than once).
In Atlanta, I felt myself on the cusp of true, full desirability, but not conventionally attractive (read: thin) enough to be seen making out with in public (unless molly got involved, and then it would be fully unacknowledged once sobriety called) and definitely not a viable dating option. I was mostly good for creative and financial extraction while being completely de-sexed and hyper-sexualized at the same time. Atlanta and Chicago are similar in that people always saved me for after dark, like a guilty treat.
In New York, I make people nervous. But the difference is they will still come up and talk to me, even if they have a little trouble holding my eyes. I feel seen. I don’t ever feel like the weirdest one in the room (because I am definitely not). I feel appreciated for showing up as myself. Interactions tend to be slightly more tender. People make plans with me during the day.
My lesbianism is my emphasis on pleasure-based experiences, meaning, doing what you want because you feel like doing it and we all deserve to feel good as a bare minimum reward for being alive, and because pleasure and grief co-habitate in the mind. This doesn’t have to be sexual, but I think it’s nice when it is.
I have so rarely changed my mind that I’m trying to even think of one instance. I’m certain there was at least one, but I can’t think of what it was. It’s a really rare thing that I change my mind.
I don’t follow Taylor Swift’s career; it follows me, because her box-office grosses are on the news. I hope she pays a great deal of taxes.
I wanted to hear your thoughts on the odd trend of lesbian period pieces. Thinking just of Ammonite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Carol, what do you make of this Hollywood fixation with representing lesbians from a minimum of 70 years ago?
Well, I don’t know about all these movies, but a lot of them have been made by men. Is that not correct?
It is.
So, I suppose that lesbians are less scary if they’ve been dead for hundreds of years.
If you’re confused, good. So was Valerie [Solanas], I think—not because she didn’t know what she was talking about, but because of her fierce commitment to her own ambivalence: a sex worker who claimed to be asexual, a lesbian who slept with men, a satirist without a sence of humor, a man-hater who behaved, as often as not, like the men she hated.
-Andrea Long Chu
For weeks, my hands and clothes were covered in DIY paste, making me look like a compulsive masturbater, which I was. But this was Art, and I would not be stopped. I had just cheated on my girlfriend, and I was very sad.
-Andrea Long Chu
For Saint-Point, the whole of humanity has up until recently been mired in a feminine epoch of history: sentimental, peaceful, anemic. What’s needed is blood.
-Andrea Long Chu
The two things fueled each other: the more righteous I felt in public, the more I could wallow, privately, in my shame.
-Andrea Long Chu
It would still be years before it would occur to me that I might be a woman. If the thought had presented itself then, I would have batted it away like an insect. I hated being a man, but I thought that was just how feminism felt. Being a man was my punishment for being a man. Anything else was greed.
-Andrea Long Chu
Wanting to be a woman was something that descended upon me, like a tongue of fire, or an infection.
-Andrea Long Chu
Diana looked at her with overwhelming awareness of her beauty, a beauty intensified by shadows and starlight. In the silver light of their room her eyes were a deep gray, her lips a sensual curve, her face a lustrous, austere sculpture of contours and shadows. Blonde hair was tumbled and lying thickly on the pillow.
-Katherine V. Forrest
“It’s hard for me to drive when you’re looking at me.”
“I’m only looking.”
“Your looking is like touching.”
-Katherine V. Forrest
“Yes,” Lane had whispered, the only word spoken between them during the night.
-Katherine V. Forrest
She remembered holding Lane’s face in her hands, kissing her; Lane’s hands covering hers, taking Diana’s hands from her face to kiss her fingers, her palms, inside her wrists.
-Katherine V. Forrest
Lips touched for a moment on her forehead, a melting softness. Diana tightened her arms and turned her face into lane, brushing her lips over her throat, over the silky smooth softness, against the hollow of her throat, feeling the pulse beat.
-Katherine V. Forrest
Now, I know that it is okay to want and expect reciprocity. Sure, I don’t go about doing loving things for others and keeping score, waiting for the moment for them to reciprocate. But I am aware when things are imbalanced. And if they remain that way, with my partner having no desire to address this, then that will impact my ability to love them. Because in loving them, I’m no longer loving myself.
[Self-full love looks like] choosing to prioritize our own needs — at least some of the time — knowing that self-sacrifice will lead to resentment, and to the diminishment of our sense of self. How can you truly love me if I’m no longer me? How can I truly love you if I’m no longer me?
Prentis Hemphill has famously said “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously,” and I carry this quote in my heart. We’re not always going to get what we want from our partners. This is why we need community. Our needs deserve to be met, but placing the onus on our partner to continually drop everything for us only breeds co-dependence.
I feel like when I’ve been forced to contend with my body the most, it’s been out of suffering. That’s when I’ve learned to notice what it feels and wants. I think somehow, sex and pleasure got very divorced from the same body that feels pain. In a way, you need to understand both to understand either of them.
I feel like I’ve had affairs with people when I’ve only touched their hand. I’ve always joked that I’m a bit Victorian, but I think it’s also that sex can be a lot of things.
I said to her, “Do you ever feel this way? I know this is a thing about me. I can be hot and cold.” And she was like, “Oh, yeah, when I dropped you off the other night, I thought, Maybe I’ll just burn this whole thing down.” I was so gleeful, felt so in love. I was like, “You’re kidding me!” She was like, “Yeah I was like, Maybe I’ll just never call again.” And I just loved her so much. That was sort of the beginning of realizing there can be trust. I am neither going to lose myself nor disconnect to a degree that I can’t be found again. But it’s all still very new to me.
It doesn’t take very much reality to make something come alive. It’s like red food coloring or something — you just need a little drop, and suddenly the whole thing is pink.
I can’t afford to donate, I need to be paid for my time and work. I don’t have a trust fund that can give me the ability to do things for prestige or for the love of “art, writing, history, etc.” Furthermore, the idea of doing something for the love of it is rooted in classicism, racism, patriarchy, social hierarchy, and colonialism.
I was exploited by a nonprofit for over a decade. As was my partner. As were my colleagues. As are graduate students. These types of institutions need to be held accountable. There is no excuse for nonprofit institutions to not fairly compensate those who work for them for their labor. Low salaries and tiny rates are a huge problem in nonprofit organizations across creative and educational industries.
Nonprofits should be showing the world that artists and their work need to be properly compensated. How are they supposed to change the world for the better when they are hiding behind their institutional classification and making excuses for their inaction? The line, “we can’t pay our staff a living wage, we are just a nonprofit” is more common than you think. It happens in nonprofit higher education, museum, cultural and research centers spaces all the time.
By their very definition, nonprofits need to be the ones to fairly compensate artists or contributors for their work. Isn’t the whole point of a nonprofit is to fight inequity? Otherwise, nonprofits are exploiting the economic inequities of art labor.
We all live under capitalism. Monetary payment is the only acceptable and equitable form of payment.
Writing is a skill and a craft. As is drawing, painting, sculpting, photographing, dancing, singing and all other arts. There are entire industries built around training and employing these skilled people/artists, from libraries to the film industry. The skills of these people are used in every industry. It is then insane to think that someone who writes should not be paid for their labor.
Published writers and literary magazines cannot continue to perpetuate this dangerous and undermining discourse, as Leigh writers, “there are some good reasons to publish aside from financial compensation.” Instead, everyone should be standing in solidarity with writers who are openly advocating for fair pay.
Prestige, and let’s be honest, all of these “alternatives forms of payment” is a rain check that the majority of artists and authors can’t accept. The sad reality of the world we live in is that most of us can’t afford to invest or donate.
Our bodies are not objects for consumption or comparison—or ranking. A body is not something good or bad or neutral for people generally, but rather something that may suit and work better or worse for the person who inhabits it.
I wish no one knew anything about my sexuality or anything about my dating life. Ever, ever, ever. And I hope that they never will again. And I’m never talking about my sexuality ever again. And I’m never talking about who I’m dating ever again.
I don’t think marriage is the be-all, end-all of relationships, nor should it be some arbitrary/compulsory “life event,” but I do think that performing a ritual to eternally bind yourself to someone is lowkey very metal and a little kinky.
So much happens in that space between desire and satisfaction, it’s a very fertile space for creation and introspection and also for destruction.