round-up: 10/21
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
&, once again, a disclaimer: 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.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
It happens all the time that artists get stuck doing whatever first brought them success, and dealers or marketers encourage them to just do the same thing because it’s the easiest thing to sell, thereby undermining what could be a more enduring career.
She’s doing it again! The fact that Gwyneth could just be rich and not address these topics aside, as I suspected when Hollywood first discovered how we’d started referring to their offspring, none of these people actually understand what the definition of “nepo baby” is. Clearly, they also categorically refuse to learn. This concept really should not be this hard to grok. Gwyneth seems to think that our light, impotent mockery of the nepos applies exclusively to famous children, claiming that, "Nobody rips on a kid who's like, 'I want to be a doctor like my dad and granddad.'“ Thus missing the entire point of this conversation and the core definition of the word “nepotism” itself. As I’m sure you all know, the point isn’t that these children should not pursue the same profession as their parents, just that they have a profound advantage in doing so, whether that profession be Hollywood starlet or surgeon. And it’s not just the advantages of having a parent with a household name already working in that chosen industry, but also the extreme wealth, privilege, and access that comes along with it. I don’t know how to break it down any more clearly or obviously for these people. But anyway, I hope this “ugly moniker,” as Gwyneth calls it, sticks around forever because I love the way all of us pointing out this simple fact of reality has so profoundly gotten under their skin. It reminds me a lot of celebrities’ response to the fictional concept of “cancel culture.” (Again, if you’re so “cancelled” why do I still have to hear you talk about it on your new Netflix special?) I say let them live in fear of the straw boogeymen they’ve created.
People are always showing me things on their phones. If I wanted to see things on a phone I would get a phone. I don’t want to look at things on the phone.
At a certain point you lose interest in yourself, or at least you should. There’s a limit to how long you can think about one person, even if that person is you. I’ve lost interest in the subject.
I stopped looking at photographs of myself. When people take photographs of me, they always say, “Do you want to see it?” I say, “No, I don’t want to see it.”
If there’s a battle between art and commerce, I’m sure you’re aware, commerce won. I know people are very upset about AI. I’m not very upset about it, partially because I don’t really understand it, and partially because I’m much more concerned about the loss of natural intelligence than I am about the advent of artificial intelligence. And if artificial intelligence takes over, it is the fault of natural intelligence.
The writer’s strike was a necessary strike, as is the actor’s strike. People think of actors in movies as Meryl Streep. OK, the strike wasn’t for Meryl Streep—the strike was for the other 160,000 people who are not Meryl Streep, because most people are not Meryl Streep, including most actors. I am on the side of anyone striking; I don’t care what they’re striking for. I’m on the side of all strikers. All my grandparents were immigrants. I was raised not to cross a picket line—I wouldn’t think of it. I don’t care what the strike is. I’m on the side of the strikers.
There are a lot of writers that I like. Don’t ask me to name them. Some of them are my friends, but most of them are not, because it’s really a good idea not to have too many friends who are writers.
If I didn’t have to work to make money, or if I didn’t have to pay everyone’s taxes in New York—because I consider myself as a designated taxpayer apparently in the 190% tax bracket—I wouldn’t work. I would still do some speaking gigs because I really enjoy them, but I wouldn’t be doing speaking engagements where you have to fly for 24 hours. I would walk around. I would read. I have to tell you, I have never been bored a minute in my life unless I was with other people.
Unlike older workers, who might have been loath to call in sick for fear of seeming weak or unreliable, younger workers feel more entitled to take full advantage of the benefits they’ve been given, executives and recruiters say.
I understand the histories of Israel and Palestine are complex, and that we are products of what we are born into or taught to believe as truth, but one aspect of all this that terrifies me is our inability to contain multitudes for ourselves and for each other.
We can also, I believe, remain cognizant of how the collective grief of a historically wronged people is being weaponized to fuel even more grief without their consent or endorsement.
We can recognize that one’s mourning, when truncated and discarded amid talks of war beyond a layman’s understanding, can harden a heart. I feel the pain of Jewish and Israeli friends, just as I hope the world, especially the people I share air, time and memories with, would try and feel the suffocating damage resulting from decades of injustice inflicted upon our Palestinian friends. This has been said a hundred times over by artists and writers and poets, the only ones offering the kind of refuge I’m so desperate for these days.
Yearning’s legacy for marginalized people as a defining state of being, one that can either bring joy or suffering, is tied to the resilience of these communities: to continue dreaming in spite of oppression, illness, and death.
For LGBTQ people, romanticizing the distance—physical or otherwise, like the distance created by the closet—between us and the objects of our desire is a longstanding tradition.
I was a baby gay during the late 2000s and early 2010s, where the most accessible depictions of queer women to me were Blue Is The Warmest Color, Black Swan (lol), and the UK show Skins. I was used to seeing relationships between women represented as hypersexual, exoticized, or superficial. But as I watched the two stars make eye contact across crowded rooms in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my pulse quickened—the two women hadn’t even touched. There’s something rebellious in finding pleasure and excitement in feelings historically meant to frighten and separate us.
All too often our political desire for change is seen as separate from longings and passions that consume lots of time and energy in daily life. […] Surely our desire for radical social change is intimately linked with the desire to experience pleasure, erotic fulfillment, and a host of other passions.
-bell hooks
Yearning, both in it’s traditional definition and as it’s used today, is a sensation of heartfelt or even painful longing for something or someone. Though the term originated before the 12th century, it has seen two waves of resurgence: in popular literature throughout the 18th and 19th century by female creatives like Virginia Woolf and Louisa May Alcott, and on the internet in 2020. While it might seem strange that a term happily at home in a Jane Austen novel has now become commonplace in our contemporary English vernacular, it is also eerily fitting. Like the women in these novels, I too have found myself preoccupied with a broad yet all consuming longing these days more than ever. It’s a sensation so specific to our needs in this current moment that it had to be brought back from the dead.
While perhaps the most pervasive today, “yearn” is one of many outdated and overly saccharine terms that have resurfaced into our everyday vocabulary in recent years. Since perhaps 2018, words like “tender,” “earnest,” “wholesome,” and “soft” have also made their way into popular conversation, demonstrating a collective desire for a type of simple sweetness not commonly found today. The ubiquity of these terms might denote the normalization of a desire for softness, but this language is also self aware. We desire tenderness and meaningful connection, but we also understand [its] scarcity.
But this shift in definition is about more than the way we view our relationships; what we yearn for most ultimately defines the way we envision our ideal lifestyle. Our deep and unfulfilled desire to spend more time with friends, to unplug, to luxuriate all day in the sun, represents a longing for a life where we can spend our time freely. One where we’re not stressed about money or work, where we can focus on things that actually matter and bring us fulfillment or joy. Though yearning was once a sensation, it has today evolved into a framework: one that is pro pleasure, antiwork, and striving towards envisioning a gentler and more fulfilling future.
We’ve learned that sexiness (as defined by the straight male gaze) should be coincidental. We’ve heard from Good Men™, the men who fancy themselves the ones we should want to be with, that they dislike the brazenness of a flashy outfit and a bold lip; what they find sexy is a Girl Next Door who “doesn’t wear makeup.” They don’t like feeling they’ve fallen for obvious attraction traps; they want to discover our inconspicuous allure because they, arbiters of aesthetic superiority, see beauty where other men miss it.
I think we abhor this attitude but also recognize the unfortunate truth that “trying too hard” is undesirable. We learn to hide the work and the why, too — we can’t cop to dressing sexy because we want to have sex (!!! can you imagine !!!) or because it feels good to be considered hot, so we cloak ourselves in a kind of plausible deniability about dressing sexy “just for us” that effectively renders us chaste and oblivious about our own beauty, but still hot.
If we position fashion/beauty as a form of expression and communication, it must inherently involve an other — someone or something we are communicating to, and a reason beyond the self that we’re communicating for.
I think that’s really helped over the past several years — recognizing that, sometimes all I have to say is, “This is unacceptable. We have to acknowledge this.” Even if we don't have solutions, a lot of times when you write about social issues, people expect you to solve these very long, ongoing ones. I mean, we're even seeing it this week with everything that's going on in the Middle East where people somehow think that sharing half-assed opinions online is going to resolve this 75-year issue. It won't. I recognize that and try to, not necessarily lower the bar per se, but be more realistic with myself about how and why. I know when I should speak on something. And when I just can't, I don't.
Sometimes, we do need to step away. A lot of what happens in discourse is because some people are very much too online, and they take that as a badge of honor. I take that as a reminder to go outside. Read a physical book. Go be in the world with people.
Any new work starts from a myriad of places. […] They’re buried and then come back to you.
I’ve been spending time out in West Texas and Northern Mexico for close to twenty years. […] All those years, I never took a picture […] but every potential photograph I would see, I was like, “Oh, no.” […] All of it just seemed so tainted with a certain kind of mythology, a certain kind of way that that part of the world has been photographed and mythologized since the 19th century.
I think all art has a politics to it. I think everything, every single thing any of us does at any point in every day in our lives, has a politics to it. Where your muffin comes from, where your coffee was ground. It all has a politics to it. Everything you’re wearing, everything you eat, everywhere you go, it all has a politics to it. Aesthetics is political, right? Beauty, concepts of beauty, have a political resonance to them.
I remember in college, falling in love for the first time, two spring months of rapture, residing on the tail end of a helium balloon. I was so giddy about everything: washing the dishes, tying my shoes, scrambling eggs, binding books, pulling berries off juniper trees.
to approach the world as a concrete object, a thing to be held, not a thing to behold, or allegorized
And to think I was just a silly beansprout of a thing shivering under the medical lights, squirming like an open earthworm, now tasked with this terrible act of naming.
For a short time, my pet peeves were my shortcomings: dry skin in the morning – brushing off the bed sheets with bits of outer insulation from my body. Was I molting? I needed to drink more bitter herbs, I thought. I had chronic stomach pain, below the clavicle, a small fist of air. Sweet antacid, mint leaves, fennel seed tea. Invisible Anxiety. The pain in my leg: a hypochondriac’s dream. Soothing myself with palm oil and camphor. Small applications on the surface. At dinner with guests, supplementing aspirin with ice-water, saying very little otherwise, a friend agreed with everyone’s assessment: “Yes, sometimes you are cold and unfeeling. You could warm it up a little.” My apparent coolness – was it a matter of objective safety? That remote vacancy which I brought to every engagement, keeping the world at arm’s length, the anthropologist’s vantage point, sustaining the presumptive: was that my vocation – the judicious spectator, an odd outlier outlining all this activity while staying behind the line of sight? As the youngest sibling, I was always evaluating my older sisters with fierce judgment from the corner of the room, just out of reach: eavesdropping on phone conversations, catching glimpses of padded bras, curling irons, and maxi pads passed between casual doorways. Taking stock of the panoply of premature adulthood (teenage pregnancy), unruly rebellion (sneaking out at night), clumsy and combative excursions with our wicked step-mother (cat fights with elegantly finger-nailed fisticuffs). I watched from a dutiful distance, careful not to engage, harboring a catalog of tragicomic events and all their moral assessments in order to avoid the worst-case scenario for myself. I was in the world, but not of it. I learned from the mistakes of others: that I was nothing more than a mistake waiting to happen, potential energy. I learned from the mistletoe to keep watch overhead so as to avoid the dangling modifier of accidental affection. I learned from the stone in my shoe to keep walking through the pain with a staggering refrain in my step, a constant reminder of the brokenness of my body and the indefatigable self-loathing of my own self-consciousness.
But for now, in a warm bird bath, sunning ourselves with a glistening glow, I could only think of the sweet bliss of here and now, the wetness of loving kisses on my nape, my neck, my back, my rump, my foreshortened wings and a sweet nectar nightcap. Hope is a thing deferred.
I procrastinated my life by traveling far from it.
I wanted nothing of it: this origami suitcase lifestyle of travel and transition. I wanted to be here and now. I wanted silence, solace, and stillness. I wanted the simplest of things: a bowl of vanilla ice cream, a warm bath, and a quiet place to sit
Fandom can be a beautiful thing. It can be a place to find genuine friends, not just because you like the same thing, but because you feel similar feelings. Maybe you’ve been through similar stuff. Maybe it helps you to laugh or cry or sing along with whatever it is you adore. That can be lifesaving.
Fear isn’t always bad. Sometimes it saves your life.
i know that i will die. it’s kind of an abstract but i know it will happen. i know that my loved ones, too, will die. i don’t love this, i’m not looking forward to this, but i feel like in my day to day, if you asked me about it, i’d say i’m fairly clear-eyed about it.
Tweets:
Yeah.
CW.
That’s all for today!
& look at these fun necklaces I made this week:
