round-up: 10/28
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
It’s Saturday, folks.
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
&, once again, a disclaimer: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling and apocalyptic, 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. And, fwiw, these past few weeks, I’ve been reading and thinking through the violence and horrors. I hope you’ve been keeping your eyes open and share where you can, too.
Housekeeping:
I asked a fun lil question of Twitter and invite you to respond either here or there: what’s everyone’s favorite(s) short story? or: what’s a short story that’s influenced your own prose?
What I’m reading:
Digging Through the Archives of Scarfolk, the Internet’s Creepiest Fake Town
Librarians Didn’t Sign Up to Be Queer Activists—but This Year, They Are
Study Hall: ‘How Do I Both Condemn Hamas and Support Israeli and Palestinian People?’
The Three Fundamental Human Freedoms That Modern Society Lacks
Quotations:
What good is rest when the world is burning?
I know they enjoy the aesthetics of Blackness and Black liberation, moodboards featuring Angela Davis and James Baldwin and June Jordan and Audre Lorde, but they don’t actually care about Black people or Black liberation and they certainly don’t care about me. I saw it then and I see it now — where people truly stand. And I’m fine with it. There’s a kind of intimacy to it. We can all see each other so clearly now. The silence of some people in this moment is resounding, but at least it’s honest.
Also, quickly: this word, “humanity,” has come up a lot and I’ve been surprised by the flattening of the word, the flattening of its meaning. I suspect many people believe humanity or humaness is tantamount to innate goodness. But humanity is simply the condition of being human. One’s humanity is a fact, like the color of your eyes or the time you were born. One cannot gain or lose one’s humanity. Humanity, to me, is not intrinsic empathy or compassion or righteousness. These are things we must all actively choose. Humans can be beautiful and caring and loving to each other but they can also be ugly and cruel and hateful, too. Humanity is not just the best of us, the good in us. Our hideousness towards each other is our humanity, too. But this rampant misapprehension is what happens to meaning in a world where humanity is not a given but a thing which must be earned or proven, in a world where most if not all the horror and suffering that we endure can be traced back to a single point: some people are considered more human than others, and some people aren’t even considered human at all.
I’m always feeling this pain. It’s almost mundane. I’ve been chronically suicidal since I was ten years old. My first attempt was when I was just twelve years old. I’m 34 years old now. I can’t believe I’m back here, still here. It’s frustrating, to say the absolute least. Especially since now, more than ever it feels selfish and rather besides-the-point to want to die when so many people who want to live are dying before their time.
It's one thing to be exhausted and upset about overlapping crises, wrote Dahlia Lithwick in 2021, "It is quite another thing to be expected to embody pitch-perfect emotional responses to each one of those things instantaneously online." Silence is violence, we have been taught by this point. And also we are acutely aware of the limits of our own knowledge and firsthand experience.
There is no such thing as Corporate Values. They do not exist.
Companies are like computers for profit. They exist to make profits. All else is in service of that thing. They are not alive. They do not have feelings. They do not have beliefs; they have interests. (The interest is “to make profits.”) This is true of every company, from the grim cement factory to the most welcoming technology firm.
It may sound like I am letting companies off the hook here. It may sound as though I am excusing them from their amoral, psychotically self-interested nature. Not at all. This understanding of the nature of companies is precisely why I think they should all be chained up like prisoners in a dungeon. They are bad robots with no moral compass. They are empty machines programmed to make all of humanity work for their owners. What the United States has done—allowing companies to infiltrate its political system, acting as though companies are entities with “free speech” rights, granting companies life or death power over millions of working people who will plunge into poverty without them because there is no social safety net—is absolutely insane. Putting companies in the most powerful role in your society?? Man, that’s crazy! It is the very essence of companies, if you let them into the political sphere, to try to purchase all political power and use it exclusively to enrich themselves, with little care for who is harmed. That is what they do. That is how they are programmed. We know this. They are amoral machines of pure self-interest, and we, the fucking idiot children that we are, have been seduced into thinking that they are our friends, because of the friendly, painted-on faces. Giving corporate capitalism control of an electoral democracy is one of the most predictably awful decisions a nation could ever make. And we are all reaping its many grotesque rewards. For all of the sci-fi terror about what might happen if an evil AI ever got loose, there is little discussion of the fact that we are already living in such a world right here in the USA. Companies are very good at doing the specific things they do—making cars, producing food, churning out new drugs or computer programs or fashion designs. They should be allowed to do those things. And they should be locked in a prison of regulation to prevent them from doing anything else. To live in a world run by companies, rather than making them live in ours, is lunacy.
The Transgender Day of Remembrance every autumn is a testament to the violence that hangs like a sword of Damocles over our heads every day.
I would say that I do not separate out trans issues, or lesbian/gay/bi issues, queer issues, from that larger relationship of forces. That is true in my novels, too. They take place, like our lives do, within the context of a larger economic and social reality - including economic class struggle, the war being waged abroad and on the domestic front, daily battles against racism, immigrant-bashing, and misogyny, and deaf and disabled accessibility.
Tweets:
That’s all for today—
