round-up: 10/30
housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Wednesday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m listening to
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:
Netanyahu mulls plan to empty northern Gaza of civilians and cut off aid to those left inside
Israeli strike at Gaza’s al-Aqsa Hospital burns tents, killing at least 4
Shaban al-Dalou: The Palestinian teen burned to death in Israeli bombing
Housekeeping:
I’ve been resistant to wearing my new Nikes because the old ones are so perfectly worn-in. I thought adding some charms might help:
I also found some copies of my very first run of Lust Empire, which is a zine I wrote a few years ago and love and still sell on my website.
Anyways, the color green is such a source of joy for me right now. It’s all around me.
& some recent news, well-summarized by Roxane Gay:
The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post both declined to endorse a presidential candidate even though both papers were set to endorse Kamala Harris. The staffs are rightly furious. There have been several resignations. Their billionaire owners intervened for self-serving purposes while calling it neutrality or some other nonsense. Anyway, the Post has lost more than 250,000 subscribers or 8% of their subscriber base. Whoops!
I don’t subscribe because I don’t make that kind of money, but my parents just cancelled their subscriptions to both. Anyway, bring back indepedent journalism.
What I’m listening to:
Lizzy McAlpine’s new album! She’s brilliant and I would die for her.
What I’m reading:
Reducing daily sitting time by 40 minutes may help prevent worsening back pain
Sapphic vocabulary is up for debate after this controversial post
Quotations:
I like the limitations of the novel. I like feeling them pressing in on me while I’m trying to get close to my characters.
Throughout my work, rather than writing about characters, I write about dynamics. I always find it funny when people say “That’s an interesting character,” or “That’s a good character,” because I don’t think a character has any intrinsic value. Every person is intrinsically interesting, but in a novel, what gives a character power is their relation to others, and how those relations change.
Every novel I have written has been that process of falling in love with these totally fictitious individuals, and, in that way, their relationships become the plot.
For me, writing novels is a way of preventing or being in denial about the passing of time.
I wonder if it’s common to other writers—something a little bit frantic about wanting to preserve life, not to let that get away and not to have nothing to show for it, not to have spent three years and have no evidence that I had ideas and experiences. I forget I live in a world where I do not dictate the speed at which time passes—it passes in the normal way for everyone.
The desire to be normal places demands on us that can often feel intolerable.
How do you balance the desire to belong, to be part of a community that makes life meaningful, and the desire to resist the constant drive to normalize relations?
Language gains meaning from the person who is uttering it and the person who is receiving that utterance.
The mind-body problem is interesting for me, because when I’m writing my novels, I feel like I am a floating brain. I forget that I physically exist. I’m a Word document. It can be a shock for me to catch sight of my own reflection—not that I’m shocked at what I look like, but that I look like anything at all. It’s strange to exist while I think I’m floating in the ether with these characters.
Even if I wished to, it would be hard for me to untangle completely my idea of storytelling, or even the pursuit of artistic beauty, from the idea of God and the divine.
I think the experience of art leaves a residue that goes beyond what can be captured in ideological critical terms. What is that residue, then? You can call it magic. Or you can talk about it in specifically religious terms, and many writers do.
What I would like to develop is an aesthetics of anti-consumerism, an aesthetics that is against buying and that can resist the extreme weight of the capitalist content-production mill. I want to play whatever tiny, grain-of-sand role I can in developing that aesthetic program, in making something beautiful that says no to consumerism, disposability, endless growth, and that is consonant with a political project, even if it’s not in itself political.
The reason I don’t think capitalism can be rehabilitated is because we have only one planet to live on, and we are running out of the resources that power the capitalist system. We cannot keep plundering the earth. In the Marxist tradition, which wasn’t originally an ecological intellectual tradition, there are other good reasons why I don’t think the capitalist system is sustainable as a way of organizing human activity.
I think some people don’t believe you can come up with fictional characters, because it’s such a weird thing to do. It would be more normal if I just wrote about things that happened to me, because it’s conceivable why a human being would want to write about troubling experiences—as a form of catharsis, for instance—and then market it as a novel. That seems like a more plausible psychological process than when I say, “I was sitting on the train one day and I just thought, What if a chess player played a simultaneous exhibition game in a rural arts center, and then the woman who worked there began a love affair with him?” That doesn’t seem like something that would happen to someone, and even if it did, you wouldn’t then spend three years fleshing out every aspect of their lives. People probably want to believe I’m not as weird as I would need to be to have written the books I have written. But I am that weird.
i never had insomnia before. i used to sleep like a rock. it’s common for the women in my family to suffer.
i’ve applied for three jobs i am overqualified for and pay at least 30k less than what i make now, but i’m trying not to care about money. i am trying to prioritize time to fuck around, color, have dreams where i’m not tortured.
What, then, is sex? It is not defined by the involvement of any given parts of the body. Nor is it an activity or a set of activities. Perhaps we can more properly call sex a dimension—a physical and conceptual space that is the shared creation of all parties to a sexual encounter, and into which they can bring whatever activities or objects or drives they like. Baking bread, or squeezing a spot, or pressing brake pedals aren’t generally sexual activities, but they can be if you want them to be. Elbows and armpits aren’t sex organs, but that doesn’t mean they too can’t be brought into the sexual dimension.
it’s been centuries inside this grief
Up until my late twenties, I had zero concept of what my body was for other than looking as maximally attractive as possible. I had never heard of anyone talk about bodies, especially women’s bodies, as being “for” anything else. Now, I understand my body to have a much richer and more textured purpose, one that can be full of positive feelings and satisfying, enriching, validating experiences. Learning to lift weights was the vector for that. But wrapped up in that physical practice were a bunch of layered mental practices.
Likewise, mortality studies find that when we control for behaviors like balanced diets, exercise, not drinking, and not smoking, body weight is a much less significant factor. Therefore, let’s dispense with the idea that someone who wants a ballerina body is inherently healthier, more responsible, more suited to carry on the human race, whatever weird moralistic features people want to ascribe here. If someone claims it’s fine to want a ballerina body, and then someone else objects, and then the first person goes “but what’s so wrong with wanting to ~ be healthy ~???” they are moving the goalposts. I reject it.
But what is a body for? A body is where you always are.
No one rehabilitated their relationship with this body against the overwhelming cultural forces out there overnight. It’s terrible that we have to make deliberate effort to mount defenses against it.
america creates myth of hedonism, greed, materialism, individuality. “we are so dopamine poisoned!” we have not felt pleasure in one hundred years.
after a drink or two, i like to get up and wander around looking for the bathroom. there’s no emergency, i just like to be a little buzzed and strut my full figured body around. i like to be inside knowing the bar tender is watching me, people on dates are watching me. men and women are all thinking about me and my body. i hold everyone’s attention for a whole 25 seconds, or however long it takes to get to the bathroom. i play with my hair in the mirror.
the theater is mostly empty. there’s a guy by himself way down in front and then a couple on a date that sit directly in front of us. this means nothing except for the part when demi moore gets totally naked and considers taking the substance. we see her small breasts, flat stomach, and perfectly adequate ass. at the sight of boobies, the woman of the couple in front of us, she pulls out her phone and googles “demi moore age.” it is important to know these things. the timing of a woman’s body. you see her tits and you want to know what that means for yours.
i believe beauty mirrors monstrosity. i believe beauty is lonely.
I was running a minimum of 30 miles a week, more if I was in the middle of training for another half-marathon. It took up a lot of time, I didn’t really enjoy it except in a Stockholm-syndrome way.
Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show hasn’t been memorable for a while. The past few attempts at relevance have failed, but it’s a great barometer of what corporations think people will buy into. Can’t get Chappell Roan to accept the performance paycheck? Ok, play her music twice - it’s like she was there. Get a KPOP girl on stage. Sprinkle in some TikTok girlies. Is that anything? Ignore the lawsuits!
I’m sorry, I can’t get energized even to be critical about how unfeminist the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is - it’s like being combative to an old relative at family dinner: we get it, she’s politically incorrect. Still, she’s never going to change and she’s got to die eventually.
1 in 860 is the chance a motorcyclist who rides 15 miles every day will die over one year. For comparison, the risk of dying for a person who takes a 500-mile flight daily for a year is 1 in 85,000.
-Michael Easter citing The Washington Post
When I was a child, it was common to see language like “indulge in a sinful-tasting treat without the guilt.” Dieters were urged to overcome temptation, to be good. The whole thing felt vaguely Catholic.
I have heard many feminists speak about the social imperative for women to be thin as an essentially counterrevolutionary force—not simply because it reduces women to their physical appearances, but because it is distracting. What better way to keep women from imagining a better world than making sure they’re obsessively focused on their bodies, unable to see past their own waistlines and thigh gaps?
When I publish this post, Substack will track and report on all of the metrics for me. It will summarize my writing and your reading in numbers. It will tell me what percentage of subscribers opened it, how many subscriptions it’s generated, how many likes it’s received, how the reader numbers compare to the average. It’s not only newsletters. Editors at most publications are able to track analytics and metrics in order to see exactly what drives clicks. This, in turn, affects what people want to write and publish, both at traditional publications and on Substack. It becomes easy to develop an obsessive focus on driving up the numbers, to worry more about the marketing pitch, the timeliness, the hook of a piece of writing than the writing itself.
I think because it was always something I did on the side. I taught for four years then I went to grad school for film studies, and I wasn’t getting paid to write, not that you do when you’re a poet. But I felt like I couldn’t claim it or fully own it. When I got into the creative nonfiction MFA program at the University of Iowa, it was a three-year lesson on learning how to feel comfortable claiming that identity. I learned how to treat that identity seriously and to take my writing seriously.
For me, as a woman, I’ve always been taught to please others above myself. You’re trained all your life to ignore your body, instincts, and urges. It took a lot of deprogramming to realize I can prioritize myself and my work, and even though it may not be compensated, it is important and it has value. Learning how to do that has holistically enriched my life. Writing has always been intensely personal. I’ll never stop doing it. I realized I need to treat it with the care it deserves if I want to take care of myself.
The beauty without pain feels more complicated. For me, beauty has always felt thorny. I have always wanted to be taken seriously as a person and paid attention to for my thoughts and character and not what I look like. This is salient to the book because I think women and femme-presenting people are accustomed to role-playing. You have to switch in and out of characters or costumes to navigate the world and survive. But the rewards of that survival perpetually feels like oppression.