round-up: 1/04
recommendations, anti-recommendations (warnings?), quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday, and Happy New Year!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m watching
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I officially will have a lil half-table at LA Zine Fest on March 2nd.
Please come see me!
I made this little one a few years ago that you can download for free. Or there are some others on my website to buy.
Since we last spoke, I also made myself a little belt.
The Drama™.
And, truly:
Happy New Year. In 2024, I got 26 nose bleeds and cried constantly. My Notes app really has illustrated how difficult of a year it was—as if I didn’t already know. I hope 2025 is better to us all.
What I’m watching:
The Jetty on Hulu. Highly recommend for all fans of British crime shows and any girl who ever had a crush on her best friend growing up.
This reaction video—despite using the words “clean” and “detox” like ten times, Gwyneth openly admits to waking up hungover with some regularity, which is silly and ironic. Bless her heart.
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
On the Mezzanine, Cass Donish (again! highly recommend)
Brutes, Dizz Tate (2/5 stars; don’t buy it; it was bad1)
Danish studies find higher risk of optic nerve damage with Ozempic
Quotations:
The practice of lying on the floor for relaxation and stress relief, known as "floor time," has also gained popularity on social media. #Floortime offers semi-comfortable relaxation. While there isn't extensive research on the benefits, psychologists suggest that lying flat on your back promotes an open, relaxed posture that can have a calming effect, and the hard surface may help people become more attuned to their bodies and less focused on their thoughts. This is in contrast to familiar places like beds where minds tend to keep working. Analogous practices exist in various cultures. The savasana (corpse pose) in yoga is a relaxation pose lying flat on your back with arms and legs extended.
This year taught me that nothing is guaranteed—not health, not opportunities, not even the seemingly small joys like laughing with friends or sitting quietly with a cup of tea. Time isn’t infinite, but it is precious, and I want to stop treating it like loose change.
I think we all contain the ability to think (and thus potentially act) fascistically. And though it’d be easier to blame the current state of the world solely on the people who’ve begun to act publicly and obviously on this fascistic way of thinking, it is important that we investigate the dormant fascistic thoughts within all of us—how anti-social, and how fear-based we as a society, regardless of individual political persuasion, have become.
It is one thing to realize you have been traumatized (we’re all traumatized these days, aren’t we!). It is another to ensure that that trauma and that fear, no matter how justified, do not disable you from seeking pleasure and connection, and do not disable you from contributing pleasure and connection back to the world; that they do not stop you from being alive.
We may not feel like we have much power these days. But that is also what the fascists us want us to think. They want us to sense the real dangers of the world, and allow ourselves to become scared of them, to build up impenetrable psychic armors to protect ourselves from them until we become inhuman, and thus are able to invalidate the humanity of any and everyone else.
A lot of writers and people who write about writers seem to have arrived at the conclusion that to care about an audience and its reaction to your work is Bad, a dishonor to art itself. Art should be pure, and that apparently means that you do it for yourself alone: to consider anyone else in your output is a mistake. We should all be ascetic in our pursuit of greatness and creation. To keep an audience in mind as you plan, write, edit, and publish is to diminish the value of the work.
I say this as someone who's been credibly accused of elitism by friends and foes alike: we've become a bit too precious about the work.
Life is hard. There are chores and routines and doctor's appointments and bills and difficult conversations and funerals and sad birthdays and inconvenient flus and hurricanes and there are so many apps we're forced to download. Most things in our daily routines drive us away from creating anything at all, so I tend to consider it a tiny miracle when someone is able to sit down and put together some words and decide, in the face of self-doubt and embarrassment and the ever-present fear of failure, to share them.
There is of course something very lovely about creating for the sake of creating – toiling away at the altar of Good Work without requiring anyone to ever engage with it. Unfortunately, I seem to lack that purity. And what's more, I think work suffers when you think of yourself as your only audience. I derive a sort of fascination from thinking about the lifecycle of a sentence from the inside of my head to paper to laptop to paragraph rearrangement to polish to publish to regret to mild satisfaction. Sorry, I guess.
I've published essays that now make me cringe. There are a couple of agents out there in possession of manuscripts that I regret ever sending. Dozens of rejection emails from literary magazines litter my inbox. Maybe it is cringey to acknowledge progress as it is happening, because we are not supposed to mention that there is improvement to be had. We're supposed to pretend we only start sharing our work when we've already reached our peak. Why, though? Who is this helping?
Beauty to me is a feeling of comfort and rapture when I walk into a space. It’s peace and contentment. When something takes my breath away.
It felt like every woman I knew was being sexually assaulted and harassed at work, and there was no means to report it that would not incur greater professional retaliation and abuse. You could go to HR, if your company had HR, and they would almost certainly concoct a reason to fire you. You could go to the cops, but good luck with the cops. They’re quite incompetent at dealing with this kind of thing. The options were to complain and incur more violence and abuse and punishment, or to shut up and take the blow to your self-respect. I did not find either of these acceptable.
My own experiences, and observations of other women’s experiences, have taught me that making such a claim publicly does not actually get you anything that you would want. It incurs punishment. An under-discussed aspect is that it affiliates your name with both the person who attacked you and the worst thing that ever happened to you in the minds of members of your community, of everyone who knows you. It has often ruinous material consequences. So the perception of false accusations does not align with what I have observed of women’s incentives.
Unacknowledged rape is a phenomenon in which people who have had experiences that meet the legal definition of rape do not label those experiences as such. This is wildly common among women and men. If you ask men if they have ever raped somebody, they’ll say no. If you ask them if they have ever forced somebody to have sex with them whom they knew didn’t want to, about one in ten of them say yes.
For a long time, I felt myself to be in this defensive stance. Overcoming that has been a process, because when you are on the defensive as a writer, when you are anticipating a hostile reader, that is a way to do terrible writing. I’ve learned this the hard way through a lot of trial and error. I had to cultivate a capacity to perform, in vulnerability, an authorial persona that can write more confidently than I might feel. I had to be able to imagine a readership that was willing to hear me in good faith. That was something I gained through experience, by writing enough, and by being in conversation with enough other writers, seeing responses to my work that could have been critical but were fair, that did not seem like ad-hominem attacks on either my person or, frankly, my position as a feminist. And that was very useful.
Rape and sexual violence are very connected to abortion bans, which are also an act of commandeering your body in order to fit you into a gendered role that can have degrading implications.
Yellow flare of forsythia, here, here, now there too; Japanese magnolias, their pink and purple teacups, their exquisite lean.
-Cass Donish
We breathed into each other’s mouths until we were dizzy.
-Cass Donish
What’s real: rose orange glow, the streetlamp outside the window. The pink light on your face.
-Cass Donish
There’s so much I don’t want to look at, don’t want to notice.
-Cass Donish
July, its exits and entries.
-Cass Donish
I stay inside my apartment with the curtains closed. I pace. Hours flood into each other, they slosh against the windows in the dark.
-Cass Donish
The water is bright blue and completely opaque, yet it has an odd, three-dimensional sheen. We can’t see our bodies—as though they’re gone.
-Cass Donish
We cannot all look the same. We have different genetic makeups, so not everyone will have these advertised physical results, no matter how many squats they do or Pilates classes they take. So, what happens if you see that you don’t look like that influencer or celebrity or coworker? Even if you feel better with the exercise you do, do you think that you failed because you aren’t transforming physically? We compare ourselves to people we see even though we aren’t aware of the full picture.
We aren’t supposed to look the same throughout our lifetime. That’s sort of how bodies work. They are living and breathing forms that come with life experiences and aging, no matter what influencer is trying to convince you otherwise. We often see celebrities being praised for looking the same or maintaining their physique with age. We see headline after headline of “How does she do it?” “What’s her secret?” “She just turned 40 but looks 25! Her secrets shared.” And yes, I purpsefully put “she” because we live in a fatphobic, ageist, classist, ableist, racist, elitist, and misogynistic society which allows men to more often than not, age “gracefully.”
What are we to do with our insatiable desire?
In a world where women have been penalized for wanting since the beginning of time, (at the very least, since the first bite of the apple) witnessing a woman’s submission to her forceful desire, with the inevitable darkness of its nature, is a sight that changes you.
Our own desire is reprimanded, looked down upon, and thus suppressed into the corners of our thinking. If you want to be desired, you cannot also desire at the same time — a woman is merely an accomplice to a man’s wanting. One if a driver, the other is an exemplary passenger seat. A woman that allows herself to be desirable is not the same woman who desires: those are polarizing forces and don’t have anything in common. If she cares to be wanted, she’s not actively displaying her own desire; instead, she’s dubious, strategic about her seduction tactics, lays plans out like a game of chess. She tricks the other party into taking the lead, and if she dares to let the vulgarity of her wanting shine through, she automatically becomes less desirable, her attitude less commendable. There is now ‘less’ of her to conquer, to take, to own. Such is the unfair paradox — and we’re led to believe it’s somehow empowering.
Nothing’s more threatening to a woman than a loss of control she so diligently guards. A body that desires is a body that meets its needs. So much of a woman’s journey, after all, is about suppression and rigorous discipline: controlling food intake, controlling her emotions, regulating and concealing, constantly exercising a certain prevention of destruction or doing damage control. Sandra Lee Bartky wrote: “This disciplinary power is peculiarly modern … the disciplinary techniques through which the ‘docile bodies’ of women are constructed aim at a regulation which is perpetual and exhaustive — a regulation of a body’s size and contours, its appetite, posture, gestures, and general comportment in space.” But when your desire in itself, as an active state of wanting, is the destructive force in your body, like the beastly appetite you develop once you’ve skipped one too many meals, unable to be tamed, only to be given into, letting it run free is incompatible with incessant discipline. A turning point from cinematic to gruesome, control doesn’t stand a chance where desire is acted upon.
Gut instinct. Susceptibility to mass hysteria. Torches and pitchforks. Making songs about folk heroes. Let’s get some lutes and some tunics in this bitch and have ourselves another dancing plague. Shall we burn some heretics at the stake later? Fuck it, having a widow’s peak is a bad omen. Certain nose shapes do make you more likely to be an adulterer. Make sure your four humors are properly balanced, diva, because thinking like a medieval peasant is back in style. Only, this time, we have TikTok. Yay.
Enough. I’m single. You’re aware of it. You have cute single friends. Gimme. Don’t be greedy. Just do it. You know who I think you’d like? You know who you should meet? Yes, it’s time to deputize our friends to work as matchmakers. Maybe it’s not even romantic. Maybe it’s just setting friends up with friends for a friend date because you think they’d be friends. We should make that more common. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or subtle. We should brazenly be saying, “there’s someone you should know.” At this point, what have we got to lose?
Night stains the sky slowly, then all at once.
-Dizz Tate
When we wake up, the sun has just appeared, a thick red muscle bleeding low across the lake.
-Dizz Tate
We don’t like to split up. We like to stay close, link arms, nod our heads on one another’s shoulders, lie across one another’s laps.
-Dizz Tate
She loved to burn anything, especially beautiful things. She liked to watch cheap earrings curl on the sidewalk, pink bougainvillea flowers from the pool shrink and blacken, the ends of her prettiest friend’s hair vanish.
-Dizz Tate
Far away we could see a storm, a creeping shadow interrupting the baby-blue sky. We could see the distant white forks of lightning spiking and shutting down the roller coasters in the distant parks.
-Dizz Tate
We knew nothing in this world came easy. We knew love took practice and we vowed to put in the hours.
-Dizz Tate
We squashed our faces against the glass of our own lives. Is this it? we asked.
-Dizz Tate
I had always thought love was supposed to make you selfless, but it made me ridiculously vain.
-Dizz Tate
I prefer to be empty and cavernous.
-Dizz Tate
I know what’s behind me. It’s what is in front that scares me.
-Dizz Tate
I think that to humiliate a woman is the only way some men know how to love one.
-Dizz Tate
I would love to be cold but it is difficult for a woman. People seem to see warmth in me even when I offer none.
-Dizz Tate
We knew our mothers’ idea of goodness was not measured by morals but by how much noise we made. And we quickly grew tired of trying to be good in their way.
-Dizz Tate
It was golden hour, the light softened around the edges, illuminating the sand flies and air particles into an atmosphere of subtle glitter.
-Dizz Tate
The sky turned fleshy with sunset. Shadows grew long and harp across the construction site. Car headlights bloomed on the highway.
-Dizz Tate
He stood by the lake as the sky ripped itself up around him. Strips of it seemed to land and float on the lake’s surface, great hunks of pink sky.
-Dizz Tate
Broken men are much more appealing than broken women. Broken men inspire longing. Broken women are just looking to get kicked further down the drain.
-Dizz Tate
We are untouched and we long for touch.
-Dizz Tate
We sit very still in a circle. All our knees touch. We hate for our knees to touch, we like to leave space for the possibility of touching.
-Dizz Tate
A fire engine flashes its disco lights on the street.
-Dizz Tate
The lake is a frenzy of glitter as the rain hits it.
-Dizz Tate
the guys at these parties werent super woke, just the regular kind. like, you know, faux woke. pronouns in bio but two white claws and they started acting strange.
I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.
-Franny Choi
i have been thinking about survival. a lot has changed for me this year. i used to follow the signs, build a narrative. a day had a structure and days with structure made a month and a month with structure built a year. i couldn’t do that this year. nothing bled, or fed into each other. one day contained indescribable complications, things i witnessed this year i can’t possibly explain, and also beauty, ease, comfort.
Quotations:
RIP (unironic—genuinely, I hope he rests in peace)
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
Instagram
Twitter
Website
Dyke Semiotics
Zines
Shirts
I sometimes hate things that everyone else seems to really love (and then tend to feel stupid, left out, anti-intellectual), so I felt vindicated when I saw these Goodreads reviews. This time, I am not alone!