round-up: 1/10
reading/watching recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Happy Wednesday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& 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.
Some things for you:
Israeli military says it mistakenly killed 3 Israeli hostages in battle-torn part of Gaza
Israel Gaza: Hostages shot by IDF put out 'SOS' sign written with leftover food
Israel Says 3 Hostages Bore White Flag Before Being Killed by Troops
These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza
Gaza City archives among heritage sites destroyed in Israel-Hamas war
& a quotation:
A person in the world who has been affected by the pain of another is an agent of change.
-T Fleischmann
Housekeeping:
I have some art coming out in the upcoming Moody Zine.
What I’m reading this week:
You, Caroline Kepnes
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson (again)
At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches, Susan Sontag
To read:
What I’m watching this week:
School Spirits (This is not good but I’m watching it anyway)
The Buccaneers (This is fun!)
Quotations:
I wanted to know her right away.
-Caroline Kepnes
Whoever distributes love in this world is doing a bad job.
-Caroline Kepnes
She made me too aware of myself. I hated that I wanted to impress her and I hated that I was so easily impressed.
-Caroline Kepnes
Your pupils are fat with desire.
-Caroline Kepnes
And when my hand finally nears yours, you gasp, lightly, as you open your fingers and latch on to mine. We are holding hands and your sweat is mixing into mine. Wow.
-Caroline Kepnes
You pull my face to yours and hold me. You pause. You drive me crazy and then. And then. Your lips were made for mine, Beck. You are the reason I have a mouth, a heart.
-Caroline Kepnes
It’s easier to make sense of things at sea, in a river that could kick your ass if it wanted to.
-Caroline Kepnes
How does my anger with you always soften into love?
-Caroline Kepnes
I have nothing left to crave and dream about anymore.
-Caroline Kepnes
I’d give anything to eat pizza with you.
-Caroline Kepnes
I fall into the red snow. Deer blood. My blood. Yet I am alive.
-Caroline Kepnes
I find a limp that works for me, a zombie sidestep, like I’m missing a conjoined twin.
-Caroline Kepnes
When I hear you laugh, I am, at last, sure that I’m not dead.
-Caroline Kepnes
You sit down next to me and we won’t kiss for a long time but God did I miss the nearness of you, the anticipation of your words, your voice.
-Caroline Kepnes
All I want to do is forgive you.
-Caroline Kepnes
The problem with books is that they end. They seduce you. They spread their legs to you and pull you inside.
-Caroline Kepnes
Your body is just parts now.
-Caroline Kepnes
It is an indisputable fact: Some people on this earth receive love, get married, and honeymoon in Cabo. Others do not. Some people read alone on the sofa and some people read together, in bed. That’s life.
-Caroline Kepnes
What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.
-Maggie Nelson
You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you.
-Maggie Nelson
I want the you no one else can see.
-Maggie Nelson
Age doesn’t necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.
-Maggie Nelson
I’m not the kind of faggot who wants to put a rainbow sticker on a machine gun.
-CAConrad
We knew something, maybe everything, was about to give. We hoped it wouldn’t be us.
-Maggie Nelson
I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.
-Maggie Nelson
I knew you were a good animal.
-Maggie Nelson
The air was hot and lavender with a night storm coming in.
-Maggie Nelson
No one asked, How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces. A question from the inside.
-Maggie Nelson
I don’t want to represent anything.
-Maggie Nelson
I am interested in offering up my experience and performing my particular manner of thinking, for whatever they are worth.
-Maggie Nelson
Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance.
-Maggie Nelson
I feel feral, a little sad, very full. Backache.
-Maggie Nelson
Tried to sleep, but the night began to cavern.
-Maggie Nelson
Can one prepare for one’s undoing?
-Maggie Nelson
We’re all telling ourselves a story, as we try to understand where we’ve arrived.
-T Fleischmann
About the Truisms, I wanted to write and present what was worrying me, or engaging me, to others.
It is not a head start to be female in the art world or any other world.
Yeah, better late than never, that old saw. But I would prefer that great artists are recognized while thriving and alive.
Not to be overly dramatic, but life as a female provided some fodder.
For Arnold Lobel, two details—his death at the age of 54 and his square on the AIDS quilt—allow me to cast my cultural history, to claim him as one of my own. Other details—his wife and two children—seem to place him elsewhere. But I still hold onto the idea that he is family.
-T Fleischmann, “If you are to be an owl”
Even now, a goblin perches on my shoulder, whispering that I should try again, giving me perverse hope.
I came to believe, as I was working on the book, that trans fiction has a different relationship to the people it depicts than other fiction does — the experience of writing into literature what has historically been marginalized or erased carries with it a greater degree of responsibility. This has been articulated before. It implies a program for social realism — a mandate to tell the truth, with the implication of a certain epistemic command of the terrain on the part of the writer.
Most of the language people actually utter is totally banal, filler stuff that orients you relative to the people around you. I’ve always written dialogue this way. It was intuitive for me to just write speech the way I heard it, and not try to prune it to be more coherent or “useful” for the story. I only realized later that what I was doing was unusual, and that I would need to justify it.
What I like about small talk is that it’s almost like body language — it’s an instrument for people to place other people at the appropriate distance. People rarely say what they actually mean, but they indicate it anyway through the tone and approach they take with other people. Things like code switching and the level of comfort each character has with the other are all things that small talk can reveal.
I like this period of annual introspection as the year changes. I know it’s fun to hate on in/out lists considering how much of a staple they’ve become, but I love seeing what people are featuring as they head into the new year, which is such a nebulous transition. Nothing is changing, but the new number at the end of the date provides us with an opportunity to reinvent ourselves.
It is, above all, the characteristic details in a person which mystically entice me.
-Ola Hansson, Sensitiva Amorosa (tr. Paul Norlen)
The sun stood big and yellow far down by the horizon. The sky was turning white.
-Ola Hansson, Sensitiva Amorosa (tr. Paul Norlen)
It was as though I were suddenly stepping out into the sunlight and felt it permeate my frozen being and thaw it out.
-Ola Hansson, Sensitiva Amorosa (tr. Paul Norlen)
As the days passed and autumn was approaching, our young summer love grew full and ripe, and our souls intertwined as when two adjacent trees braid their roots and crowns together.
-Ola Hansson, Sensitiva Amorosa (tr. Paul Norlen)
What good does it do to try to build up a life, when we are governed by forces that we don’t know?
-Ola Hansson, Sensitiva Amorosa (tr. Paul Norlen)
At this moment, I so painfully feel that I am sitting here like a person around whom everything has collapsed and fallen apart. I feel so sick and empty and alone.
-Ola Hansson, Sensitiva Amorosa (tr. Paul Norlen)
The southern spring blazed around us.
-Ola Hansson, Sensitiva Amorosa (tr. Paul Norlen)
I certainly prefer being alone; I shun people like poison; I simply don’t want them.
-Sylvia Plath, Letter to Ted Hughes, 7th October 1956
In the last two months, as we have watched Israel unleash an unprecedented and genocidal campaign of violence upon Palestinians, grief has permeated so many of our lives, even if we live on the other side of the world, or have no direct connection to Gaza. In this context of ubiquitous loss, which as of this writing surpasses 22,000 lives, there is no luxury of time for mourning. Instead, Palestinians must parade their grief in front of cameras, using precious internet and energy to beg the international community to mobilize on their behalf. Grief, in other words, has become the primary political currency for securing compassion and action.
We understand loss and grief to be universally shared experiences, making them affectively useful tools to engender political will. As we look at the images of grieving families from Gaza, their grief propels us to want to take action, to do something to halt this gross display of indifference to human loss.
Undoubtedly, this turn to activism in the face of unbearable, human-engineered tragedy is imperative. At the same time, though, we can’t afford to predicate solidarity on suffering that results from the extraordinary, therein precluding the quiet violence that afflicts the everyday. A politics of solidarity galvanized by spectacular displays of loss and grief can be strategic and effective in the moment. But such approaches to grief can also render invisible the more quotidian forms of violence—the “slow deaths” caused by the grinding violence of settler colonialism—that do not constitute spectacles. Political movements that spring into existence in reaction to the spectacular usually have a short shelf life; once the spectacle is gone the solidarity tends to dissipate too.
When publicly confronted with questions about the morality and practicality of sanctions, I often grapple with questions surrounding my own grief. Should I, for instance, delve into the more nuanced aspects of my dad’s death? Should I mention that his death was not a “normal” one; that perhaps he would be alive today if U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran had not restricted my family’s access to life-saving medicine; and that I have to live with the political significance of his death day after day?
All activism demands that the activist transforms their pathos into protest.
For Palestinians, this tradeoff between grief (inhabiting the present) and grievance (fighting for the future) is not a choice. There is simply no time to privately grieve the dead while a heavily militarized occupation encroaches on the access to life. Instead, Palestinians report on their grief, as Wael Al-Dahdouh and Motaz Azaiza do. They relocate grief from the private realm to the public domain, attempting to render it legible, to publicize the suffering that they witness up close daily.
Making grief publicly visible as a means of provoking anger can sometimes incite the multitudes into action. It has before, and it is partially serving that utilitarian function in this moment too, as people from disparate backgrounds are organizing into a unified demand for a ceasefire. In the age of social media, we just can’t avert our gaze from the images of mangled bodies—adults and children alike—flooding our feeds. The pictures attempt to vivify war and its savagery, forcing us to take in the insanity of an unprecedented situation brought about through military wrath. We fixate on the image, the spectacle. We acknowledge that this is a moment that uniquely demands solidarity in the face of unspeakable barbarism, and we rely on the spectacle to humanize the unspeakable.
In the present context, consider Palestinian families holding their dead up to cameras to plead for international mercy. Or the heart-wrenching footage of children in Gaza holding a press conference outside Al-Shifa Hospital, begging the world for attention. How did this happen? How did we arrive at a moment where solidarity is flimsily predicated on parading the mutilated bodies of children?
I was only a boundary before, and now I can move again—
-T Fleischmann
What can one do with a past?
What I mean is, what can we do with our bodies?
-T Fleischmann
I wanted to flee and to become something else again.
-T Fleischmann
Hurt people can justify the hurt they cause so easily, sometimes, calling it necessary, feeling it is survival.
-T Fleischmann
Really, no matter how public the art, the speech act, no matter how many people are gathered around the table, aren’t we at our core just speaking to one person?
-T Fleischmann
I still know nothing of why sex, or music, or sunlight hold their pleasures.
-T Fleischmann
I fell in love many times.
I used to be rapturous with it.
-T Fleischmann
The best version of me isn’t the person who falls in love, but the person who takes love squarely for what it is, as an occasion to know someone else, to learn about their desires, to be each a better self together, so long as that is what we both want.
-T Fleischmann
To hell with all that hurt, whatever came before.
-T Fleischmann
What a relief that is, that any touch will end.
-T Fleischmann
Empathy is a holy power.
-T Fleischmann
Isn’t that a wonderful dream?
That love can lead to mercy amid endless violence in the name of desire?
That someone else has felt my pain, and known my joy, and happily, still, looked back?
-T Fleischmann
I would like to be uninscribed by language.
-T Fleischmann
I want to leave my gender and my sex life uninscribed.
-T Fleischmann
Fall begins to exert its emptying.
-T Fleischmann
It is as though the institutional architectures of buildings and policies are forcing me to talk about language, about pronouns and bathroom signs, which are not things that I care to talk about.
-T Fleischmann
I don’t want to give any more of my touch to language. I just want language to generate more touch.
-T Fleischmann
Love people for who they are, and for all the things they’ve chosen to keep away from you.
-T Fleischmann
I want all the pleasures, every incompatible one.
-T Fleischmann
The work of resisting should feel good when it can.
-T Fleischmann
Whatever the horrors of the United States should be called, they never lack for disguises, new ways to hide in plain sight.
-T Fleischmann
The police state wants me dead to make sure their children don’t end up like me, so I guess every time I fuck and I’m happy and I do what I want I would like to call that an anti-state action. The people I love alive—yes, we weaken the state.
-T Fleischmann
I can become my best self when facing beauty, in awe of what I can’t possess, can’t fix in language, can’t know.
-T Fleischmann
It seems important to me that all people create, make art, practice their imaginations, exercise beauty. When we fill the world with artifacts of what we dreamed we begin to learn from who we wanted to be, an imagined people who might know enough to stop making the same mistakes.
-T Fleischmann
Tweets:
This changed my life. Incredible.
Mood.
That’s all!
Can you share what books the quotations are from, please?