round-up: 11/05 (vote, vote, vote!)
housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Tuesday!
This week’s newsletter is out early because I wanted to kindly beseech everyone in the US to vote. If you’re not voting for a presidential candidate, fine, whatever, but there are lots of other things on the ballot that are still worth engaging with. In California, at least, you can take up to two paid hours off from work to vote in person. In Los Angeles, you can vote in person today and then immediately see a fun new art exhibit for free. (The voting center is open from 7AM-8PM; the exhibit is open from 12PM-5PM.)
Here’s what else I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m buying
What I’m watching
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.
Things to read:
'I felt like my heart was going to explode': Beirut reels from heaviest night of strikes
After a year of terror in Gaza, our souls feel suspended in time
Housekeeping:
I’ve begun my yearly rewatch of Killing Eve. Still a msterpiece (at least the first season).
What I bought this week:
What I’m lusting after:
What I’m watching:
I loved it. It was too long but so much fun. And there’s a trans lesbian! Great for fans of Love Lies Bleeding and Griselda, I’d say. And very French, which is to say tragic. It’s out on Netflix very soon.
What I’m reading:
Women are happier without children or a spouse, says happiness expert
Like Love, Maggie Nelson
Voice of the Fish, Lars Horn1
Quotations:
I was saying no to New York City and to being a lawyer or a social worker and to seventh group house meeting about cleaning and to having an iPhone (I was one of those annoying people who had a flip phone until the end) and to marrying a nice guy who loved me well; I was saying no to all of this so that I could say yes to being weird and not knowing and being queer and to writing.
Then comes the background on Didion herself—the girl in the plaid silk dress, with the unraveling hem: she’s “been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city, leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m. long-distance calls that will make her lie awake and then sleep drugged through all the steaming mornings left in August.” So basically… she is not happy, she is not in an enviable situation. But my inner fourteen-year-old is still like: (a) “Why is she complaining?”, and (b) “How am I supposed to keep a notebook when I never go to bars, leave men, or take drugs?”
This happens to me sometimes in the EU, where visiting US writers encounter some amount of (understandable) butthurt from colleagues who are like “Dude, you guys’s book advances are orders of magnitude larger than ours,” and who thus view their situations as existentially incomensurate. Indeed, it’s way easier to make a living as a writer in the US than in most of Europe; and it’s unfairly way, way easier to make a living writing in English than in many other languages. It’s also way easier for US writers to spend time in Europe, taking advantage of all the amazing cultural wealth, than for EU writers to visit the US and take advantage of the amazing things that exist here. Nonetheless, when the thing with advances comes up, a tiny part of me is screaming: “In the US, medical care and rent and food and childcare also cost orders of magnitude more, and if you get sick and don’t have savings you die on the street, and NOBODY HAS A TERRACE OR TAKES SUMMER VACATIONS AT THE BEACH!”
Our conflicting desires. Desire in general — his lack of it, my abundance. All the things I wanted and all the things he didn’t want. The pit in my stomach that never left even when I loved him so fiercely it made me cry to watch him sleep.
Desire, I realize again and again, is like death and taxes — certain and inescapable and constantly reaffirming of your smallness and powerlessness inside mechanisms much larger than yourself.
Desire always wins. Isn’t that embarrassing?
When we first realized we would have to break up — it was my decision, but we made it together, just like we did everything else — David talked about the idea of us ending up with each other again sometime in the future. He said, it just seems like it doesn’t make sense to get rid of all of — he paused — this. He was gesturing vaguely to something like our love, or our history, or the life we had built together, and I’m not sure if even he knew exactly what he was talking about, but I knew what he meant. Some people spend their whole lives looking for a good story.
After the breakup, I took the train up to Montreal, where autumn was beginning to take hold even in the earliest days of September. I spent hours every day walking aimlessly around the city, watching the leaves curdle on the trees and trying to weave the loose threads of our relationship into a story that made sense.
This is the obvious truth that hits me over the head again and again, that I fear I’m doomed to learn and forget and re-learn in perpetuity: that nearly every person you’ll ever encounter, in love or in passing and anywhere in between, has suffered unfathomable pain; that you will rarely be able to understand or even recognize a fraction of it; that they all keep on living anyway; and that we spend most of our time, all of us, engaged in a grand collective charade to ignore the enormity of our monstrous, communal pain in the interest of continuing to live. This task — the task of continuing to live — would be nearly impossible without beauty, or narrative, or interpretation, or divinity, or whatever else you choose to call the process by which we assign meaning to the objectively absurd.
The cruelty of this project, of course, is that I’m setting out to do exactly what I aim to condemn: I am trying to describe the indescribable, to turn something sacred into something consumable and finite. So I will try to stop telling the story, for that reason and also because I find it hard to convince myself that any of it would matter — if it would really mean anything to you to hear about the morning sun in his irises, the cold showers in the heatwave, the mud, the vomit, the sex, the dinners, the dirty dishes made clean and then dirty again. It was better than all of this, and worse than this too, and the problem with telling a story about love is that the harder you try to tell it accurately the further away you get from anything that feels true.
What do you want? I feel a deep empathy for anyone who, when confronted with this simple question, responds with irritability, confusion, anger, numbness, or nothing; whose first instinct is to turn away, fight, change the subject, or cause a distraction. To admit what you want is to expose yourself, which is to say that it builds intimacy with a receptive audience: it is worthwhile, but challenging, especially if you’re not in the habit of doing it because of your upbringing, trauma history, or lack of experience, in that you haven’t yet learned that the benefits of connection far outweigh the risks.
Writing is mystical and magical but I feel I’ll ruin it if I try to articulate the why and the how. The thing I like most about writing is how I don’t often know where it is going to take me or what I’m going to say.
I used to care about genre; but the older I get the less I care, and I’ve always been interested in genre fluidity.
The fact is—you can’t really write about somebody you don’t love. Even if the portrait is vitriolic, even if the pen is sharpened with old grudges, there has to have been love somewhere along the line, or the sheer, brute energy of pushing that pen across the page will not be there. And writing takes energy—more energy than you ever think you have. And energy comes from love.
-Erica Jong
Any woman who was once a girl knows all about the cruelty of girlhood. Boys get into fist fights. Girls are more likely to destroy your social belonging. Girls are mean, first earning your trust and vulnerability, and then exploiting it. I learned in childhood that loving other girls came with terrifying social risks. I both received and meted out the cruelty and betrayal of girlhood. I learned that I had to be really careful, because anything I said could be used against me.
I believe it did find the right readers, and that was very fortunate. What a thing, to want something my whole life and then get to experience it. My childhood dream came true. However, the prevailing feeling that I remember from that year was…anxiety. Which is not a feeling at all, but the whir of a secondary sensation, one that estranges me from my true emotions. It was an odd kind of disappointment, to realize that publishing a book would not satisfy or change me in the deep and permanent manner that I had hoped for, though I kept that hope a secret even from myself.
If you’ve read Body Work, or anything I’ve ever written about writing, or probably anything I’ve ever written, you have a sense of what creative practice means to me. It is the primary means by which I grow. It is an aesthetic, psychological, spiritual, intellectual, and cathartic process. It has oracular power. Memoir, in particular, is a kind of truth serum for me. I believe that it has saved my life (literally).
Like most memoirists, I am a secretive person. The idea that memoirists are oversharers who crave attention is erroneous; we are usually people who have hidden large swathes of ourselves in order to appeal to others, to feel safe. By the time we write our memoirs, those concealed parts have become too heavy to bear.
All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
-James Baldwin
Every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love.
-Hilton Als
Can something that’s like love, but not love, offer its own sustenance? How would ne know the difference?
-Maggie Nelson
God forbid we’re left alone with something, especially ourselves.
-Maggie Nelson
Too often in my work I give place to the familiar rather than to the strange—I tend to cut odd passages and retain comprehensible ones.
-Wayne Koestenbaum
To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, fear, and in what ways.
-Judith Butler
I’ve also become steadily less likely to believe there is anything necessarily radical about choosing sexual partners or life partners of the same sex—save the reaction-formation that ensues when heteronormative culture pushes on you, threatens you, tries to “cure” or shame you, won’t let you into a loved one’s emergency room or an adoption office, beats you up, or kills you.
-Maggie Nelson
Some touch is received and the sensation is entire / at contact, and some touch there is a rising into.
-Maggie Nelson, “Paranoia Places Its Faith in Exposure”
Being touched is mysteriously constitutively different from touch.
-Maggie Nelson
Poetry doesn’t need to be thinky, or intellectual, in any proper sense! It can be, but it can also be a shimmer of mood scribbled on a cocktail napkin.
-Maggie Nelson
All you owe anyone is your emotional truth.
-Brian Blanchfield
I never thought I was solely a poet, but poetry was almost a metaphor, or a consolidation, a crystallization, of what it meant to be a language-maker—to care, inordinately, about words.
-Maggie Nelson
Since poetry is such a joke in the culture—theatrically revered and reviled at the same time—it needs a lot of apparatus to make it worth joining, worth sticking with. It needs a sense of nobility and worth, because God knows it isn’t going to come from without.
-Maggie Nelson
Homosexual has not always been something to be. It was homosexual, what we did; not: I am now homosexual. Right? And it can be enticing to wish again that it were not understood as essence, that as a minority in a culture, you didn’t have to be queer all day long.
-Brian Blanchfield
There was something about my particular life as a female, as a person prone to drug and alcohol abuse, as a lesbian—that I sensed I was endangered. I had a feeling nobody would know what it was like if I didn’t tell it.
-Eileen Myles
No one will know what it’s like if we don’t tell it, even, or especially, when we ourselves don’t know exactly what it is we’re telling, only what we’re seeing, feeling, wanting, loving.
-Maggie Nelson
People long for confessions and I have no reason to deny them mine.
-Borges
Everything’s bad. Everything’s wrong. There’s no right answer. It’s always like this, but now it’s on steroids every day, all day.
-Maggie Nelson
Moralism is a hell of a drug. When it comes to sex, the things that you don’t like or wouldn’t want to do sexually don’t just seem uninteresting to you—they tend to seem repugnant or morally reprehensible. They produce a different kid of response from someone wanting to eat mustard when you don’t like to eat mustard. There’s something deeper, like, “Ugh, I would never be into that,” the implication being that it’s disgusting or wrong. These are unintentional forms of cruelty and alienation that we can animate right when we want to call people to communion.
-Simone White
We are humans with unhealed wounds, and we often seek others who have unhealed wounds that reflect or animate our own.
-Simone White
Fear / is fear. But we abandon one another.
-George Oppen, “Leviathan”
A lot of the language we’re using these days borrows from restorative justice without actually reflecting its basic principles. I think that’s a problem. One of the reasons that the prison abolition movement is so inspiring to me is that it doesn’t do this. It’s one of the few places where these principles really are put into practice, in a way that’s missing in many other places. It’s missing because it’s hard—much harder than condemnation and shunning.
-Maggie Nelson
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.
-Judith Butler
What’s better generally means trees. And it’s always anecdotal, too; when I was a kid, there was a chestnut tree out my window of my house. We just had a shitty backyard, a little gravel backyard between two family houses, but there was this tree, and it was the conversation, the syntax, the seasons, the everything of my growing up, watching the tree change. My mother loved plants and growing things, and she was particularly aware of the tree and we had so many rituals involved with the tree. When she remarried, my stepfather came in and cut down the tree.
-Eileen Myles
Of course, trauma is always with us, which is death and dreams.
-Eileen Myles
I feel like other lives totally knock me out of orbit. I feel like there always are all these planets that are affecting my orbit, and I don’t know what or where they are until I find them.
-Eileen Myles
Sex has a funny way of passing through all of us.
Mirrors unnerve me. I don’t know my weight. I don’t tend to look at myself.
-Lars Horn
Nonbinary, transmasculine—my gender exists, for the most part, as unseen, unworded, unintelligible.
-Lars Horn
I regularly find myself trying to explain my gender in terms that will make it intelligible to another.
-Lars Horn
How I sense myself as movement. As lake or late-night radio. As a thing that feels weighted, finds it hard to rise, break surface.
-Lars Horn
What might gender look like beyond the blurring of a male-female binary? The body expanded beyond its periphery—animal, vegetable, mineral. Textural. Gestural.
-Lars Horn
I believe writing to be a vital act.
-Lars Horn
Being human has been, and always will be, filtered through essentialisms, dogma, ideologies, will always be caught between humanity’s capacity to love and hate.
-Lars Horn
My body, a mass of fishes—to dredge these truths from my lungs, watch them contort in someone else’s mouth.
-Lars Horn
I couldn’t find a way to honestly render this body—my experience or understanding of it—the fins, the gills, muzzle, hide.
-Lars Horn
I have wished to not be human, to slip from this world, turn saline—the rush of an ocean tide.
-Lars Horn
Who on Earth truly understands what we are here for, what great drought and flood, what raining of plagues and reaching up, what earthquake and fire we are here to witness, to just, maybe, survive?
-Lars Horn
How water—crashing, stilling, water carrying a body exhausted—how it engenders a rare generosity.
-Lars Horn
I am most interested in artwork as a creative process. In the dynamics that occur before, and up to, any final outcome.
-Lars Horn
I am still surprised, even after thirty years of living in this skin, when I catch sight of myself in mirrors. It still manages to come as a slap of cold water in the early-morning light.
-Lars Horn
Past a certain age, my own reflection became increasingly difficult to look at. So, I didn’t. I looked out. Around. At others. Animals. Trees.
-Lars Horn
I am finding it hard to address myself so directly. To wade back into this water of childhood. Of a body that seemed to betray e. Or that I simply struggled to keep up with, to understand as rapidly as it needed. How does one write of a self that is fundamentally displaced. Of a self that, for decades, has seen and not recognised its own body?
-Lars Horn
It takes time to resuscitate a self.
-Lars Horn
Growing up, I didn’t think my parents, family, or friends either understood or could understand—that I felt uncomfortable in my skin, that I had always been male. Or other, both. But now, looking back, I think everyone understood. In the way that truth settles over a body in the small hours, undisturbed by the screech of cars, by the dull hum of rent and bills and groceries, in that quiet, dark way, I think everyone understood who I was, who I still am.
-Lars Horn
Irregular work. Irregular pay. A house not mine. A bed not mine. A bike not mine. A life, in a way, not my own. Strange holding space. It was the kind of place into which one drifts, without fully understanding how, and from which one increasingly sees no exit. A swallowing kind of small town.
-Lars Horn
That night, a thunderstorm rang out, flooded the vley electric. Water sluiced off the mountainside, the road suddenly live, writing river-like—baptismal, apocalyptic.
-Lars Horn
What is this part of me that does not recognise my body, that somehow feels detached from my physicality in this life?
-Lars Horn
People often ask if I feel male or female, where I lie on a gender spectrum, whereas, in truth, I just feel like a soul in a strange craft.
-Lars Horn
Mind, dysphoria: I dislike these concepts, too clinical, too sterile. They smell of bleach. But a soul—something ancient that speaks—this I can nurture.
-Lars Horn
That morning turns in my memory: black, blue-black, green, umber, amber-black. That darkness is a gasoline spill. A hornet behind my eyes.
-Lars Horn
To know a body—its limbs, muscle, sinew—as layer upon layer of living, as warmth, sheet rain, as occasional flood.
-Lars Horn
I’d like to believe that coincidences might be concordances, echoes between bodies, actions at distance. That just maybe there is an order to things—distant, imperceptible—that something carries between us, something ritual, well-worn.
-Lars Horn
Moss. Leaf mulch. The cut-caw of birds breaking sky.
-Lars Horn
The body straightens up, it looks at itself in the mirror, chokes slightly.
-Lars Horn
Every time I enter water, I pray that I might slough weight, those parts of myself that chafe, that come to this world, to another, as small, ungenerous. I pray for the slow erosion of water, for its tumultuous break.
-Lars Horn
Tweets:
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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This book is a great example of why the aesthetics of book layouts are so important. I got this ARC months or maybe years ago (?) and, every time I opened it, I felt a sense of anxiety and instantly closed it again because there is so little white space. I need bigger margins, more breath. But I read it, finally, at least mostly, and, well, it mostly tries to sound smart without actually being smart, so I don’t recommend it.