round-up: 11/09
what i'm reading, quotations, despair, hope(?), etc.
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
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:
‘A leg fell to the floor’: The horrific Israeli bombing of Al-Aqsa Hospital
Israel intensifies bombardment of Gaza and southern Lebanon ahead of Oct. 7 anniversary
18 killed in Israeli strike on West Bank’s Tulkarem refugee camp: Ministry
Macron urges countries to ‘stop delivering weapons’ to Israel for war in Gaza
Housekeeping:
It has been an awful week for the US. Nothing else to say, really.
Here are some things to read post-election.
Here’s something else to read.
Here are some relevant tweets:
The founding fathers creating the electoral college:
What I’m reading:
Winter is coming. Here's how to spot — and treat — signs of seasonal depression
Chappell Roan and Her Fans Might Change Celebrity, Toxic Fan Culture Forever
Nick Hornby: The Older You Get, the Less Time You Have for Bad Books
Quotations:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
I believe art and storytelling are some of the most powerful tools we have to effect change in the world. It’s why I do what I do. It’s what I’ve made my entire life about. And I think we can make great art in the good times and the hard times equally. Because the capacity to do so isn’t in the world around us; it is something within us. Something internal, ingrained, deeply held and deeply felt. I think it’s about having perspective and empathy. And I think perspective, a true engaged curiosity about the world we live in, no matter how hard it is to not look away, will give you something to say. Something worth saying. Something worth hearing.
I hate when people like me seem like they feel obligated to issue lofty or highly emotionally charged statements in moments like this, as if everyone was waiting to hear from them specifically. I do not think that I am The person to listen to, or the person with all of the answers. How I feel is like: In the movie Clue, the cast spends most of the movie screaming their heads off at every new dead body they find. But by the time there are the fourth, fifth, and sixth bodies, they trudge silently into the room, take in the scene, and trudge silently out again. That is how I feel.
This is a time to insist upon our humanity, especially because there is a will to separate us from it. That means feeling sad or angry, if that’s what you feel (if you even needed one more person’s such permission). It means taking time to do nothing except stare into space, allowing yourself not to have the capacity. It means moving slowly. It means not taking instruction even from well-intended people like myself, but paying rapt attention to your own state. And not because you need to process everything so that you can get up all the sooner and get back to work, but because our humanity is what this moment wants to take from us, and there is nothing to do but insist upon them in the face of opposition.
I don’t know how people voted against their own self-interests again. I do know a burger costs $20, and half of Americans aren’t prepared for a $500 emergency. Money—and the lack of it—makes people forget easily and do strange things easier. I have to see the election as an act of desperation. Otherwise, I’ll be consumed with anger. This country is responsible for so many atrocities; maybe it got the results it deserved.
We should be offended by art. It’s not the artist’s job to make us feel safe or affirm us.
I think we tend to gather around images—star machines and cults of personality—more than works. Maybe this was always the case, but now, it’s truer than ever.
Creating art and being part of the art world are very different things. They only sometimes bleed into each other. How does our era deal with art and artists from a different one? I think a lot of artists, including myself, experience this impossible tension, which is something the book deals with: a push-pull between the desire for connection and visibility, wanting one’s work to reach people, and the desire to hide, retreat, quit.
I don’t think being understood is the goal. The goal is to make something people can’t get out of their heads—meaning, there is something there to come back to, something ungraspable. Do artists even understand their own work? Though, I get a hot, tingling, floaty feeling in my body when I feel grasped or seen. An inner glimmer.
The sun is the original narrative.
I feel like they do go hand in hand—the need to connect and the impulse to disappear. It’s like…we’re driven to soul-bare, to strip ourselves naked down to our bones, but then an uncomfortable awareness of that nakedness creeps in.
Survivors of childhood trauma sometimes use perfectionism to correct or conceal self-perceived flaws and vulnerabilities. But for a long time, whenever anyone ever called me a perfectionist, I took it as a compliment. The part of the Serenity Prayer that mattered to me was the middle stanza. I was determined to change and control whatever I could.
I wonder if the reason my mother keeps her distance from me is simple: the sight of me reminds her of too many things that hurt to look at.
I’m not trying so hard to be good anymore.
The truest things live in the spaces between.
I reject the ubiquitous notion that writing shorter is necessarily better than writing longer, that less is always more. The sclerotic fixation on minimalism, which arose largely in imitation of Hemingway and Orwell, has crippled American writing for a century. Like all tools, concision is only as good as its use. Sometimes, shorter is better; often, the dictate to write less is misguided, misapplied, results in needlessly abrupt work that fails to capture the nuance and complexity inherent to any topic of human interest. Yes, time and attention are limited, but a short piece that does not adequately explain itself wastes all time and attention spent on writing and reading it. Stylistically, the brevity-above-all orthodoxy has inspired generations of writers who sound exactly the same, their voices defined by a clipped, artificial tenor, the tell-tale signs of writing in fear of peer opinion. Good writing does not emerge from insecurity that itself emerges from aesthetic conformity.
As a kid, movies were my escape, my hope, and my fantasy.
I wish someone would tell me what I tell my students now and that’s just to write. Write everything and don’t worry about publishing. Don’t worry about revising. Don’t worry about editing yourself. Don’t worry about what it is you’re writing. Just write. It can be about anything, whether it’s something very universal or something very intimate and personal that only you know. The thing that I’ve learned over the years is that the more vulnerable you’re willing to be in your poems, the more impactful it is. It kind of seems a bit contradictory to say my very personal, very specific experience is going to resonate with someone else, but it does and it’s almost like it’s magical. The more specific I think an experience is the more someone seems to connect. I think it’s because it just mirrors our daily life when we see someone going through something, it resonates with us on an emotional level. Obviously, the situation isn’t happening to us, but just the mere observation of it, to just witness another human being going through an experience resonates emotionally with us. So that’s what I would tell myself, don’t stop yourself in any way. Don’t edit yourself in any way while you’re writing. You can worry about that later.
I don’t make a lot of money, it’s really difficult for me to save. I think, for the last couple of years I’ve owed money to taxes, so there’s that. But, you know, if I didn’t love what I was doing I probably would have stopped doing it a long time ago because I’m always broke. I grew up poor and I feel like I’m a poor adult because the income isn’t steady. I do a lot, but they’re all confined within certain periods of time within the year. So the income isn’t coming in throughout the year. This year, for instance, I stopped teaching in May; so, from May up until July, three months, I had zero income. I had to rely on savings, on credit cards, I had to borrow money. It’s hard. I have student loan debt and being a freelance writer is not going to get me out of it. But that’s okay, because I enjoy what I do and I enjoy the people I meet and I try to lean into what brings me joy. Money is not bringing me any joy because I’m not getting a lot of it.
So many of us feel like our bodies are unwieldy, impertinent meat sacks that have never once behaved in response to anything we’ve tried to get them to do
They used to call it a “pash.” A high-school or college girl would become infatuated with another girl. She would blush and coo when she spoke her crush’s name; she wanted to spend every moment either with her pash or dissecting every glance, cutting comment, perfumed note, or inexplicable silence she received from the girl. A girl with a pash was silly, dizzy, but also adorable—and normal.
The women’s college “pash” was a latecomer to the parade of publicly acknowledged, structured forms of same-sex love and intimacy. That history starts in the ancient world. Warriors in the Iliad whose grandfathers have sworn friendship realize they cannot fight one another. The biblical covenant between David and Jonathan and the promises of Ruth to Naomi bring these honored forms of love, in which two men or two women become kin, into sacred Scripture.
When same-sex love no longer had intelligible public forms, that didn’t mean people stopped feeling it. Many people across the spectrum of what we would now call “sexual orientation” still desired to share their lives with another man or another woman. Finding no guidance, ritual adornment, religious purpose, or social respect for this longing, however, most of them shrugged and got married and had normal, beautiful, unacknowledged friendships. The only ones who continued to try to share their lives with someone of the same sex were the ones who had especially urgent motivations for doing so. One such urgent motivation has always been sexual desire. And so life-shaping same-sex love, which had once been a recognized possibility for all Christians, was now sought after mostly by homosexuals.
There’s no one way to be transgender—something all transgender people know already, but which the general population often doesn’t because they’ve always been fed one narrative.
Transition has traditionally been understood as somebody trying to align their “sex” with their “gender”—“gender” being our internal identity and “sex” being the external body. So, somebody like me, a trans man, I’m supposedly aligning my body with my internal gender, which is male.
But that’s not how the experience felt. I didn’t have this overwhelming sense that I had a male identity; what I had was an overwhelming sense that my body was wrong. But because I had been told I had to have this concrete, unchanging, persistent feeling that my gender was male—which I didn’t have—it took me a really long time to understand that I was trans.
My identity, if anything, feels neutral or genderless, or what we commonly call nonbinary. But when I aligned my body to fit with what I would term a nonbinary gender identity, it didn’t feel right. My brain kept telling me, my gut kept telling me, my body kept telling me that my body needed to be as male as I could get using surgery and hormones. And once I started to understand that and I started to pursue that path, I started to feel like a human being, and all of the dysphoria disappeared, all of the anxiety disappeared, all of this feeling that something was constantly wrong just vanished.
Having a million opinions about everything comes cheap and easy, whereas actually doing something can cost you quite a lot. Whenever you think about power, you have to think in terms of symptoms.
You have to understand that Ferd and I grew up gay in the fifties and sixties, when being gay was very, very stigmatized. There were all these myths about homosexuals, like, homosexuals never finish anything. Homosexuals are mentally ill. How can you tell a homosexual? He can’t whistle. Creepy stuff like that. You lived in constant danger of real violence. Growing up in a culture where you’re immersed in that kind of bigotry made me insecure. I didn’t have any confidence that I could amount to anything. When I first broached the subject of my sexuality with my parents, they immediately sent me to a psychiatrist in Boston, who insisted over a period of months that I wasn’t gay at all.
I’m allergic to the idea of myself as the subject of any of my books. I don’t write them as self-revelation, in the contemporary sense. Even when I write what appears to be very personal material, I am writing about a character, one who is sometimes traveling by my name.
I wanted a world of people who were serious about ideas and politics and art. I wanted that desperately.
Francesco Clemente told me once that when you’re in love, the economy goes out the window. And that was my experience—he was all-consuming to me.
To continue with something you have to take a leap of faith. But there does come a point with a novel when you know you’re going to get to the end. When you see how you can make it work despite there being elements of it that make you afraid, then you are really in it. After that, the fear that you’ll croak before you finish sets in.
I was aware at an early age that this country is rotten to the core, but it took years to begin to understand why it was rotten, what produces the rot. America was built on genocide and slavery, and the spirits of the slain inhabit this country almost more palpably than the living do. I saw the American pathology on display every day of the Menendez trial. José Menendez was a Cuban émigré who’d come to America after the revolution, and he’d swallowed the whole deal—I’m going to succeed and become rich, my sons are going to be everything I want them to be, they’re going to be tennis champions, they’re going to be business parasites like me. The trial revealed something fundamental about this country—the insane worship of money and success that American society drills into people. Also, the cavalier abuse of children. I suppose my view of it all, by the late nineties, was informed by how unfair it was that so many young people had been carried off—not just killed by an epidemic but rejected by their families, their bodies refused by funeral homes and cemeteries, because they weren’t somebody else’s image of perfection.
The counternarrative to the Menendez defense sickened me because it presumed that boys couldn’t be raped, boys couldn’t be sexually victimized. I think that if you revisited that case now, the take on it would be much different. I never doubted that the sons had been molested. I didn’t credit everything the defense said—but it was clear to me that given the composition of the juries, if you had presented the incest and abuse as anything less than a nightly event, the jurors wouldn’t have given any weight to it at all.
I was maybe sixty or seventy pages into Do Everything in the Dark when 9/11 happened, and then I made the decision to stop the novel before it caught up to that event, because I didn’t want to take that on, I didn’t want to capitalize on it. Certain things need time to sediment.
I need to be in control of the material. I don’t want an editor to come back to me and say, We think you need to do this or that. I don’t like too many fingerprints on my work.
What I think is necrophiliac is to fetishize these moments in time that represent how things were then, rather than focus on how things are now. A lot of what I did back then, or involved myself in, embarrasses me now, times I behaved badly or messed up. I don’t want to have those moments turned into landmark events.
I know a lot of people who have only lived in three places: where they grew up, where they went to college, and where they live now. I notice, sometimes, that people who haven't moved around a lot attribute to geography certain ways their life fails to meet their expectations. For those of us who've had, as you put it, a little more nomadic existence, it's harder to ignore that you carry your trouble with you wherever you go. It's hard to be a new face in town, and to make deep connections and community.
I expect most of us have the experience of loving someone in an incomplete, counterfactual way. Like, oh if only X weren't true. If only we could get back to Y state, or stay there. Most failed relationships are the wreck of a perfect idea.
It's much harder, if the object of your love is moving in and out of your house every couple of months, to ignore them and sit in front of your computer and write. It should be hard. Love is more important than art.
I had discovered that my body could become my language, it was the closest thing to who I was and it allowed me to become known to others. I had been struggling with how to move from the two-dimensional, and then I discovered this new vehicle, my body.
-Zhang Huan
It is a season of bitter oranges. The first revolt
of starlings rises, a blade against the skin of sky.
I’m someone who deeply believes in our capacity to change, to transform into the people we so desire to be. I can see the potential in all of us to let go of old patterns that no longer serve us, to foster the kinds of intimacy we dream of, to be the fullest most expansive versions of ourselves.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
Instagram
Twitter
Website
Zines
Shirts
I always turn to the Polish WWII poets when horrible things happen, idk.