Happy Saturday, all—
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 apocalyptic, 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. And, fwiw, these past few weeks, I’ve been reading and thinking through the violence and horrors. I hope you’ve been keeping your eyes open and share where you can, too.
Some things to read:
Housekeeping:
Last week, I spoke about my cat dying. Well, it happened. She was 17 and I’ll miss her forever.
All my mail has been going to my parents’ house because I can’t get any mail at my LA apartment without someone stealing it. I went home this weekend and saw that I have some art in the newest Swamp Ape Review and on the cover of Denver Quarterly. I’ve been trying to get into both journals for years, so I’m really pleased that something I’ve done fit in with their editorial visions.
Anyway, I’ve gotten back into writing fanfiction in the past nine months as a sort of coping mechanism. I highly recommend it for anyone disappointed with canon or anyone who wants to put in hundreds of hours of unpaid labor because they love the characters That Much. It can be very healing.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
The book of Arendt’s that made a tremendous impression on me years ago was The Human Condition, which she’d first wished to title Amor Mundi — love of the world. Amor mundi was a phrase Arendt first encountered when reading Augustine, and her framing of it is not love in any sense we’re accustomed to. It is the challenge of what it means to first accurately see the world, with all its horrors and failings, and then commit ourselves to it, to care for it, nonetheless. It is a provocation to meet each other across chasms of difference, as human beings, to commit ourselves to the world with understanding, criticality, and steadfastness.
the number one thing i try to avoid doing in my fiction is repeating myself. there might be multiple permutations on an idea or a character archetype, sure, but if i can’t meaningfully distinguish it from something i’ve already done then i keep the little variations to myself. the more i read short story collections that are “unified” around a theme or a type of character the less distinct those characters and themes become. for me it isn’t the same as a novel at all - a novel at least might have, say, six characters all responding to the Theme but at least these six characters aren’t, usually, all functionally indistinguishable from one another.
the more i see these carefully curated collections the more i feel like the pressure to make a single aesthetic statement with six to ten short stories is a huge disservice to the form of short stories overall. i know nothing i’m saying on a blog read by my friends and nice randos who found this via substack will change an entire industry but @ publishing can we consider the benefits of a diversified portfolio in a short story collection rather than a selection of ultimately forgettable stories that faintly make up “one” narrative like some kind of silhouette. no?
I often suspect that I don’t understand anything unless I’ve written through it first.
For me, those haints are, at the moment: a young woman cradling her child’s death shroud; desperate men, many of them not even old enough to be called men, frantically digging through rubble with their bare hands; a young American activist’s last living photo, her broken mouth her ultimate portrait.
I have learned to live so as to have something to write about.
I was still frustrated with the concept of community, as I had been most of my life. The drama, the groupthink, the way it turns against individuals it does not understand.
Community. Just the word itself is so damn amorphous. It can describe everything from a Rust Belt city’s literary scene to a network of Christian denominations to transsexuals bitching about electrolysis pain on the internet to unwieldy political blocs of racialized minorities to internet fandoms to organized hate groups to any homosexual-adjacent person who self-describes with the word gay. Somewhere along the line, such amorphousness had even caused the word community to attain semantic satiation for me—the phenomenon in which a word is repeated so often it loses its meaning; it ceases to sound like a word.
We have powerful entities referring to vast, disparate groups of far-flung people and doing so with a mien of authority, with the assumption that when they say “community,” their audience understands what they mean, that nobody’s going to ask for clarification. These powerful entities are also the type whose utterances are usually subject to multiple rounds of review as well as quick public criticism—in other words, if a term would be confusing or get them in trouble, they might not use it. But “community” is invoked without question all the time.
I believe in community. I believe in its necessity. I believe it is deeply and irrevocably meaningful to humanity and to our individual lives.
I've written so much about the idea of "queer time" over the course of my life. About how it moves differently than regular time, than heterosexual time; about how we’re on our own schedule; about how we exist outside the rigidity of the patriarchal space-time continuum. Despite what we've been told, over and over, there’s actually not a cosmic clock counting down the minutes we have to meet someone and fall in love and build a life together. The hours aren’t melting away for us to choose our careers, or uncover our desires, or chase our dreams. There's no finish line; we never really arrive. We grow up, we get better, we fall down, we learn, we grow up even more.
I really wonder about this idea of objectivity. How on earth can we be objective about atrocity? How is someone supposed to set aside their humanity to chronicle humanity?
For many women, the threat of death and men hang in close proximity in the mind.
Only the addict who dies has died; the rest of us have only flirted with death—and I say flirt because, again, addiction always felt to me like a man who demanded my performance.
I rarely feel grief is mine to have, even when it comes close to me or to my family. I’m not sure what qualifies in my mind as a loss that would be close enough for me to feel I have a right to it though—the death of my child? my husband? my mother? myself?
Another thing that’s particularly fraught about your work and the whole good mother ideal is that not only should you be a thin mom to be a good mom, but your kids’ bodies also reflect your supposed “good motherhood?”
Yes, you are measured by your kids’ bodies which is ridiculous because you really cannot impact your child’s body size. It’s primarily determined by your family’s genetics. There are a whole myriad factors we don’t understand that drive body size, but the largest driver is genetics.
So many of the markers of good motherhood were explicitly created and determined by white men in power, to forward very specific agendas that have harmed so many marginalized groups throughout history. The more you dig into ideals of good motherhood, the messier it gets. And the more apparent it is that there is no such thing as the Ideal Mother. She was created. She was invented. She was not created or invented by women or mothers, particularly not women or mothers of color, or other marginalized mothers. She’s really serving no one and actively harming many others.
The thin ideal was not created by fat folks, was not created by women. Was definitely something that white men came up with, in a concerted way to control people and cause harm. So that’s the overlap right there. Patriarchy, white supremacy. We’re both attacking it in slightly different ways. I’m interested in how we perform bodies, Sara is interested in how we perform motherhood. You often are performing both simultaneously in this culture, because the expectations for both are so intertwined.
It’s very hard to tease out what is actually a personal preference because I fundamentally think we don’t have personal preferences in this culture. We’re so influenced by messaging and social pressures that your own straightforward personal preference can be very hard to hone in on.
American individualism still reigns and the cult of the nuclear family is still held up as what we should all aspire to. That puts all the onus and pressure on individuals rather than communities which is why we all completely cracked up during the pandemic.
We see this really clearly in the way the body positivity movement has gotten watered down to nothing pretty much. That started very much as an activist movement, driven by queer, fat, Black women to drive systemic change to look at how healthcare demonizes marginalized bodies. And now body positivity is a white, small fat woman being very proud of herself for wearing a bikini in her hourglass body. It is very much just focused on well just love yourself. Just love yourself.
And I mean, I hear this from fat folks all the time. Loving myself doesn’t make the doctor look me in the eye, loving myself doesn’t make the airplane seat fit. Loving myself doesn’t mean I can go into a restaurant and know that I’ll fit in the booth. It doesn’t solve any of those fucking problems.
I’m not the first person to look at the sinister maw of the capitalist death machine as it eats the children of the world and think, “Hmm, sure doesn’t seem like poetry can help much here.” Truly, in many ways, it can’t.
Tweets:
Oof.
Sigh.
Mood.
That’s all for today!
Hope you all find some joy wherever you can—