Happy Thursday, all—
I’m going out of town over the weekend, so this week’s newsletter is coming to you a few days early. Warning: I read a lot this week and, as such, have a lot of quotations for you. If you want to read through all of them without your email cutting you off, I recommend opening this newsletter in a new window.
Here’s what I have for you today:
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.
Something to read:
What I’m reading:
Books! (A rarity these days!):
Trysting, Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)1
Love Me Tender, Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)2
Phototaxis, Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)3
This next, maybe—
And:
WHAT 35 YEARS OF DATA CAN TELL US ABOUT WHO WILL WIN THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
Alvin Baltrop: remembering New York's forgotten queer photographer
Esther Perel Thinks All This Amateur Therapy-Speak Is Just Making Us Lonelier
Quotations:
I am supposed to be a hardboiled writer, but that means nothing. It is merely a method of projection. Personally I am sensitive and even diffident. At times I am extremely caustic and pugnacious, at other times very sentimental. I am not a good mixer because I am very easily bored, and to me the average never seems good enough, in people or in anything else. I am a spasmodic worker with no regular hours, which is to say I only write because I feel like it. I am always surprised at how easily it seems at the time, and at how very tired one feels afterwards.
-Raymond Chandler, Letter to Jamie Hamilton, 10th November 1950
I always remained in touch with the personage who, little by little, has dominated all the rest of my work: the personage of my mother.
-Colette
And all the while, from among the leaves of the walnut-tree above her, gleamed the pale, pointed face of a child who lay stretched like a tom-cat along a big branch, and never uttered a word.
-Colette, My Mother’s House
Our only sin, our single misdeed, was silence, and a kind of miraculous vanishing.
-Colette, My Mother’s House
When a young girl is without fortune or profession, and is, moreover, entirely dependent on her brothers, what can she do but hold her tongue, accept what is offered and thank God for it?
-Colette, My Mother’s House
I could go on because indeed this is only a minuscule fraction of the swirl of chaos we are witness to but the point is that this is all so ridiculous, because not only should it not be happening, it doesn’t need to. People are choosing this reality. And, in my opinion, at the center of all this madness is a singular fact: we are all going to die. And yet we avoid this fact by clinging to distraction - racism and violence and sex and legacy, willing these things to matter with a kind of desperation that obscures the fact that, all that aside, we are all still going to die anyway. And the meaning we place in these things will not follow us to wherever we are going.
The only thing that’s ever really been eternal is love.
I considered going to see a movie today, but there’s a fire blazing and it’s not on the periphery of things. It’s right in front of me, in front of all of us. And the absurdity of “normal life” feels too much to bear sometimes. It feels like the whole world should be stopping to address the emergency of white supremacy, Western imperialism, war mongering, capitalism and patriarchy has put us in, and it’s not, and that’s wild.
You open the door for me, but I was already open, like a cracked fruit.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
Don’t be fooled, ever since the beginning it’s been about distracting us from a revolution that’s already underway.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
Naively, we longed to be torn to shreds, destitute, impossible to situate, just spoken words tossed into the air by our bodies without history, nameless and sexless, drunk on each other.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
I examine the apartment, hide my computer, lift and close the piano lid. I hate, exasperate, myself in these states, primed for the slaughter.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
For a long time now I’ve been nothing but a face, reproduced and tossed to the curb.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
Attracted by the luminous interior, moths slide in through the slits in the wooden shutters. They thrash against the window in frantic convulsions, regardless of how their bodies fall to tatters.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
It isn’t modesty but insatiable desire that motivates me.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
The day stretches on without pause, the sun blanching everything around me.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
She sings the body lost, quartered between continents, the dying reef, the dying ocean, the animals, the gunshot. A form thrashing on the water’s dark surface.
-Olivia Tapiero (tr. Kit Schluter)
They’re annoyed that Kyle’s working out because they’re not and they feel bad about it. Case closed. When you live in a culture that positions exercise — and the thinner body that can accompany it — and “health” or “wellness” as next to godliness, you develop a lot of baggage about your level of participation. That’s why someone else being dedicated to something you aren’t as dedicated to (especially something we feel we’re supposed to do to be “good, healthy” people) feels like a personal attack, as if they’re bringing attention to your failure to adhere. It’s also about envy, of course: Kyle’s getting all shredded and Zen and changing her life for the better and the other gals are feeling a way about it, probably because they aren’t.
Allowing ourselves to be sad can be a surprisingly difficult thing to do. At least, it can be challenging to make space for sadness in our happy-at-all-costs society. A quick Google search tells me there are lots of people looking for guidance on how to do this. There are tips on how to get your tears flowing, lists of the saddest movies on Netflix, and entire books devoted to the art of being sad.
If I were to write one of those how-to-be-sad advice posts, I’d tell readers to stop searching for the right song, movie, or memory and instead make space for silence. I’d invite them to go for a walk, without headphones; take a bath, without a book; or lie in their bed, without kids, partners, or anyone else interrupting the moment. I’d encourage them to take a deep breath and, as they exhale, to imagine releasing all the things that are weighing them down. I’d give them a gentle reminder that crying is okay, and that on particularly heavy days, it’s one of the most cathartic things you can do.
Before mass production was thought up as a technological process, people wouldn’t have even imagined trying to take the variety inherent to the human body and collapse it into a set of standard-ish sizes. People didn’t think using standardization as a mental model.
Being a politician of “The Left” is infinitely more demanding than just being a politician. Whereas being a normal politician is a full identity in itself, a politician who represents The Left finds that their identity as a politician is subservient to their more important status as a moral leader. We expect normal politicians to wheel-and-deal, and make devastating compromises, and act in their own self-interest. Normal politicians can do what they want as long as they satisfy enough of their own constituents and donors to remain in power. But the always-small group of elected leaders rooted in the Left represent more than their district or their state. They represent the entire idea that social justice movements can win electorally; they are the vanguards of the movements themselves; they carry the weight of the entire project of changing the world for the better, the heart of progressivism, on their shoulders. We expect them to be different from normal politicians and that is the deal that they accept by rising out of and aligning themselves with the Left. They have to first believe in stuff and then worry about getting power, rather than vice versa. They will always be judged by higher moral standards because, unlike most of their colleagues, at the heart of their identity lies their acceptance of the obligation to always fight for the powerless, to fight against injustice, to fight for the principles of righteousness.
The leaders who could not bring themselves to call for a ceasefire when justice demanded it are not going to be the leaders any more. This is one of those times when a dividing line rushes up from the ground, and the Left gets to clarify who really understood what the point of all this was.
The Bernie Era of the American Left is over. I don’t know if another single most prominent hero will rise up behind him, or whether we’ll just have a period of many different people doing different things, but I am sure that the leaders who failed to find the moral clarity or courage to be in the right place on the issue of Gaza’s decimation have lost their credibility to a degree that will make it impossible for them to maintain their status as leaders on the Left.
Not being able to see what is happening in Gaza for the atrocity that it is indicates that we do not share all the values we thought we did.
Here is how I think about it, for myself. I believe in the labor movement. I believe, in fact, that building the labor movement is the key to fixing inequality, the most central problem in American society. I place a lot of weight on whether or not a politician is a friend or a foe of labor. But if you come to me and say: “I will support the labor movement, at the price of killing four thousand children,” is that a deal that I want to take? Of course not. That is sick. I don’t want to purchase good labor policy—or good environmental policy, or tax policy, or education policy—at the cost of blowing the arms and legs off a bunch of innocent people. That is not the type of horse trading I’m interested in. Some things are beyond the pale. Some things, we expect those who are moral leaders to stand against no matter the political pressure of the moment. This is one of those things.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war in Vietnam, over the objections of many of his allies. They told him that he was getting sidetracked; that getting involved in this issue would be unpopular; that he must remain focused on civil rights here in America; that he should keep his eyes on the prize. He gave a famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4 of that year, explaining why he did not take that advice. “This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions,” he said. “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls ‘enemy,’ for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”
The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.
-St. Basil the Great
That’s the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we’ve done.
-Garth Greenwell, “Mentor”
Calling out the “institutional repression, street-level harassment, and violence” that have emerged around support for Palestine, the activists referenced an increasing public pressure to “self-censor” and accused the mass media of dispensing “misinformation and extreme censorship for geopolitical gains.” Invoking the at least 40 reporters who have been killed since October 7 — 35 Palestinian, four Israeli, and one Lebanese, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists — the group also stressed the important role of journalists currently “bearing witness” to Israeli violence.
The tiny sounds stop as he smiles at me. His hand leaves his cheek to touch mine.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
Loving him means worrying about him. The air solidifies in my throat. My stomach is full of heavy objects.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
The worry takes me by the throat, or by the stomach.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I caught hold of a big, bright yellow balloon, pressed the opening to my lips, and let it deflate slowly, breathing in his air.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
He puts his arms around me and then draws back a little. He pulls my T-shirt away at the neck and looks over my shoulder and back. I can tell he’s looking at something by the way he stops moving. He isn’t stroking me or kissing me or doing anything, just holding the neck of my T-shirt. I say What is it? He says: you.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I walk over and, standing behind her, take her in my arms. Her body regains its equilibrium, supported by mine.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
He was crying, down below my stomach, over my labia, and I didn’t know how to comfort him. I grasped his shoulders to try to pull him up toward my face. I would have liked to say something to him but he wouldn’t move. He stayed there, forehead pressed to my thighs, eyelashes brushing against my pubic hair just where the flesh parts. Tears trickled inside, all warm.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I’d always rather be someone’s master than their mistress.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I stayed put stubbornly in his arms for ten years, as if between two walls.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I wish she could be blooming again, bursting with health, big, full of life. But she’s dying and I hurt her. But she’s dying and she hurts me.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
Each time I see him our bodies gently untie their ligaments, unfasten their joints.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
After she left, as though I wasn’t sad enough already, I surrounded myself with things that make you cry. Music, first: enough minor keys to drown in, with all their tear-jerking power, and then evening walks by the river. I would go down to the water in search of that special fragmented light, seeking those spaces where the vegetation is so dense that light can only enter obliquely, prostrating itself to slip among the low branches of the trees that brush the bank, and where the only rays that ever penetrate are those of twilight. I needed things like this, ending, declining, plaintive, and weary, to be able to explore my pain to the full.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
Tomorrow it’s going to be a sunny Sunday afternoon. I’ll take my mute off. She’ll come down right away. I’ll open the door and I’ll say great, I was hoping she’d drop by so I could talk to her about rhythm, music, modulation, song. I’ll tell her to sit down, make her a cup of tea, offer to play her my music, my own music, full of variation. I’ll tell her to let herself go, be carried by my breath, my sax, my mouth, my lips, my melody.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
It’s hard to define this sadness that settles like dust in my mind whenever I stop moving. It isn’t exactly sadness, more an oppression that makes my breathing irregular, my body feel awkward, and the afternoons seem interminable.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
Since she left there’s only silence: the absence of her voice and of mine responding.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
She straightened herself, got up, and then sat down again when I knelt in front of her. I took her bare foot, her summer foot, in my hands that hadn’t even had the time to applaud, and put her sandal on.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I had my banal, consensual love affairs, muddked by half-expressed feelings, increasingly permeated and burdened by desire.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I took him to the station. It was over at last. I didn’t love him anymore and I thought I was relieved.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I used to sniff her all the time. Odors are always stronger when they’re damp. Perfumers dampen thin strips of paper to sample their scents. Dampening an area, an object, or a body helps us to smell it and get to know it fully. I moistened her all over with my saliva to get to know her by heart.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
What do you call that feeling, just like nostalgia except about the future? The regret, the longing to rediscover something you haven’t yet lived through? I was pining for that future time and also, in anticipation, dreading its loss.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
She was entirely present. Now she’s in the past. I’m waiting for her to come back.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
She lives in a house by the sea, at the end of a road that floods at high tide. Twice a day, nature seals off her doors and swallows up her road. I can only go see her at low tide.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I often dream of stopping, but I see her smiling at me and I can’t think straight.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I slip into darkness, I sulk, I disappear.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
We are getting old. I like the signs of aging on him, the wrinkles and folds, the emergence of moles and liver spots. I wonder if these marks appear all of a sudden or little by little. I look out for the signs of these blossomings. Time is pollinating his skin with flowers, with speckles, with stars.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
In the shower, the falling water redraws the shape of her spine.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
Sometimes I want her so much that my legs wobble. As though I were a newborn deer trying to stand up.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
With her, I had that seesaw feeling of being almost happy, on the verge of a new beginning, and the certainty that always came too: this won’t last.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
I can’t stand sleeping in the fixed clinch of someone’s arms. My body refuses and pulls away.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
The sense of urgency was her: the intensity of the colors, the eddying of time, the tangled hours. There she was, sleeping beside me. It made everything a blur.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
She looked at me. We came to a halt, the world and I.
-Emmanuelle Pagano (tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things, or even just one thing that cannot be reduced to any kind of psychological or sociological explanation and is not the result of a preconceived idea or demonstration but a narrative: something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded, and can help us understand—endure—events that occur and the things that we do?
-Annie Ernaux
A strong argument for sympathizing with the Palestinians focuses on conditions today. Five million people live under occupation, controlled by a government they have no say in, subjected to regular humiliations. West Bank Palestinians live in Apartheid-like Bantustans, amidst nearly half a million Israeli settlers spread across a hundred communities, appropriating good land, and dividing the rest of the territory with exclusive roads and checkpoints. Palestinians in Gaza live under an Israel-Egypt blockade and Hamas authoritarian rule, with very few allowed in or out.
Everyone deserves basic rights, and Palestinians don’t have them. One can sympathize with Israel, acknowledge serious threats to Israeli security, and still easily recognize that this state of affairs is bad. And since the United Nations and United States have been actively involved since the creation of Israel in 1948, they bear responsibility to help solve it.
But if anyone claims they’ve identified the original wrong, one can always roll back the clock to find another wrong supposedly justifying it. Israel’s campaign in Gaza is a response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks; the Hamas attacks were a response to the Gaza blockade; the blockade is a response to Hamas rocket fire; Hamas rocket fire is a response to an Israeli raid; or it’s in response to the occupation more broadly, which is a response to ongoing terrorism, which is a response to ongoing occupation, which is a response to Arab-Israeli wars, and so on.
I am always afraid of what I see in the dark.
I try to put sorrow in the periphery of my vision, to keep myself from going blind with grief. I can mostly keep my eyes on the things in front of me.
In the beginning, when my friends went to pro-Palestinian rallies, part of me felt like they were against me. Like somehow they thought of me as an oppressor, and that I’d done something wrong, even though I knew deep down that that wasn’t true. I felt both guilty and betrayed.
What I didn’t realize, was that the vast majority of those who are in support of Palestinian freedom are against the government of Israel, Netanyahu and his coalition, not Israelis and Jews as a whole. My friends know that I’m not flying the planes and ordering attacks, and in taking a step back I finally started to calm down and reassess my reaction.
So why did I feel this way? Why do so many Jews around the world feel this way? And why does it feel — to so many of us — like nobody gets it?
The Jewish people have been raised by the paranoid and fearful survivors of the worst event in modern history, something so terrible that it led scholars to invent the term genocide. We study and read a book yearly, the Torah, that tells the story of our plight for thousands of years, up from the very point of our inception as a people, all the way to the very end of our text. We read this book over and over again, and retell our suffering to each other. It hardens us. It scares us. When you have a group of people that only have known suffering, scarred from the stories of our ancestors, and hardened by actual world events, you have a group of people that will do whatever it takes to ensure their own survival.
Betrayal and lying are at the center of my work, as are the layers of truth: how the same thing can be revealed again and again, or looked at from other perspectives, without being a lie, but rather a different kind of truth.
If you are young, it’s a blessed state of mind, to be so trusting.
I think almost everyone has had this experience once in life, that of betrayal. If we were to see all the complexity all the time, it would drive us mad. And there’s always the question behind it: How could I take a half-life for a whole life? Was I content with so little that I couldn’t even see there was something missing, there was something hidden from me?
We are also responsible for the ugly children among the sentences. We should love all sentences, the ugly ones as well as the beautiful ones.
We all lie to ourselves. We manipulate with what phrases we leave behind.
When I studied opera directing, a famous director—one of the most famous opera directors in Germany at this time—she always said, “If you are facing a problem, don’t make a detour. Go right through the middle of it.” I think this is a basic law for all art. Even if something is destroying your initial idea or plan, you have to deal with it.
We want to produce a sound picture of ourselves, a picture that makes sense. A whole that works well with our idea of what we want to be. We want to have not only smooth outsides, but also smooth insides. And this doesn’t work, of course. We have dark corners.
I thought: the absence of women is a screaming one.
If you don’t allow abortions, it doesn’t mean that abortions don’t take place. It only means that abortions are made illegally and put the woman in danger.
Keep being curious. Everything depends on the point of view. And the truth is never just one thing. It is a complex, living entity, moving, growing, shifting around.
Everybody should be given the chance to live.
For years, trans artists have alchemized disgust, rage, and monstrosity to give birth to cybernetic and primordial work. Rarely are they enshrined in the canon of transgressive women artists.
Trans artists don’t own monstrosity, but damn do we harness its potential.
Our best ideas can come from our nightmares.
For me, homosexuality isn’t about who I’m fucking, it’s about whom I become. With men there was always a limit, now I have all the space I want, I feel like I can do anything.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
“Are you going to come to mine?”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, the day after, the day after that.”
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
All I know is that I don’t feel anything anymore. I could walk on glass. It could break at any moment.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
I swim every day, I don’t even think about it anymore. I do it, and that’s that. It’s my form of discipline, my method, my own form of madness to keep the madness at bay.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
Each day I save myself. Then I do it all over again the next day.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
The world is turning into a skeleton without any flesh.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
Sometimes I steal to eat, sometimes it’s just for the sake of it, for the beauty of the gesture. I’m training myself to be indestructible, I need to know that I am.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
With the girls I’m seeing, I’ve rediscovered the tomboy I was as a child. Long time no see.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
I can’t bear beauty anymore.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
Love is nothing if not savage.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
You would’ve guessed by now that a lot of this is coming from being a second-hand witness to the genocide and second Nakba in Palestine. For most of us, the only thing we can do is watch — from the comfort of homes that are not vulnerable to air strikes, in neighbourhoods where water and bread are not scarce, and where hospitals are not being turned into graveyards by Israeli missiles. Though it turns out geography won’t necessarily save you. A friend in London told me about an acquaintance who was brutally beaten up by a group of white men who stopped him because he was carrying a Palestinian flag on his way home from a recent march. The men asked him his name, which is unmistakably Muslim, and then knocked his teeth out while shouting slurs at him. In Bengaluru, a pro-Palestine gathering was shut down by the police and in Mumbai, despite the protest being sparsely-attended, there were reports of a handful of protesters being held in a police station for hours. “You want to protest? The van is right here,” one policeman, blatantly dangling the threat of arrest to a friend who had said he had come to attend a protest.
There is a feeling to this moment in time that seems particularly bleak. Maybe every era feels this way. Maybe it’s the lens of my middle age and my own preoccupations with nihilism that make it seem so. But as we live in such a hateful, violent world barreling toward its own destruction, what else has the capacity to speak to us but horror? As the climate crisis, war, poverty, book banning, and mass shootings are in the daily news alongside the latest celebrity breakups, the very genre of horror isn’t a fantasy anymore. We can imagine a world that is as unforgiving as the cold monster running at us with an ax because that’s how the world feels now.
I had my first real French kiss in the cemetery, meaning, it was a kiss I was wholly un-ambivalent about, a kiss I very much wanted, had dreamed of.
I’m a contributor, which means I don’t have benefits, I don’t have any kind of protections. So that’s how most of the journalism in our industry is currently being produced in this moment, by contingent laborers. There’s this bigger question of: If an institution is not willing to give you a job, then what do you owe them?
-Jamie Lauren Keiles
One of the most widespread and impactful labor trends of this century is the steady effort of companies to push full-time jobs off their books and replace them with freelance jobs. This frees companies from paying benefits and it freezes workers out of the legal ability to unionize and generally it is a great deal for employers to exactly the same extent that it is a bad deal for workers. It is this trend that has fueled the rise of the “gig economy,” which is, in aggregate, a scam that guts worker power and increases the profits of companies and undermines America’s entire 20th-century social contract. If you pull back far enough you can see that the same basic trend that spawned Uber and makes Amazon claim that its delivery drivers do not work for Amazon has also turned every college professor into an adjunct and replaced full-time staff writer jobs in journalism with an endless buffet of freelance writing where you do the same amount of work for much less income. The mechanisms vary from industry to industry, but at its heart this is one big wave of employers trying to push every last possible task into the “independent contractor” column. The “workers love flexibility!” lie is a paltry attempt to put a pretty face on the fact that those same workers would love to have full time jobs instead, but they can’t find them.
What do you owe an institution that is not willing to give you a job? More importantly, what should you owe them?
The short answer is: You owe them the work in question, and before and after that they can fuck off. It is very important for all of us to police these boundaries. Every time an employer tries to attach conditions to freelance work that extend beyond the quality of the work itself, they are trying to snatch something that they have not paid for. They are trying to shoplift your life.
The New York Times, in this example, is a consumer of services deciding that they will boycott anyone whose publicly declared political opinions stray outside of the lines of what is deemed to be reasonable by the New York Times. And, as any journalist can tell you, this is actually how it works! And it is why not too many loud communists work at the New York Times, while plenty of loud normie Democrats do.
The pernicious thing is that the New York Times is trying to pretend that this political decision is not a political decision. Well, it is. The main reason why this discussion, in journalism circles, quickly becomes absurd is that media companies are addicted to the myth that what they do is rooted in some gauzy idea of objectivity, rather than in politics.
News organizations want to pretend that they stand outside of politics, which is like stepping onto a box and pretending that you no longer stand on planet Earth. It is very difficult to have an honest conversation about what is happening when the person you are talking to insists that they are an angel floating above the tawdry corporeal plane. But this myth is important to the self image of mainstream media companies, and so this charade will continue long after we are all dead.
I’ve often asked myself: why was I an avid consumer of fat acceptance content, as a political matter, without ever quite connecting with it personally? Why was I so convinced of the arguments, without self-applying them? Why did I loathe diets in the abstract, but struggle to give them up in practice?
The answer for me—and which I wonder might resonate with some readers too—consists in my body shame, and the particular way shame militates against community.
In this book, I am trying to reckon with the experience, as a woman, of not being considered a shiny object by most people, but rather, a tarnished one, and compared negatively to others. I am trying to reckon with the irrevocability of my own fatness, and to proceed from the simple, I’ve come to think beautiful, truth that people simply come in different shapes and sizes, and that our assiduous attempts to shrink ourselves are as futile as they are harmful.
I think as time has gone on, my awakening as a human being in my life and in myself has happened alongside—and is totally integrated with—my process of growing and awakening as a writer, and that’s really reflected in my craft. The more I locate those other voices [inside myself] and figure out how to answer them, or extricate them ideally—those same voices that tell my students they should steer towards their super dry, theoretical discourse and away from their own stories and the things that actually drive them to write—the more my work feels like me. The more it becomes a mirror in which I can determine who I am.
I mean, anger is real but it’s a response to hurt or fear. And so I think for me, it’s only when I’ve found a way to get to that more primal emotion that I can change my relationship to [the anger]. And it really has been through writing that I’ve done that. It’s through stepping outside of the story of myself and redrawing it in an objective way, so that I can see myself the way that I see other people. The result is almost always that I feel compassion for myself, or really deep grief, or I don’t know, sometimes forgiveness, sometimes apology, but it is so vulnerable. It’s much more vulnerable than anger or the more analytical modes that I can work in that are much more comfortable for me. I had all these ideas when I was younger about what it meant to be tough or strong, and it’s just the opposite of what I thought then. Vulnerability is the hardest, bravest place to go.
I just say, “Keep writing.” I give a lot of prompts and assignments in my classes, which they find annoying sometimes, but I think that’s the best way to push through. Having some external power exerted on me to make me write through the discomfort, beyond the thing I expected, beyond the thoughts I’ve already had—that’s where the good stuff comes for me, and so I just make them write like crazy.
I also have been blessed with this weird, intense urge to work shit out on the page and in art. It is the primary place where I am honest with myself, where I heal from things, where I integrate, and truly where I do my best thinking.
I’m really bad at pretending to be anything other than what I am.
I will say that one of the things I find disheartening is something I’ve seen increasingly in students, where they are bringing the imagined criticisms of a bad faith reader to the desk with them when they’re doing the first draft. Basically, they’re already thinking, “What is that person on Twitter going to say about this when I publish it?” It is a preoccupation with others’ perceptions. I try to encourage them as much as possible: be conscientious in your work. Be conscientious of your reader, of your potential readers, of all of your past selves, but do not write for the bad faith reader. You have to write for the reader of best faith, the reader who most needs your work, and you need to do your absolute best work for that reader. Exile the thoughts of the person who is looking to invalidate the art that you’re making; you can’t make art that way. Or it will be a brittle, sad version of what you would’ve done if you had imagined the loving reader who is grateful and interested in what it is that you actually are trying to communicate.
I am realizing you become a wife, despite the mutual attempt at an egalitarian partnership, once you agree to move for him. You are placed into the feminine role—you play the pawn. Once you let that tornado take you away into the self-abnegating state of wifedom. Which I did from the beginning.
-Kate Zambreno
How can we not be angry—how can we go about life without feelings of anger towards history, toward the chasms in history that remain invisible, the raging exploitation of people and resources, inequalities, injustices—all of it.
We are constantly told anger is a dangerous emotion, to never let it show lest you make someone else uncomfortable. Another way we are taught to make ourselves smaller for other people’s comfort.
My etymology text tells me that anger has roots in the 13th century, when as a verb it is rooted in Old Norse, angra, “to grieve, vex, distress.” As a noun, its use dates slightly later—the mid-13th century—rooted from Old Norse angr—here given as “distress, grief, sorrow, affliction,” also citing a Proto-Germanic word angaz, meaning “tight, painfully constricted, painful.” Finally, it notes that Old Norse had the term “angr-luass,” as in ‘anger less’—meaning ‘free from care.’
The hint that anger arises out of grief, distress, sorrow, and affliction feels right. Anger is so much more than rage or wrath directed outward; it's about the grief of being hurt, oppressed, painfully constricted. And it’s the last meaning that gets at the crux of it—angre-lauss, free from care—meaning anger is essentially care. Because that’s what anger feels like to me—like giving more than a damn. Care for the things that constrict and hurt one’s self at times, but especially care for others who are experiencing hurt, grief, sorrow, and affliction. Polite silence does not create change.
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-Despy Boutris
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I loved this. Please read it.
Good prose. Fascinating voice. Reminiscent, subject-wise, of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s autobiographical work.
This book was not good, imo.
Thank you for this collection of quotes and articles. They help me think more deeply about the world and about myself.