round-up: 11/23
reading recs, quotations, & tweets galore!
Happy Thursday!
I’m not a big Thanksgiving girl, but I’m grateful to you for being here and hope you have a restful day off and eat some good food.
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 to read:
&:
I read a lot this week and so there are more quotes than fit into this email. If you want to read all the way to the end, please open this message up in a new tab.
Housekeeping:
I took a lil trip with one of my best friends for the week of Thanksgiving. Since neither of us are huge fans of the holiday, we thought it would be fun to do something a little different. And of course it was beautiful.
What I’m reading:
Lie With Me, Philippe Besson (tr. Molly Ringwald)1
Patience and Sarah, Isabel Miller2
The Crying Book, Heather Christle4
Tribute, Anne Germanacos
Quotations:
A lot of that internal work was about just owning the story and then having the right to tell the story. For years I have vacillated between whether or not I have a right to tell this story.
Fuck me over once, I'll learn from it. Fuck me over twice, you are dead to me. Keep a folder or a spreadsheet to remember all the fuckers who are dead to you, with screenshots or receipts for reference if needed.5
-Alice Wong
People call me "sweet" all the time, which is a true thing. I am friendly and gentle and mushy and patient and affectionate and all that tender stuff. More than that, though, I am kind. Sweetness is a disposition. Kindness is a deliberate decision. Kind people aren't born, they're made. Of loss and darkness and grief and bone-deep sadness we've fought to turn into something more, a fractured map for still believing in goodness, the courage to be soft even though the world has tried to make us hard. Kind people understand the necessity of compassion because we've experienced the other side of that need. Kind people love the way we want to be loved. We strive to see the way we want to be seen. It takes an enormous amount of strength and vulnerability to be kind. It’s a beautiful, precious, flowering thing, rooted so often in an enduring pain. People wake up sweet. People choose every morning, over and over and over, to be kind.
It’s the end of August, so a place I love is burning.
You didn’t have to attract desire . . . Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing.
-Marguerite Duras
I’m from a bygone era, a dying city, a past without glory.
-Philippe Besson
I would have stayed in this childhood, in this cocoon.
-Philippe Besson
I didn’t see the harm in feeling good; I had experienced pleasure with Sebastien and I couldn’t conceive of associating that pleasure with anything wrong.
-Philippe Besson
If I shut up, it’s just to avoid being confronted with violence. Is it cowardice? Perhaps. I prefer to see it as a kind of necessary self-protection.
-Philippe Besson
I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine.
-Philippe Besson
This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.
-Philippe Besson
Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.
-Philippe Besson
He says that he has never done this before. He doesn’t even know how he dared, how it came to him. He hints at all the questions, all the hesitations, denials, and objections he had to overcome.
-Philippe Besson
I say: I’ll follow you.
At that moment, I would have followed him anywhere, done anything he asked.
-Philippe Besson
It’s as if he’s negating everything that transpired between us, one body against the other, as if the image has been completely erased.
-Philippe Besson
Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. I wonder sometimes if I have ever written of anything else. It’s as if I never recovered from it: the inaccessible other, occupying all my thoughts.
-Philippe Besson
Perhaps writing is a good means of survival.
-Philippe Besson
His hair continues to drip water, the wet strands sticking to his forehead. His beauty is devastating. He kneels down on the mattress. I do the same.
-Philippe Besson
He puts on his jeans. He’s still shirtless, in spite of the cold. I get up too. I start to press myself against his back, wrapping my arms around his pelvis. He tenses at the contact, repelling my tenderness. I say: It’s so you’ll be less cold.
He gently disengages from my embrace, grabs his T-shirt and sweater, and puts them back on.
-Philippe Besson
He caresses me with hands that know exactly what to do. He bites my hips, my torso. He groans, no longer able to contain it, a sound that he releases maybe without even realizing it himself.
-Philippe Besson
A little tipsy from the half bottle of wine we snuck upstairs, he dances in front of me, listening to the muffled echo of the song. I feel like I’m dreaming.
-Philippe Besson
I tell him about the trafficking of feelings, the life at the margins, the bodies that seek, press against each other violently, and then separate.
-Philippe Besson
I had only one desire: to escape.
-Philippe Besson
There is often a staggering intimacy between us, a closeness beyond imagining.
-Philippe Besson
We’re left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves.
-Philippe Besson
I’m not possessive, figuring no one should have exclusive rights to someone else, as if a lover were a piece of property. I respect everyone’s freedom too much (probably because I can’t bear to have mine undermined).
-Philippe Besson
I cannot stand the idea that he could be taken from me. That I could lose him. I discover for the first time—poor idiot—this stabbing pain of love.
-Philippe Besson
(And when you’ve been hurt once, you’re afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid sufering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.)
-Philippe Besson
Don’t we already spend most of our time avoiding each other? Missing each other? I smile at the double meaning—an unsightly, tragic smile, of course.
-Philippe Besson
Affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart.
-Philippe Besson
The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word.
-Philippe Besson
You can never really let go of your childhood. Especially when it was happy.
-Philippe Besson
There’s a noise in my head as she finishes saying these words. It’s the sund of a ship’s horn as it casts away from the mainland. I don’t know why.
-Philippe Besson
Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash.
-Philippe Besson
I feel a profound loneliness, the kind you feel when you are alone in the beating heart of a crowd.
-Philippe Besson
That singular moment. The pure urgency of it.
-Philippe Besson
His body strethced out like a cross in the fresh grass, face turned toward the blue of the sky, the feeling of the sun on his cheeks and his arms.
-Philippe Besson
You get used to everything, even the defection of those you thought you were bound to forever.
-Philippe Besson
No matter how much you want to respect someone’s freedom (even when you consider it selfish), you still have your own pain, anger, and melancholy to contend with.
-Philippe Besson
It was love, of course. And tomorrow, there will be a great emptiness.
-Philippe Besson
There is a vexing preconception among traditionally-published authors, one that I’ve occasionally been guilty of too: the idea that there are leagues in writing, and that some authors belong here or there, not based on the quality of their output but according to how their books reach an audience. Because publishing the traditional way entails overcoming obstacles (agents, acquisition teams, editors, and so on)¹, it is often assumed that a book published in this fashion is a priori better than a self-published one. If you look at Amazon KDP — that cesspit of badly-typeset atrocities dressed in covers put together with Microsoft Word — it is tempting to agree: self-publishing does stink of bad literature. But so does traditional publishing, and not always with nicer covers. If you don’t believe me take a look at any bestsellers list and marvel at the stultifying putrefaction of what you’ll find.
I had enough spite in me to want to live, usually.
-Isabel Miller
I was still eating when she finished. She put her cheek against her fist and watched me and smiled at me. I saw where any extended amount of that would give me trouble swallowing.
-Isabel Miller
“I can’t gab all afternoon, like women-folk.” She stood up and looked down at me. “I never wanted to till now,” she said.
-Isabel Miller
I kept wishing I had rubbed grease into her chapped hands. I wanted to even up her rough-cut nails with my little bright scissors.
-Isabel Miller
“There’s something else.”
I groaned.
“There’s what I feel,” she said. “You might not like it.”
“What do you feel?”
“I care for you.”
“I want you to. I care for you.”
If it bothers you or anything I can stop. So tell me if you don’t want me to.”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
-Isabel Miller
Her fear was over. Mine not. “That’s something powerful, girl,” I said.
-Isabel Miller
I looked back, seriously entirely, because it was up to me to save us from a thirst we could never come to a pause in or rest from. I was older. It was up to me.
-Isabel Miller
Oh, we were begun. There would be no way out except through.
-Isabel Miller
So when I let my head fall back under Sarah’s kiss, the frenzy I trembled at just wasn’t there. Instead, comfort and joy and simplicity and order and answers to questions I’d always supposed unanswerable, such as, why was I born? why a woman? why here? why now?
-Isabel Miller
“We’ll have other money, and you won’t cut your hair,” I said, very firmly, something like a man. I began to wonder if what makes men walk so lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women. If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other.
-Isabel Miller
How easy it was to wake that morning, when the world and my life in it were for the first time more interesting and beautiful than any dream I could lose by waking.
-Isabel Miller
I struggled for calm and unselfishness to be of service to others, and I thought, why, this is suffering, this is the pain of life, this is what they talk about in Church, this daily struggle to keep going without knowing why. And I saw what was meant by faith: faith is the belief that this life is not our only chance. Wavering of faith means beginning to believe in this life and wanting to live it, denying all duties and dashing off uncontrolled.
-Isabel Miller
I had to put space between me and all I was lonesome for—
-Isabel Miller
I felt her take my hand. I heard her say, “Come on,” and I stood up ready to go anywhere, to her bed or off a cliff or into the fire, anywhere she took me.
-Isabel Miller
She stretched out and patted beside her to show me my place, and I went into it. I propped myself up on my elbow and looked down at her and words like hallelujah and glory kept coming to me.
-Isabel Miller
There […] [were] those wonderful Sunday afternoons when I could hold Patience and lean over her face trying to find the exact name for the brown of her eyes, and studying her ear with the tip of my tongue, and feeling her clean breath on me, learning how born to fit her eyelid my mouth was, watching the daylight fade across her face.
-Isabel Miller
How you know what’s wicked is whatever feels good.
-Isabel Miller
“We have to talk,” she said.
“All right,” I said. I was afraid.
“There’s been too much bed and not enough talk.”
I said, “We could talk in bed.”
She smiled a little, saying, “I know you better than that.”
-Isabel Miller
Can’t you see? We can be an army of two. We can be Plato’s perfect army: lovers, who will never behave dishonorably in each other’s sight, and invincible. Let the world either kill us or grow accustomed to us; here we stand.
-Isabel Miller
I have not succeeded in making you reckless.
-Isabel Miller
You leave me. I feel the cold air like a sword where your warmth has been. You tear my whole front open when you cease to lie along it. My skin goes with you.
-Isabel Miller
The firpins will be bolder than I and touch you where I have not. They will caress your body all day, as my lucky ambassador—lieutenant—proxy—and at unexpected, inconvenient times you will remember to feel their touch, which is my touch, and your heart will pound. My heart is pounding at the thought. It is the sort of problem I like for us to have.
-Isabel Miller
(I do have my hook in your mouth, darling, but I’m not playing you; I’m landing you. I’d better, don’t you think, before we’re both too old for a walk in any weather?)
-Isabel Miller
He says, “Have you prayed to be freed of it?”
I say, “I meant to. Last summer I got as far as my knees.” (You turn and stare at me. Well, darling, of course there are some things about me you don’t know.)
“But didn’t pray?” he askes.
“I found I didn’t wish to be freed of it.”
-Isabel Miller
We ride now palm to palm. I marry you. Embracing inside secret walls never married us. The open, the sky, the eyes of my brother marry us and the harness bells are our wedding hymn.
-Isabel Miller
God make me worthy of you, in a hurry.
-Isabel Miller
It may be that one must be a male, or be owned by one, not to be their natural victim. […] It may be that there’s no place on earth for women who refuse to bend their necks to be the wards of males—neatly transferred from father to brother to husband to son to grave.
-Isabel Miller
The mountains were like lady giants lying together, vast hips and breasts. The fruit trees were in flower.
-Isabel Miller
Ah, Sarah, in your eyes I see myself become what I always dreamed I could be.
-Isabel Miller
I would shout my triumph when Sarah groaned. I would groan for her. We would make the bed gallop. The floor would ring like a drum.
-Isabel Miller
What a sweet night it was, of quiet word and talk. I loved it for itself and for being the pattern of all the time to come. Work is endless and we could never lack for topic: I had my whole life and every thought and fear and wish to tell, and hers to hear, and every day would bring more.
-Isabel Miller
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
-Adrienne Rich
I insist on being shocked. I am never going to become immune. I think that’s a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside. I want to be surprised and shocked every time.
-Toni Morrison
Like a lot of masochists, I enjoy pain that can be controlled and am terrified of pain that can’t; like a lot of disabled people, I don’t trust doctors to do anything other than make my life shorter and worse.
I don’t know how to talk about my biological father, so I am going to describe the lake: it’s blue, with swans.
-Tony Tost
There is something compelling about hunger.
-Anne Germanacos
Is it in anticipation that desire takes root? Vice versa?
-Anne Germanacos
My fingers ache—taxed by all this necessity and desire.
-Anne Germanacos
We’d just kissed with something that—if not abandon—was extremely close.
-Anne Germanacos
While he slept, I lay awake for a long time, thinking his body onto mine. The merest fluttering of fingertips.
-Anne Germanacos
Taking her into my body in order to keep and have her.
-Anne Germanacos
I keep saying: unravel. But don’t I mean disentangle?
-Anne Germanacos
No doubt sex is a form of eating and beating eaten.
-Anne Germanacos
I am a pilgrim at the shrine of her.
-Anne Germanacos
Here in the postmodern age, I write myself raw.
-Anne Germanacos
(keeping a thing in the dark doesn’t necessarily keep it alive)
-Anne Germanacos
One day, perhaps, we’ll touch hands in honor of what has passed between us.
-Anne Germanacos
How much hunger can a person stand?
-Anne Germanacos
A mouth, and another mouth, each a perfect everything.
-Anne Germanacos
Every time I think of her, I bloom, then wilt.
-Anne Germanacos
Last night, I could have pursued him and been pursued—nimble, hunted, hunter—for hours, mesmerized by what was unfolding, in thrall to what would come.
-Anne Germanacos
(Saying you’re not taking a side is, of course, taking a side.)
-Anne Germanacos
Not enough hours in the day; I steal some from the night.
-Anne Germanacos
Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.
I can’t write about poetry amidst the "reasonable" tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.
When I'm writing, I want to be, as you say, in conversation, in community with people who are out there. I don't want to just be writing in my cork-lined room.
You don't actually want to have to have a thick skin. I mean, you don't want everything that brushes against you to leave a wound, but I think that it still seems so important to remain permeable.
I think the responsibility of the artist honestly is very selfish – it's to write or create or engage with the things that are meaningful to them in whatever that is. And so if you're joking around and you're like, "I'm going put a urinal on the wall upside-down because that has meaning for me." Cool. It's art. But on a personal level, I think it is extremely selfish. I'm always going to write books that are interesting to me. I'm never going to write a book where someone is like, "Here is a big social problem. I think you should write about it." If it's not important to me, I'm just not going to write about it. It has to come from within.
But the art that stays and continues to speak to people over time is the art that feels like it is in conversation with the world on a larger level.
Like me, every queer and/or trans person I've ever known has — at some point in their lives — been forced to hide at least part of themselves from the people they love most. Our sexuality, maybe. Our gender. Our relationships, our names, our pronouns, our hopes and dreams, our real feelings about politics or religion. Some of us have had to do it because we know we won't be safe or accepted if we tell our families who we really are. Some of us have had to do it because other people have begged us to stay hidden ("for your own sake," they always say). People who've never had to be closeted can never truly understand the emotional, psychological, and sometimes even physical damage it does to a person to have to hide who they are, the way the shame twists like a sickness in your guts, whispering lies that you're unlikable, unlovable, unworthy.
Having to hide parts of yourself — your knowledge, your accomplishments, the very you-ness of you — is a terrible thing, but I find great comfort in knowing that I was never really alone in cloaking myself because of my queerness. That I'm not alone, even now, when I have to obscure parts of myself in certain spaces. I've always been part of a long lineage of women who've found ways to express and be seen for exactly who they are.
I feel the bone-chilling weight of colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, racism, climate crisis—all of it—almost all the time these days. Everywhere I turn, there it is. […] Frankly, the West has won in ways that enrage me to admit. I am writing this in English. I am posting on their platforms.
Last week, I went to an action in San Francisco, led by dozens of kids under the age of 16, whisper-chanting “ancestors watching, I know they’re watching; ancestors watching, I know, I know” outside a building where Joe Biden was speaking about the economy. The children created a collective altar, and in front of it, created a mountain of kids’ shoes–echoing the imagery from the Holocaust and visualizing the heartbreak that powers the phrase “Never Again”. Police officers flanked the area of the vigil—a stark contrast to the inner circle where the children were which was protected by parents, community members, and indigenous Ohlone drummers and medicine workers who cleansed the space with sage—and I wondered to myself how the Zionist state militia could justify their aggression amidst what was indisputably a site of sacred declaration aimed at affirming life. Never before have I felt this devastated and this hopeful at the same time.
Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a shortcut—something I could say that would effortlessly untangle the ball of yarn I am trying to untangle here on these pages. But that would be asking too much from you. It wasn’t you who loved her, or thought you loved her. I wonder what I could write that would help you to understand that it is profoundly easy to fall in love with an olive-skinned woman that touches you just so, and who has a tattoo of a quote from Orlando trailing down her back. Show me your tattoo again, I’d say in bed. She’d pull up the bottom of her shirt, and I’d trace my fingers over the cursive words by Virginia Woolf that read: Love, the poet said, is a woman’s whole existence.
-Chloe Caldwell
I worry that if I cannot make you fall in love with her inexplicably, inexorably, and immediately, the way I did, then you will not be experiencing this book in the way I hope you will.
-Chloe Caldwell
Isn’t it sad to talk about ex-lovers in the past tense as though they are dead?
-Chloe Caldwell
In my memory it happens quickly—everything of hers in everything of mine. Fingers and tongue. Her palms on my back, her hands in my hair, her breath in my ear saying babybabybaby. I want you so bad, I say. I remember this surprising me. It rolled out of my mouth so naturally: I want you so bad. Where did it come from? Since when had I wanted her so bad? Why had I not been conscious of it?
-Chloe Caldwell
When I start crying, she says, Oh no, what are we doing—this is not what you need. No, it was not what I needed. But maybe what I wanted.
-Chloe Caldwell
She finds my foot under the comforter and lifts it to her lips, kisses it, sets it back down.
-Chloe Caldwell
What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began.
-Maggie Nelson
We treat desire as a problem to be solved.
-Rebecca Solnit
Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?
-Mary MacLane
You’re like a soft little animal, I say, while we’re nuzzling each other. Her voice so small and amused when she repeats back: I’m like a soft little animal?
-Chloe Caldwell
I am a child. I have regressed several years emotionally.
-Chloe Caldwell
I always want to feel good and I never want to feel bad.
-Chloe Caldwell
She has the posture of a teenaged boy. I want to pummel her, wrestle her in the grass, give her new blue jeans grass stains, hump her leg.
-Chloe Caldwell
We try to just be friends. She asks me if I will meet her for a game of pinball, which turns into sex. When I ask her if she wants to come over and play Bananagrams, it turns into sex. We cannot be around each other without the strong desire to fuck.
-Chloe Caldwell
(I tiptoe around her state of mind, cave to her jealousies, try to protect her.)
-Chloe Caldwell
I wish I could talk. I want to tell my mother everything. But I worry that if I begin crying, I will never stop. I will never get out of bed. If my mother gives me sympathy, I worry I will collapse, get on the plane home with her.
-Chloe Caldwell
Everything is arranged last minute, as it is in affairs, because that is what we are having, even if I don’t want to think of it in this way.
-Chloe Caldwell
She tells me about the word schaudenfreud, which translates to harm-joy, the feeling of pleasure or joy derived from the misfortune of others. Of course, I am not malicious and do not wish harm to others. It’s just that I love a good train wreck, possibly to distract me from my own.
-Chloe Caldwell
I am grasping at my identity. I am questioning everything.
-Chloe Caldwell
Things hurt worse before they hurt better.
-Chloe Caldwell
She fixes my bra that is twisted. She fixes the chain of my necklace that is twisted. She kisses my shoulder. I put one leg onto her lap. She plays with my shoe, straightens it.
-Chloe Caldwell
She wants to make me macaroni and cheese at night. She wants to eat cereal with me in the morning. I put my fingers in my ears and say lalalalalala because I know it won’t happen and I don’t want to be devastated when it doesn’t.
-Chloe Caldwell
We hug goodbye. I tell her about this anecdote I read that says when you hug somene, the bonding and attachment begins after three seconds. Let’s let go after two then, she says.
-Chloe Caldwell
I used to be more hardcore in my self-destruction, but I am back to basics now.
-Chloe Caldwell
She used to be able to see my mind gears turning. What? she’d ask, seeing a certain expression on my face. Never mind, I’d shake my head, and she’d say, No—tell me what you were gonna say, put your heart on my heart. So I’d sigh and straddle her and lay my heart down and she’d say: This is gonna be a good one.
-Chloe Caldwell
I have stopped living and started killing time.
-Chloe Caldwell
I have tried so many routes to oblivion.
-Chloe Caldwell
Before the crash, before the smoke from the airbags, there is the sight of two deer directly in front of me. My brown eyes meet their brown eyes, their beautiful and graceful limbs bent mid-air.
-Chloe Caldwell
Tweets:
Anyways:
I bought myself this shirt as a holiday gift to myself. It’s on sale today.
-Despy Boutris
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Five stars; go read it!
Oh my god I loved it so much! If you have read it or do read it and like it, I know you’ll like Desert of the Heart, too.
I just feel like I found this book at the exact perfect time, as someone who—like the protagonist—just moved to LA and is gay and deeply depressed. Highly recommend.
I don’t think I’ll finish this because it’s not very good!
Exactly.