round-up: 11/24
what i'm watching, what i'm reading, quotations, etc.
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping / what I’m watching
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:
Students protest following MIT’s decision to ban issue of pro-Palestinian magazine
Young Gazans Reach Global Audiences With Videos of Everyday Life in War
Housekeeping:
I watched Agatha All Along this week and highly recommend it for anyone who has a few hours to kill and likes toxic lesbians.
If you need more convincing (because that’s valid—it’s Marvel and it’s on Disney+, of all things), here, watch Aubrey Plaza and Kathryn Hahn almost kiss:
Everyone’s putting out gift guides.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, here’s mine:
What I’m reading:
A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes
Quotations:
Sometimes I have a craving to be engulfed.
-Roland Barthes
This is how it happens sometimes, misery or joy engulfs me.
-Roland Barthes
I am wedged between two tenses.
-Roland Barthes
Absence persists—I must endure it.
-Roland Barthes
I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need.
-Roland Barthes
I am devoured by desire.
-Roland Barthes
Turn back, look at me, see what you have made of me.
-Roland Barthes
What I hide by my language, my body utters.
-Roland Barthes
(My life is a ruin: some things remain in place, others are dissolved, collapsed; this is dilapidation, wreckage.)
-Roland Barthes
What will the world, what will the other do with my desire?
-Roland Barthes
Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.
-Roland Barthes
(A squeeze of the hand—enormous documentation—a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn’t move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other’s head gradually comes to rest—)
-Roland Barthes
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
-Roland Barthes
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language.
-Roland Barthes
The amorous subject experiences every meeting with the loved being as a festival.
-Roland Barthes
(Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.)
-Roland Barthes
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer frombeing excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.
-Roland Barthes
It is as if desire were nothing but this hemorrhage.
-Roland Barthes
What does “thinking of you” mean? It means: forgetting “you” (without forgetting, life itself is not possible) and freqently waking out of that forgetfulness.
-Roland Barthes
I make myself cry, in order to prove to myself that my grief is not an illusion.
-Roland Barthes
I live under the regime of too much or not enough.
-Roland Barthes
I am afraid of my own destruction.
-Roland Barthes
What is a hero? The one who has the last word.
-Roland Barthes
Dream of total union: everyone says this dream is impossible, and yet it persists. I do not abandon it.
-Roland Barthes
(Love is blind: the proverb is false. Love opens his eyes wide, love produces clear-sightedness.)
-Roland Barthes
I love you is in my head, but I imprison it behind my lips.
-Roland Barthes
I’m constantly digging through the detritus of coloniality, because all it leaves is detritus. It buries you in detritus. It locks you into the one-notedness of itself and the absolute boundaries that it sets for you. However, you exceed these boundaries constantly; have always exceeded them. And the part of you that is more than these boundaries notices its enclosures. You’re not simply bound in the enclosure; you notice the enclosures constantly, and you’re always more than them.
I always had a distrust of linearity and linear structure, and I felt that poetry was much more expansive, much more open to philosophical meanderings.
For the last century, research has repeatedly shown that intentional weight loss interventions fail the vast majority of the time. The weight loss industry is desperately trying to rebrand in order to dodge this truth. So now it’s not a weight loss clinic, it’s medically supervised weight management or “ob*sity” treatment. It’s not a diet drug it’s “anti-ob*sity medication.” It’s not weight loss surgery, it’s “bariatric surgery” or “metabolic surgery.”
There is absolutely no research to suggest that any current intervention will be different than any past intervention (which is to say that there is no reason to believe that they will do anything except create short-term weight loss followed by weight regain for almost everyone and/or include dangerous, potentially life-altering or even life-ending side effects.) A failed weight loss intervention by any other name will still be a failed weight loss intervention.
There is no method of body size manipulation (whether we’re calling it a diet, a lifestyle change, a health journey or something else) that reliably produces significant long-term weight loss in more than a tiny fraction of people.
I always feel like I’m just one purchase, one kiss, or one sweet treat away from unlocking the meaning of the universe and forever absolving myself of human suffering.
I won’t go into too much detail, but I had to call the hotline recently. No, I wasn’t a danger to myself or others —too selfish for the former and clumsy for the latter— but I know myself well enough to predict that whenever I get like this, I resort to irrational self-sabotage like eradicating the most important people in my life, cutting all my hair off, or moving countries on a whim (true story x4). None of these options have ever served me beyond temporary relief. It was one of those days where you find yourself delirious and hyperactive, fever motion, hated by everyone and hating everyone back, fidgeting around your house like a tennis ball, a little nauseous and eager to bury yourself alive under the floorboards. Just girly things, you know. What do you do? Go for a run? Take a nap? Well, if that were the case, Better Help and its counterparts would have filed for bankruptcy long ago. Instead, you end up doomscrolling, ignoring your hunger and thirst, writing self-effacing footnotes into the story of your life. Made my bed, and now, unfortunately, I have to lie in it, though I may need a little Ambien for this. But since my frontal lobe is fully developed, this time, I counterattack with a 1-800-fix my brain for me, please.
Radical optimism and toxic positivity are not part of my constitution. Not only because I have a fairly realistic grasp on the state of affairs in the world and find the whole ‘you create your own reality’ mindset gurus both nauseating and fraudulent, but also because I’ve got a melancholia-programmed chip implanted in my brain since birth and it’s made me incapable of faking happiness with a gun to my head.
Our generation is positivity-averse. There are a few understandable reasons for this. Positivity in its contemporary form tends to overarchingly stem from a place of privilege, negating important factors that play a crucial role in one’s ability to feel happy; everything from one’s socioeconomic status to plain inequality and the sheer capacity for physical and mental wellbeing. Optimism has a reputation for putting a bandaid over gushing wounds, dismissing real-world problems in favor of capitalist oblivion and productivity.
Positivity is offered as a passive measure: why don’t you just embrace the unknown and be happy, let life flow through you? It’s a pragmatic person’s hell. Practicing positivity is an act akin to putting on a dress, bypassing the concrete steps that could genuinely improve your situation — you’re just told to cultivate goodness irrespective of circumstance and all the nuance that plays into the root cause of why you’re unwell to begin with. Our strong aversion to this lazy one-size-fits-all Be Happy mantra is not unnatural; the more uncertain and volatile the world gets, and the more tragic information from all over the world we access and process daily, the more cynical and devoid of joy we become in response; the more ridiculous optimism looks in contrast. Late millennials and Gen Z are particularly at risk due to the dissolution of our promised picture-perfect future in real time. And we can’t afford the unbearable lightness of denial, either. Let’s leave that to our parents.
If I can’t ease my pain or the pain of others, and things are wildly out of my control, what is there left to do? Could I live laugh love not to erase the suffering, but to make the journey a little more bearable along the way? Could I hold space for both a cynical understanding of the world’s atrocities and small attempts to make myself a little happier?
Life, as I’ve gotten to know it, happens at the intersection of trying to feel better and just being. It’s both and it’s neither. It doesn’t care if I’m happy or miserable, ironic or genuine, miserably happy or happily miserable. It’s just there, raw and ugly and messy as it comes — it’s my job to mold it into something I can tolerate.
I think we all have a shadow self, that stays with us, that makes us who we are. Some of us allow that shadow self to become our main self, and that is usually not a good thing. But I wouldn’t want my shadow self to disappear completely. I think it gives us access to some hidden realities, many of which seem to drive much of life as we know it. It’s good to be aware of these forces, and not pretend they do not exist, right?
I was never a monster. And there is always work to do, which simply means being open to life. I’ve been with my wife now for twenty years, we have a 16-year old daughter, we all get along. If I step back and look at that part of my life it all seem unlikely. How did I figure that out? The same with my writing—I’m a poet, I work with language every day, I have a few books out in the world and people come up to me sometimes and tell me these poems mean something to them. It’s all a daily practice, everything, the family, the poems, the sobriety. I have spent time in a life that did not look like this, and this one seems to fit better.
My depression is (was), apparently, what they call “situational,” rather than a chemical imbalance. I’ve seen folks really improve with meds, but I do worry about the tendency to over-prescribe. I had anxiety for a while, an acupuncturist put a tiny needle into my earlobe, it was on a little piece of tape, and I would squeeze it whenever I felt anxious, and it would fill my head with pain, which triggered endorphins, I guess, and then eventually the anxiety subsided. A psychiatrist would have prescribed Zoloft, and I’d likely still be on it.
I was watching The Drew Barrymore Show, and Vice President Kamala Harris was a guest. At one point, Drew Barrymore said something to her like, "We need you, our country is so broken." Then she added, "We need Mamala." I was stunned. Here’s Kamala Harris, this former prosecutor, district attorney, and senator, and current Vice President was instantly reduced to the role of “Mammy.” I had to turn off the TV.
Why is it her job to be “Mammy” to the country? Nobody ever says to a white man, “We need Big Daddy.” Nobody says, “We need you to daddy us.” But people are forever expecting Black women to nurture and fix and clean up situations and people. When people say things like that to me, I pretend I've not heard it. That puts them in a position where they have to repeat it, so I hope and pray that before they open their mouths to do so, they'll think about what they're asking because I damn sure am not about to be Mammy.
This expectation that Black women should be the caretakers or nurturers, even in the highest positions, is frustrating. We see it time and again. It’s this persistent stereotype that white men, no matter how raggedy, how tore up, barely being held together by paper clips and Scotch tape, are better equipped to lead than an intelligent, educated, talented Black woman. Always. It’s always the case, from the Oval Office right down to the corner office of the place across the street, and I’m sick of it.
There’s something inherently dystopian about the persistent flex culture in the middle of an economic crisis.
Just because you get lucky in an industry it does not mean or prove that the system works. No. It just means the system worked out for you. You count yourself lucky.
Isn't it time to stop thinking about suffering as a rite of passage for writers/artists/academics? What the hell even is suffering when it’s such a lame and shallow attempt at imposing cruelty on someone? The only reason poverty and/or suffering exist is because of the systems in place. It is finally time to change not only the narrative of how we talk about writing but the systems within which writing operates.
There are of course exceptions and things are changing slowly for the better since traditionally published authors and folks in academia are becoming more transparent and honest about their experiences and pay. But we still have a long way to go as far as financial transparency goes in publishing. So it is not the fault of a misled new writer who is just starting but the systems that led them to believe that writing books can improve their quality of life and move them into a different social class. It is also okay to think of writing as a tool for social mobility. Because it is. Shouldn’t all labor be?
I want to remind my fellow writers and art/humanities professionals that systems are built and rebuilt and rebuilt over and over and over again. They are not stagnant as much as the people who have the most invested in them the way they are want you to believe. Systems CAN and SHOULD change. This includes archaic institutions such as universities and publishing.
What is the value that the author is communicating in their essay? Because to me this whole piece reads like a defense testimony for an abusive spouse or a terrible boss. They and anyone who has written similar work obviously do not value the people who work in the arts and humanities, and the effort is to argue that this is just how things are. Fierce competition—but such a high demand for the arts and humanities! Modern economy and media landscape, oh yes let’s capitulate to an economy struggling to maintain labor rights and a media landscape runaway with Orwellian cries of fake news, truthiness and AI hocus pocus. To toil away in the trenches like your workplace, your career, and your work should be a goddamn war? I can’t roll my eyes hard enough. Someone else is getting rich off what we make. You think book binders are paid well? When the going gets tough, the lowest paid are the essential workers.
Pay people fairly. Don’t pay writers in rain checks! Don’t pay writers with hope! This is our version of being paid in exposure, fuck exposure. Don’t dangle the possibility of getting lucky and getting those doors to success and financial stability to finally open.
To be honest, reading the essay left me feeling dead inside because I know this is exactly what the large majority of successful published authors in traditional publishing believe. It is still pulling the ladder even if you’re looking over the edge and cheering for everyone down there. They believe and proclaim rather proudly that “That’s just the way the system is built.” They remind you that you should be focusing on the future and hope that this “little bit” of exploitation whether in graduate school or writing your first book is just a normal part of the process, an experience we all need to go through to get future opportunities to present themselves to us. Just keep trying, just keep underselling your work, and you might get lucky.
Luck is not equitable. Luck is designed to favor those in positions of privilege and power. Just promise me that you will remember this one thing from this essay. No promise of success justifies exploitation of people. No promise of opportunities, book deals, teaching gigs, is worth the price of human suffering.
To say that being underpaid and to glorify poverty as a “natural part” of being a new writer is to normalize the justification that these things will open future opportunities is DANGEROUS and actively hurtful. And it’s just a massive shit to take on people who don’t choose to dip their toes into poverty. At the end of the day, one of my biggest concerns is the fact that essays such as these cloud the judgment of young authors who are contemplating their own path into the world of writing and trying to figure out how to build their own career as a writer and/or academic/researcher.
I sometimes feel that in an individualistic culture, people get freaked out by the idea of being tied down or responsible for anything.
Gift-giving is a way of saying “I see you.” I see what you need and I see what I have to share. My well-being is tied to yours and yours to mine. It develops a trust that when I am in need, there will be abundance shared with me. The giver and the recipient are honored at the same time. That seems a lot like love to me.
With the current work I’m doing around Narcissus, it started off as a loose idea of how I could contemporize this ancient myth. I didn’t have all the answers right away — I just wanted to explore what it could mean for me, as a Black queer man, to reimagine this classical story. And perhaps a better word than “reimagine” is “situate” myself in it. I needed to see a Narcissus, someone engaged in falling in love with themselves, who looked like me. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t find one, so I made one.
Beauty is power, and that’s true in so many ways. When queer Black men assert their beauty, they’re asserting their power, too, but it’s complicated because there’s such a narrow standard that’s historically been accepted. The Narcissus myth, for me, becomes a tool to explore that — to question why certain bodies, certain faces, and certain skin tones, have been excluded from that narrative of beauty. It gives me an entrypoint into a much broader conversation about who gets to occupy that space of desirability and how we, as Black queer men, navigate it.
If radical honesty is a commitment to not hiding, omitting, or lying about our actions, feelings, and thoughts, then radical receptivity is a commitment to taking accountability for your response to someone else’s truth. Radical receptivity requires us to get curious about why it hurts when someone is radically honest with us.
For me, being radically honest means that I’m going to push through all of the fear and insecurity and trauma to say the scary thing because if I don’t say it, I’m disavowing myself.
Being radically honest requires A LOT of work. Before I can speak my truth, I have to do the work of regulating myself; I have to compassionately unpack all of the negative stories I internalized about myself and my self-worth that are coming up each time I think about speaking my truth; and then I have to take that terrifying step and make myself utterly vulnerable in the face of the other.
To say that “people will always perceive you through the lens of their own experiences, perceptions, and emotional capacity” is lacking in nuance. To act as if our responses happen in a vacuum of past trauma or lack of emotional capacity is not only pathologizing, but it ignores our interdependence. This way of thinking contributes to the ways in which folks on the radical left have weaponized the language of needs and boundaries to justify being unaccountable. They will say “This is just my boundary. You don’t have to like it. I’m not responsible for how my boundary makes you feel” end of story. In this way, boundaries can be used to minimize your responsibility to those you’ve chosen to be in connection with.
Our attachment styles play an integral role in whether we tend towards soft or rigid boundaries. For folks who have an anxious attachment style (which often manifests as a fear of being alone or abandoned), boundaries tend to be soft. The palm is always open. A closed palm is seen as a threat to connection. For folks who have an avoidant attachment style (which often takes the form of “I don’t need you, I don’t need anyone”), it’s the opposite. Boundaries are rigid and the palm is usually closed.