round up: 1/13
on beauty, where to submit, reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Saturday!
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.
Once again:
Housekeeping:
Broken Pencil reviewed On Heaven & Holiness—a zine I made a while back. Here’s what Scott Bryson wrote:
This meditative dispatch on the intersection of longing and holiness carves a palindromic path from church, to heaven, to bodies, to desire, back to bodies, to holiness and back to church again. The suggestion is inescapable: these concepts are thoroughly entwined, at least for writer Despy Boutris.
The handwritten train-of-thought text and Picasso-esque sketches of faces that meander across this zine’s pages culminate in a calming read. It’s easy to see yourself existing at the author’s pace, with the rapture of devotion standing side-by-side with overwhelming human wants. “Even now,” Boutris writes, “it’s hard for me to tell the difference between desire and panic—all shaking hands, all machinegunning heart.”
On Heaven + Holiness ultimately defines itself as a love letter from Boutris to “[redacted]” that takes an admirable (i.e. won’t make you cringe) stab at expressing one person’s reasons for loving, and the path that led them there. You’ll get through this in two minutes, but it’s clear that some serious self-analysis went into its careful construction.
Also:
I went and saw Cathy Opie’s newest show on Thursday. I did not cry but I almost fainted. Here are some photographs from it:
And some highlights from her from recent interviews:
The photograph with “pervert” cut into my chest, when I participated in Los Angeles’s queer BDSM community, is a little too extreme for me now. It was important for me to make it, but there’s some work that you don’t necessarily want to live with every single day.
Beauty is often thought of in relation to fashion and femininity. Its construct in pop culture is something that I’ve always tried to work with in different ways in relation to my work as a photographer. Beauty is complicated; it’s an individual response to how we live our lives – but it can also encompass kindness and compassion.
I’m a self-identified butch dyke, I’m a big woman, and even though I might struggle with my body, I still find it really beautiful in terms of what it can do.
I find an enormous amount of beauty in being political and intellectual.
For me, beauty is also about being held.
Where I’m submitting this week:
Ploughshares
Menagerie Magazine
EPOCH Magazine
Colorado Review
PRISM International
New Orleans Review
Cult Magazine
Broken Antler Magazine
The Drift Mag
Archetype Mag
Alternative Milk Magazine
Prairie Fire
They all pay!
What I’m reading:
A million newsletters, mostly—they’re all linked below.
Quotations:
What is the movement between wholeness and fragmentation? Is it polarity, a spectrum, participatory? What created the fragment? What is in between the moments? What is missing? Sometimes what is missing is more important than what is included. Fragmentation allows us to understand what we cannot see. How do the fragments contribute to a whole that is different than any separate piece?
I don’t really think we’ll see our own utopias but we should still work towards them. I am so much more interested in how we carve out joy for ourselves and if we are even thinking about what joy can mean when it seems almost morally bankrupt to feel any, ever.
There’s a poem by Mary Oliver with a line I think about all the time: Joy is not to be made a crumb. When you feel it, just give in. Don’t hesitate. There’s a lot that can never be redeemed, but joy is always worth feeling.
Part of the torment of infatuation is that it’s both all-consuming and totally frivolous.
I’d always choose heartbreak over boredom.
The internet has a way of literalizing obsession, beaming your crush into your private space, during your private moments, producing the vertigo of potential contact. It also realizes the fear of being found out: the [crush] knows you’ve watched their stories; all it takes is one slip of the finger to indicate you’ve been scrolling too deep.
The internet, while it can cocoon you in a fixation, can also help formalize distance. It legitimizes deep attention to others at a considerate remove, and allows for conversation at staggered timescales: you leave an impression of yourself, in text or image or audio, for anyone else to pick up at their leisure.
The contemporary meaning of crush—infatuation—has been sanitized. Crush is rendered cute, brief, and pathologically girlish instead of passionate, enraged, and at the very core of what, in the midst of vulnerability, keeps us going day after day.
Crushing, its insistent form toward the unrequited, does not necessarily permit a long-lasting, stable relation. Crushes are transient, unpredictable, often unnamed and unacknowledged, provisional, and random. To say “I have a crush” is to feel forced upon, a reminder of dispossession, yes, but also a small glimpse of possibility, that alchemical feeling of vitality so foolishly powerful that I live for it.
Wanting is sometimes as close to ecstasy as having.
I’m noticing the absence of grief in my own life and community and how much that’s tied to whiteness and class.
I don’t actually think familial love has to be unconditional when it is wrapped in various forms of abuse. If a void continues to act as a void even as you seek it’s shape, your compassion for seeking the shape of a void does not render it into a more approachable form. All that happens is you’ve embraced the void as it swallows you whole. I don’t need that. I would rather have the sun and stars, you know? Love that is not so fraught. A way of being recognized that does not ask that I change my form.
Secrets never kept me safe from abuse or neglect, so they don’t deserve my allegiance.
A poet’s life is rarely one that you would wish upon your children.
I have never really thought of myself as a “creative person”—writing is my only talent, and writing has always felt more clarifying than creative to me.
-Maggie Nelson
Love, to me, is a continual commitment, an event, and an offering.
In Highsmith’s pulp lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, the way Carol and Therese fall in love is painfully casual. It’s not graceful or fortuitous. It just happens the way life happens, for no reason at all. They spend time together because of senseless, mundane events. One woman sends the other a Christmas card for no particular reason, the other happens to respond. They drive to Utah because it’s literally just something to do. I love how haphazard the narrative is, the way it seems as though they can’t ever remember why they’re doing what they are. Nothing fits. They can’t help the way they gravitate toward one another; it happens as a simple consequence of going about their lives. In Carol and Therese’s romance, nothing seems new even though they both know everything will now have to change. And as strange as it is, their love becomes the reason anything makes sense anymore. It becomes the ground.
-Trisha Low
Isn’t love terrifying? And time. And home. And caring for anything at all. It’s all worth it, though. Because if not, then what would be? Who?
I have found a funny sort of mimesis in the ouroboros, in the serpent — that continuous hunger. For me, the body of the snake is a traumatized body. It is the uncontrollable, unstoppable compulsion to digest one’s own past, the need to consume our own bodies. That exhaustive circling, that thoughtless shape of memory. That’s how it works, isn’t it? That’s the trauma, the thing we can’t talk about or write about, that wounded trauma space. It’s generated through a particularly circular mode of remembering and re-structuring of memory itself. The life lived after trauma ceases to be linear — spanning simply from birth to death — and instead becomes ouroboric.
What is a ghost but a body that cannot help but replay its own suffering?
It is so seductive, tantalizing. The eroticism of forgetting.
I keep running from the bogeymen on my shelf
who did bad things and wrote great poems. I try not to feel
them become erect with the word great.I close my eyes and thumb past the award seals
that silence women I love. What a lie to be alive!
To come so close to greatness, so close it knows
your name, and survive.
-Amanda Johnston, “Bogeymen”
Years are constructs put together to artificially measure the passage of time and our inevitable tumble toward death.
-Lyz
Making it into a new year is really just a sign that we have persisted despite the horrors. So good for us. We deserve a little treat to celebrate our survival. To mark the love and happiness that we cling to despite the structural and political forces that try to rob us of our agency, healthcare, and rights.
-Lyz
Unfortunately, since it’s America, a country founded by humorless Puritans who never met a spice they didn’t want to burn at the stake, we choose not to celebrate. Instead, every New Year, Americans like to punish themselves by taking a look in the mirror and declaring that they hate themselves and will now subject themselves to the ritual torture that we have rebranded as diet culture.
-Lyz
Resolving to move your body and maybe eat two more vegetables a day are not inherently bad things. But so often these fitness resolutions become a way to hurt our bodies and make ourselves miserable in the name of “self-improvement.” The economy of self-improvement has no vested interest in our happiness. In fact, it thrives on our unhappiness. If it ever made us happy, it couldn’t continue to take our money for a shake, pill, shot, or food supplement that it has promised will fix us this time. It will be better this time! THEY PROMISE.
-Lyz
There is no amount of Vitamin D and running and making myself a little treat and any other chemical therapy that’s going to help me forget that there is war and genocide and that people I love are really sick and it’s frightening. And I’m scared and there is no bootstrapping my way out of that.
-Lyz
Reading both fiction and non-fiction is a constant source of research as I try to better understand the world around me. Everything I read and listen to potentially offers me ideas or information that I fold into my writing.
Becoming a better writer isn’t just about writing a lot; it is also about learning more about the world around you and being curious about history and context and new discoveries. And this is true whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction. Frankenstein doesn’t get written if Mary Shelley doesn’t listen to her husband and friend discuss the possibilities of galvanism. Stephen King’s 11/22/63 doesn’t get written if he doesn’t spend months traveling to Dallas, Texas to learn about the Kennedy assassination in person. Philippa Greggory doesn’t get her many historical novels turned into acclaimed television shows and movies without extensive historical research that started with her PhD from Sussex.
What’s interesting to me is the urgency I felt, the hunger for experience and novelty. It was as if I’d been saving up various desires for a long time — during the pandemic, before the pandemic — and they all exploded out at once. A desire volcano, or something like it. I said yes, all year, to everything.
When was the last time you were really honest with yourself about what you desired?
Like living, writing is in so many ways about desire. What is it you really want? What is the story you want to tell?
When I was getting my MFA, one of my professors always said that your characters need to be driven by secret fears and desires that are revealed in moments of stress.
What would you write if you weren’t afraid?
The job is not to know; it’s to become.
To be able to see change is to be able to make change.
It seems to me that girl culture isn’t just about rejecting adulthood or even womanhood, but about a broader movement toward redefining what that all might mean and look like, and the distinction feels important. After all, girls don’t want to make mom/wife dinner— they just want to slap some yummy shit that their meat-and-potatoes husband wouldn’t like on a plate. That is not a revolution in and of itself, obviously, but it does say something about the degree women are willing to go in shaping their lives around the kind of womanhood they’ve also been sold.
Tweets:
I have a long list of nemeses and these journals are on it.
That’s all for today!
