round-up: 1/18
reading/listening recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Happy Thursday!
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.
And something to read:
What I’m reading:
What I’m listening to:
Quotations:
I don't think there's a single person who's taught in the classroom who isn't haunted by something. Because it's an impossible job. Completely impossible.
So much of my development over the last decade, both in my final few years in the classroom and since, has been about reframing "misbehavior"— as a form of protest, or as a trauma response. A kid who's coming in and has their head down or doesn't have their homework is going through something incredibly difficult in their lives. […] So often what's needed is support. It's hard to do in a world of limited resources. But when you are able to do it, it's unbelievable how often it works.
William Bennett, in calling recently for the elimination of the Arts agencies, charged that they were corrupt for supporting artists whose work undermines “mainstream American values.” Well, art does not exist only to entertain — but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for the truth. To deny artists, or any of us, for that matter, free expression and free thought — or worse, to force us to conform to some rigid notion of “mainstream American values” — is to weaken the very foundation of our democracy.
Ironically, contempt for the artist as citizen is often expressed by those most eager to exploit the celebrity of the entertainer. Both journalists and politicians feed off the celebrity status of the successful artist. We can attract a crowd and raise astounding amounts of money for the politicians — and make good copy for the journalists. Which is precisely why we are courted — and resented — by both. I recall various leading newspapers and magazines trying to entice Hollywood celebrities to join their tables at the White House Correspondents dinner, only to trash them afterwards. You can just hear them thinking — you make money, you’re famous — you have to have political opinions too?
But we, as people, are more than what we do — as performers, professors or plumbers — we also are, we also should be — participants in the larger life of society.
Well, most artists turn up on the humanist, compassionate side of public debate, because this is consistent with the work we do. The basic task of the artist is to explore the human condition. In order to do what we do well, the writer, the director, the actor has to inhabit other people’s psyches, understand other people’s problems. We have to walk in other people’s shoes and live in other people’s skins. This does tend to make us more sympathetic to politics that are more tolerant. In our work, in our preparation, and in our research, we are continuously trying to educate ourselves. And with learning comes compassion. Education is the enemy of bigotry and hate. It’s hard to hate someone you truly understand.
Art is the signature of a generation; artists have a way of defining the times. […] Art can illuminate, enlighten, inspire. Art finds a way to be constructive. It becomes heat in cold places; it becomes light in dark places.
Our role as artist is more controversial now because there are those, claiming the absolute authority of religion, who detest much of our work as much as they detest most of our politics. Instead of rationally debating subjects like abortion or gay rights, they condemn as immoral those who favor choice and tolerance. They disown their own dark side and magnify everyone else’s until, at the extreme, doctors are murdered in the name of protecting life. I wonder, who is this God they invoke, who is so petty and mean? Is God really against gun control and food stamps for poor children?
I deeply resent the notion that one politician or political party owns the franchise on family values, personal responsibility, traditional values and religion.
I’m also very proud to be a liberal. Why is that so terrible these days? The liberals were liberators — they fought slavery, fought for women to have the right to vote, fought against Hitler, Stalin, fought to end segregation, fought to end apartheid. Thanks to liberals we have Social Security, public education, consumer and environmental protection, Medicare and Medicaid, the minimum wage law, unemployment compensation. Liberals put an end to child labor and they even gave us the 5 day work week! What’s to be ashamed of? Such a record should be worn as a badge of honor!
Art was a way out for me.
Artists must continue to speak out. I will be one of them.
Language is always alive.
I have a thousand valleys inside me.
Descent upon descent.
-Sun Yung Shin
All the shipwrecks sailing within us. I must disembark at every coast inside me. The docks grow open as mouths.
-Sun Yung Shin
I feel myself from a young age to be all bear, no god.
-Sun Yung Shin
The most stirring beauty is the most evanescent.
-Susan Sontag
Beauty still reigns, irrepressible.
-Susan Sontag
If women are worshipped because they are beautiful, they are condescended to for their preoccupation with making or keeping themselves beautiful.
-Susan Sontag
Let’s start with something controversial: Capitalism is not an economic system. It is a philosophical and ideological force that shapes our lives, environment, and perception of humanity.
It’s a behemoth that thrives on relentless growth, often at a devastating cost. Under its reign, we witness the widening chasm of inequality, where the affluent soar on the wings of wealth while the less fortunate are left to the whims of an unforgiving market.
Capitalism shapes far more than just our economic system — it moulds our culture, worldviews, and even our personal values. After centuries of capitalist ideology spreading globally, most of us struggle to imagine alternatives that look nothing like our capitalist status quo.
But ever-worsening wealth gaps, the climate crisis and other existential threats rooted in capitalism increasingly demand radical societal shifts.
I’ve brought nothing with me to 2024 except for my love and my hope and my joy and my discernment and my righteous anger.
Acts of care are what I believe in these days. I don’t want to admit it, and I know it’s not conducive to a particularly optimistic politics, but lately all the hope I can summon lives in the smallest, but most essential gestures of care: feeding each other, working within community to supply basic necessities like tampons/pads and diapers and whatever else, filling up fridges, finding ways to fill all of the seemingly endless gaps in every structure that is supposed to “care” for us and fails, keeps failing.
It might sound fatalistic, and I try not to be, truly, but the only manageable form of “hope” I can possibly generate or believe in right now lives in these small gestures of care, of attention to what is lacking and what we can do to make the world a little less unbearable for each other.
It is a lot to ask of our friends:
To be the warm room. To be the structural relief. To be pillars. To be the glue of our lives, when we are not welcome in our own countries or homes, when we are not, in some way, or multiple ways, not generally perceived as fully human. It is a lot to ask. To agree to care for each other in not always necessarily easy or painless ways. There are boundaries, too, that always sprout alongside devotion, that must rein in its flood, keep the water slightly contained.
I am thinking about queer friendship, about the shared trauma and the way it can become addictive, tracing each others’ wounds, over and over, or, sometimes, denying them altogether. I am thinking about history and its everywhereness, especially in friendships. Our histories and the planet’s. It is a lot to ask of anyone. Rethinking intimacy means that friendship is a collaboration in the way that we typically position monogamous romances as. I am thinking, too, of how deep and life-sustaining and ever-fruiting these friendships can be, and often are. How what keeps me afloat is the knowledge that we matter to each other, somehow, even if we’re needing space or solitude or whatever. That there is a thread and we are not letting go.
When I teach Feminist Studies, we spend 15 weeks with writers who mostly disagree with each other, other than on the fact that sex and gender are positionalities that deserve attention. We go through an overview of the “waves”: the first wave feminism was about Voting Rights for women, and this was parallel to the fight against slavery (some suffragettes were also abolitionists; many were not). Second wave feminism covers a lot of disparate views from roughly the 1960s-1980s, and involved attention to women and work (middle-class white women wanted access to the white-collar workforce, women of color were like, ‘hey we’ve been working in your homes, we have different demands when it comes to work!’). The second wave also coincided with the Black Power, anti-Vietnam War, and gay liberation movements; some feminists overlapped in these circles, many did not. It is in this period, beginning roughly in the late 1970s, when the Sex Wars began—this is the name given to the debates that split feminists on questions of pornography, kink, sex work, and other sexual practices. Third wave feminism also contained many different facets: on one end there was the (largely, though not exclusively white) riot grrrrl movement of radical punks fighting rape culture through zines and sex positivity, as well as more radical ideas surrounding transformative justice emerging from women of color organizing in anti-racist spaces; on the other end there was the beginning seeds of Girl Boss Feminism, and generally attention to “choice” and “empowerment” (e.g. Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, Girls Gone Wild, etc.).
Fourth wave is often described as “third wave, but on the internet,” and also with more attention to intersectionality. We are, arguably, in a fifth wave, which is an extension of the fourth wave, but in a post-Trump, post-#MeToo, post-George Floyd, pandemic world. (Importantly: I always begin my feminist waves lesson by naming that thinking and culture-building around sex and gender existed pre-colonization in more expansive ways, and that the waves are a decidedly Western, academic snapshot of gender and sexual liberation.)
Because so many of us have been traumatized by both the nuclear family and our expulsion from it (not to mention other stuff that may not touch me personally in the same way, like white supremacy), we often come into our queerness with bad boundaries; with issues around trust, intimacy, and regulation; without the tools or resources we need to be good to each other and ourselves. Combine it all together and things tend to get dramatic. That feeling that the world is ending when your girlfriend dumps you, or your friend refuses to respect your gender identity, or a lover has made you feel disposable, or someone you trusted implicitly suddenly betrays you…when that happens against this backdrop of literal world-ending—from climate change to genocide—I think that’s a fascinating place to explore, because that is where I live.
This I now know for certain: I do all of growing during the times in my life when I am offering compassion to the parts of myself that have not yet grown.
Who can afford to dedicate the time to writing books for such low returns? Those who have a good income from other sources or wealthy partners or parents to support them. Those in good health and with few or no caring responsibilities, who can work full time, as well as write books. Personally, I think that will only ever result in whole perspectives being absent from publishing.
Getting a book commissioned is getting harder and advances are getting lower. Unless you’re a household name of course. And that’s not accounting for how impenetrable the industry can be. While we are so lucky now to have blogs and podcasts where authors and agents share their advice and insights for free, it can still be very hard to get a foot in the door.
I don’t regret the choices I’ve made in my life, but I do know I chose a road of loneliness and instability to a certain degree. To write about the things I do isolates you from your loved ones in amorphous, intangible—and yet painful—ways.
I answered his questions about guilt and grief as best I could, but it was clear that really, what he needed was to show his suffering to the other people in the room, to reach out for something or someone. Like anyone who cannot stand themselves, he keenly wanted to find relief and a route to seeing himself as something other than monstrous – to escaping the friction of constant regret, discomfort, and shame – but didn’t seem to feel deserving of it. I remember looking at this small, pained man, himself so far from youth, and thinking how complex we are as beings. What other animal deliberately inflicts retributive pain on itself even as it longs for succour?
And yet, the story hasn’t always been portrayed as a lesbian narrative. In Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film, Celie’s relationship with Shug is hinted at more than clearly shown. The scene where they briefly kiss cuts away from the two women, suggesting a sexual encounter but still leaving room for ambiguity. Spielberg has acknowledged these criticisms, telling EW in 2011, “I basically took something that was extremely erotic and very intentional, and I reduced it to a simple kiss.” At the time, there was a lot of pushback to including any hint of queerness in the film, even though Shug and Celie’s sexual encounters are described in explicit detail in the novel.
The words do so many different things for people. If your writing is for comfort, let it comfort you. If your writing is for process, let it be for process. If your writing is to change your life or even the world, let that change roll. If your words are a war cry, for the love of God, please howl.
I know what the words do for me: for an hour or two, when I write, it’s a place I can go to feel safe. It has always worked that way, ever since I was a child. The safety of a sentence. The sensation when I push and play with the words is the purest I will ever feel. The calm space of my mind. I curl up in it. I love when sentences nudge up against each other, when I notice a word out of place and then put it in its correct spot. I can nearly hear a click when I slot it into place. I love making a sentence more powerful, more dramatic or moving or sad, and I love when I make a sentence quiet enough that I can almost hear the sound of my own breath. More than anything, I love when a sentence makes me laugh.
I can only speak of my particular intimacy and hope to connect with you. That’s what writing is: our particular intimacies.
Choose your project. Choose your sentences. Choose your ideas. Choose your ending. It’s your trip and no one else’s.
To desire effort from a man, we are taught, is to transgress in several ways. (This is true even if you've never had or wanted a romantic relationship with a man.) First, it means acknowledging that there are things you want beyond what he's already provided—a blow to his self-concept. This is called “expecting him to read your mind,” and we're often scolded for it; better, we learn, to pretend that whatever he's willing to give us is what we were after anyway.
Second, and greater, it means acknowledging that there are things you want. For a woman who has learned to make herself physically and emotionally small, to live literally and figuratively on scraps, admitting that you have an appetite is a source of cavernous fear. Women are often on a diet of the body, but we are always on a diet of the heart.
The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what's on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.
“In the past couple of years, the 'attention-seeking' label has become an all-purpose way to gaslight feminists, silence those who demand restitution for a specific wrong, and shame women for the way they present their bodies and selves in public,” writes Rebecca Onion in Slate. But underlying the attention-seeker's supposed sin is the eminently reasonable craving to be seen, considered, and taken seriously. “The desire to be known—to be paid mind—is profoundly human,” Onion writes. It becomes “whorish” (itself a word designed to shame the concupiscent woman) only in a context where any hunger, no matter how mundane, is considered outrageous.
I didn't have any particular off-the-rack eating disorder, nothing severe enough to be clinical; I just threw up a lot, and skipped some meals, and frequently avoided eating in public, and mainlined junk food in private, and had all kinds of crypto-diet food weirdnesses that I filed under “picky eating.” I simply didn't like avocados, or fish, or condiments, or spicy food, or any dish with more than three components.
Attentiveness, consideration, compliments, small and large kindnesses, feeling truly loved, having someone put you first while you put them first because you're in cahoots to make each other's lives easier and better: most people do like that, when it's thoughtful and sincere. It's here, more than in the big gestures, that romance lives: in being actively caring and thoughtful, in a way that is reciprocal but not transactional.
What would it take to feel safe being voracious? What would it take to realize that your desires are not monstrous, but human?
Tweets:
That’s all!
As always, thanks for being here. Thanks to those of you who like reading this enough to pay me $5/month or more. And, if anyone ever wants to buy me a coffee, you can do that here.
