round-up: 1/18
recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
The fires in LA continue. The air quality is awful. I hope you’re taking care of yourself if you live here, too.
We dogsat for our friends this week, and they were a great source of joy amid everything:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Killing Eve series, Luke Jennings1
Exhibit, R. O. Kwon2
Defying Empire: On the Perennially Relevant Political Message of Wicked
My Cherished Friend, My Cursed Rival: On the Perils of Literary Envy
Quotations:
The twelve men pour themselves coffee, contemplate the breeze-ruffled expanse of the lake.
-Luke Jennings
In silence lies safety.
-Luke Jennings
Oxana had never felt the slightest need to be liked, but it gave her profound satisfaction to be desired. To see the look in her conquest’s eyes—that final melting of resistance—which told her the transfer of power was complete.
-Luke Jennings
Messiahs don’t have a long shelf life. They’re too dangerous.
-Luke Jennings
Like lovers, the two men fold into each other. And stepping up from the fire-escape ladder, unknotting the sleeves of her parka from the flue-pipe, Villanelle watches them die. As always, it’s fascinating. There can’t be much brain-function left after a Black Rose round has bloomed inside your cerebellum, clawing its way through your memory, instincts and emotions, but somehow, some spark lingers on. And then, inevitably, dims.
-Luke Jennings
They’re approaching the Nanpu Bridge, with vast office blocks to the right and left of them, their numberless windows pinpricks of gold against the bruised purple of the sky.
-Luke Jennings
Sex, for her, offers only fleeting physical satisfaciton. What she finds much more exciting is to look into another person’s eyes and to know, like a cobra swaying in front of its hypnotised prey, that she is in absolute control. But that game gets boring, too. People capitulate so easily.
-Luke Jennings
Villanelle begins to answer, but feeling the slippery flutter of Lara’s fingers inside her, arches her back and sighs, her body’s pulse becoming one with the engine-note of the Learjet. She pictures the aircraft racing through the night, and the dark Russian forests far below. Taking Lara’s other hand in hers, she sucks the trigger finger into her mouth. It tastes metallic and sulphurous, like death.
-Luke Jennings
Sometimes I have a skeleton of something. For both essays and poems, the conception process is very similar. So there definitely were some essays that started as poems. It’s just about realizing what the best container is for the thought.
Part of my draw to other genres is just—there’s a fascination with language and with the word and what it can do. That’s me as a poet. Just—what is possible? And where are the limits, if there are any? When I approach craft as a whole, and my career, that’s the spirit I’m carrying. When I’m looking at other forms, it’s, how can this thing stretch? What can language do here? I’m trying to think about all those techniques as available no matter what I’m working on.
What are all the systems and steps that were taken to create the psychological turmoil that I am in and have been in? I took this wider lens and presented pieces of my past and my story, but also brought in conversations about the larger systems that are inextricable from my story.
I’m able to take a wider political view. Understanding my identity as a writer, and understanding the role of an ethnographer, was very critical, and it really shaped my writing practice. I was calling this book auto-psychologic ethnography. It’s like an auto-ethnography of my brain, of my mind.
The way that poems form in my head, they are interacting with larger ideas about the human condition and how we organize ourselves and bigger thoughts like that.
I won’t sugarcoat my mental health journey. Because it’s not fair to me. Honestly, I don’t have time to play this game that I’m not disabled. It is what it is. I don’t want to stop talking about it because this is a real thing.
We want to see me as a character, but I am indeed myself, the author, and real people don’t have arcs. To that end, my artist statement that I live by is trying to describe to the reader as best I can—using all the tools I have—how it feels to be in this body during this time in this place. Just get as close as I can to reporting. To do that, you can’t just leave out a big old part or you can’t just diminish it. There isn’t any getting away from it. I never want to feel like I’m preaching a topic, but I do want to feel like I am bearing witness to myself. I think I owe that to myself if nothing else.
I am part of something. I exist in a lineage. That is what I have found. I have found the ineffability of Black womanhood across ages. I hesitate to call it strength, even though it feels like strength, but that word just doesn’t feel right for us anymore.
But it’s a type of power for sure. There is something that I have gotten from reaching back into lineages and seeing how we’ve done it that allows me to be bigger than myself. There’s an elevation that we can get from each other, and that has been a really important lesson for me moving through the world, but also sitting at the typewriter or at the computer. I don’t always write alone.
In the past few years, I’ve had really long chunks where I was like, I don’t feel good. The world doesn’t feel good. I got nothing good to say. I’m not excited about language, and for me, it doesn’t work to write from that. It is a way of trying to first assess what I can make of this feeling, but sometimes the answer is nothing or I don’t want to. If I still feel like I need to exercise some kind of creative release, then I allow myself to, and I also allow that to not be writing. I am not a good visual artist, but I did get into doodling for that reason, because it’s a creative release and ain’t nobody checking for my drawings. There’s no pressure around it, and there’s very little politics around me drawing a plant.
I always talk about my writing process in stages, and the first one is what I call the collecting stage, which is just living. Living, going to museums, watching movies, listening to records, reading liner notes. Just collecting, storing up, and then eventually it arranges itself and comes out as text.
I think a book teaches you what it wants to be. Which is why it’s so important to be a good reader. Because you need to read your own drafts for clues.
Doing a less-than-ideal amount of a good thing is always preferable to doing nothing at all.
I call the dominant approach budget culture, because it’s rooted in the restriction and shame inherent in budgeting behavior. But, just like diet culture, it’s not about the act of budgeting; it’s about the cultural posture that makes budgeting seem like useful and necessary behavior.
I’m trained as a financial educator and work as a service journalist, so I do like to talk about the nuts and bolts of financial systems and products, but I stop short of telling readers what they “should” do, what’s “right” or what’s “best.” Financial media and education equate “financial wellness” with making the most money and “financial literacy” with knowing how to hold onto it. There’s an inherent greed in that approach that doesn’t align with what most people actually want, and the realities of our economy make those goals unreachable for most people. That sets us up for constant tension between what we’re told are the “right” things to do with our money, what’s possible given our socioeconomic realities, and what we need to live the lives we want.
Individualism lays a foundation for our approach to money that relies on discipline and restraint and ignores our inherent understanding of ourselves. It sets you up to look for what you’re doing wrong instead of what’s wrong with the culture around you. It keeps you from asking questions and talking about financial struggles, so you feel isolated and ashamed of them.
Budget culture steps into this environment, defines a “right” set of goals, creates a set of rules, and tells you you can reach those goals if you follow those rules. Just like the promises of fad diets, the latest relationship advice, or the one bad company you can avoid to stop from destroying the planet, there’s an enormous appeal to finding the one right way to do anything. It can briefly quiet the noise of all the uncertainty our messy culture causes.
Restriction is unsustainable personally, and culturally, normalizing this approach causes us to judge others and shame ourselves for not living up to an impossible standard.
Our culture’s focus on individuality and individual responsibility makes it hard to be generous and easy to ignore someone else’s need. Advice for “responsible” money management is focused on hoarding what you can, worrying about finding the next dollar and taking precautions to avoid losing everything you have.
There’s no room for generosity in that mindset, because it convinces you that you inevitably get less when someone else gets more. You can begin to break down that belief by first understanding that nothing is truly yours to begin with. Whatever you own isn’t truly yours; it’s just in your care for now. Money is a tool to shape the life and world around you. When you hold it in your hands, you hold the responsibility to contribute to that world in a life-giving way. When you see money as a communal and transient resource, you don’t have to fear scarcity when you give it away or use it to benefit someone else.
Modern cultish groups feel comforting in part because they help alleviate the anxious mayhem of living in a world that presents almost too many possibilities for who to be.
-Amanda Montell, Cultish
I have no hopes for 2025. Humanity is disappointing. We killed the Earth. Villains triumph and the innocents suffer. I imagine these trends will continue.
I woke up and immediately understood the earth was dying faster on Wednesday. The sky was orange, the sun red like a wound. It was long past sunrise, and the fog was all wrong. Not fog: smog. And the taste of the air; it was dusty, a kind of dust I remembered from being a child across the towers in New York City. Death dust. The kind that immolates things. Total obliteration.
How do you abandon your life? The things that make up your day? You build a life around things, around big things, around small things. The bedframe you were glad you didn’t have to build, the birdbath you were glad you did, the potted plants you are so confused survive every day in your care. What do you take when you have to leave?
I have been the kind of person to prepare for the worst for many years. I have pre-packed go bags with space food in them and filtration straws in them; flashlights at every door and cabinet and next to me in bed. I have books on surviving nuclear holocaust and how to pick locks and how to start fires and have been taught, lovingly, how to survive – not win – a knife fight, how to aim an axe, how to throw sharp things and not miss, how to bind a wound, how to rinse out teargas. These events did not happen all at once like a Michael Bay montage filmed by drones but in a string of singular decisions I made with people I loved over many years. We decided in pieces in all sorts of places: in our apartments, at protests, in the desert after dinner having discussed the fact the world, in fact, was not getting better every day, and that everyone I love in America is vulnerable in escalating ways. Each act of preparation was a prayer in the hopes I would never, ever need to use any of it.
It is also not enough, because you can also only be prepared so much in the theory stage of living. The emotions of life will strike you stupid when time is not your friend. Sometimes this means you don’t bring things you are then haunted by when you first evacuate your home. My friend, who has lost everything, everything but his family, is haunted by this. This is stupid. I’ll just have to move them back later, he thought, leaving his guitars in his living room. You leave things sometimes because it’s like bad luck to bring them: it means the loss will happen.
I have planned for this, I practiced, as I mentioned. But there is trauma in the preparation, in the wait, in the vigilance. In the dead space between Town Halls to hear more about canyon ridges and meteorologist breakdowns and if the water is potable. There is trauma in the attempts to pretend like none of this is happening: I am filing freelance pieces while listening to helicopters and water planes deliver water to fires in the distance. I apologize for delays in responses; in between emails, you see, I am trying to determine how many bags of my entire life I can fit into the back of my car. I am avoiding the “How are You” texts from people I went on dates with eight years ago and trying to see if the road to Vegas is already on fire yet. I am scanning my closet, remembering every place I’ve ever been and the pieces of clothing I brought to remember the experience, and trying to decide which memory will hurt the least to lose.
I am a writer and I would leave so many of my books, almost all of them. I would bring irreplaceable early drafts, my scrapbook, the rings my father gave me and my partner, my wedding dress, my parachute dress. The reality is I would miss everything. I would mourn everything. I am already mourning it. In my imagination, the loss feels like it has already happened. And every minute this week of waiting extends it.
It is my birthday tomorrow. I have planned nothing. The plans I had feel absurd and disrespectful to have. I want nothing to happen. I want to wake up to a blue sky and the sound of birds. I want to be able to unpack the things I love the most. I want everything I have learned to just be practice.
The reality that it’s impossible to be perceived on exactly your own terms is equal parts crushing and freeing. If being seen feels already like enough of an affront, being seen wrong is a dagger to the heart. Something you said or did or who you are being taken in a way you didn’t intend is enough to keep the deepest sleeper up at night. Then again, if you bare your heart too openly, too earnestly, it might let in the wrong people. Or maybe you’re just not meant to have that much of you on show. It’s cold out there with your skin peeled back.
I don’t have a problem with vulnerability, per se. But I find its use as some form of currency disheartening. I am never, ever interested in being pathologised or condoled by a stranger. I find it hard enough to have my edges come into focus for someone I’m close to, I don’t want anyone who has no claim to me feeling entitled to truths about me.
Once, on a second date, a man told me he could never be in a relationship with someone who wasn’t an artist. It wasn’t my kindest moment, but the self-seriousness of the statement made me laugh. I couldn’t quite explain why, but I think I was jarred by the idea that someone could unashamedly think of themselves as an artist in a way that defined them. I couldn’t do that. Art was a part of my life growing up, but it always seemed to be framed as something that didn’t get anyone anywhere, something unviable. In my family you don’t complain that things aren’t better, you just work harder, even if the way the system’s rigged won’t allow that to give you any leverage. Where’s the room for being an artist in all of that? There wasn’t a third date, if you’re wondering.
Walking home from work, I turn my brightness all the way down so no one sees me scouring guardian dot com forward slash recipes. How can I pull off this nonchalant baggy-jeans-with-leather-jacket combo if everyone on the street can see me looking at an Ottolenghi orzo salad? There are definitely those who’d call me a class traitor for eating this much aubergine on a weekday.
There is no balance, right? What we consider to be “balance” is a fiction, in a lot of ways. Because of the ways that time is constructed in terms of a 24-hour day in our society, and an “eight-hour work day.” The type of work that I do is not containable in an eight-hour work day. And then there’s a five-day work week. I am beholden to that structure in some ways, because I have to be in the world. I have a family. I have to have a job that is consistent and steady. But I realize that it is a construct.
I thought, later, about how often trauma and tragedy are framed as discrete events, single shivs cleaving lives into distinguishable befores and afters, but how some lives actually just start out hard and get harder, how tragedy can be more like the snow that gets packed onto a big snowball as you roll it around your front yard — the bigger the snowball gets, the faster and easier it picks up the ambient snow, and the denser it gets at the centre.
I think I’m starting to understand (for real this time) how much effort it takes to live — how many generally happy people did not arrive at stability by luck or coincidence but clawed their way there, slowly and painfully, kicking and screaming in boring, embarrassing pursuit of an incrementally better life.
Last year I made a series of horrible mistakes that I seriously cannot ever make again. I will almost certainly do the same thing this year but hopefully with different mistakes. The idea is that eventually I’ll run out of new mistakes to make and will either be forced to make fewer mistakes or re-run some of the old ones, but this time with the strategic advantage of prior experience.
It’s hard for me to think about many of these mistakes. Every time I’ve read over this list in editing it feels like a spray of lemon juice over a paper cut — a little sting, a little wince. I’m grateful for this; I think the shame is important (there’s that Catholicism again), and it also feels important that I resist the impulse to narrativize my mistakes inside a grand arc of my singular, precious personal development. I learned nothing from most of this stuff, nothing I didn’t already know. Even when I did learn something it was often at the cost of a lot of pain and suffering. When someone tries to sell me on the comfort that there’s some nebulous life lesson to be learned from my failures, I can’t help but find the whole dynamic both unsatisfying and extremely selfish. What a triumph, to have an empire of dollar-wisdom built on the backs of my loved ones! What a relief to all involved!
In the interest of fairness, I want to say that I also did some pretty good things last year. It feels, for better or for worse, much more gauche to make a list of my virtuous deeds, and it’s also significantly more boring. (The self-mythologizer’s curse: rock bottom is much more compelling than the slow trek towards stability. It’s hard to tell a good story about the million bad decisions you managed not to make.)
Sickness, in my experience, is often unbearably boring. Days full of so much nothing that they all blur together, weeks spent in bed, bad TV shows you don’t remember, stretches of strange, stretchy time that feel like months and minutes at once, staring at the ceiling and listening to your upstairs neighbors fuck, quiet betrayals, unanswered texts, meetings missed with little fanfare, closing your eyes and waiting for a real punishment that never seems to arrive. A year defined by things you forgot to do. No conflict, just lowered expectations. I’ve had a decent amount of the extreme stuff, too, but none of it has gotten closer to killing me than the monotony.
I had to kill this longing. If I didn’t, I’d light my life on fire.
-R. O. Kwon
I’d plotted, as a child, to give my life to the Lord. In college, I’d lost this faith. Isolated, grief-wild, I’d picked through ruins He’d left behind. If I could still love this orphan world, deprived of His salvific light, which parts of it might even I, broken as I came, find worth prizing?
-R. O. Kwon
I fell in love. It had to be a secret. She and I, we kept it. Pulled up, her skirt flared open. She had petal skin.
-R. O. Kwon
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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I love it. Does anyone have any book recommendations where the narrator’s a psychopath? They’re so fun. You was the same. Delicious.
DNF. Sorry. I wanted this to be good but it just isn’t.