round-up: 12/02
reading/viewing recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading and watching
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.
Something to read:
Housekeeping:
Last week, I shared a little gift guide for the holidays. You can view it here.
What I read this week:
What I watched this week:
To read:
Quotations:
I write about beauty as an act of devotion, an art form, and a means of control. I ask painful questions about beautiful things and tender questions about ugly experiences.
I am not ‘conned’ by the industry of beauty. I am entertained by it, preoccupied by its promises, and its lies are bedtime stories to me. I don’t need to believe in them to love them; they are the sheep I count at night. I don’t mind never reaching a final destination, a perfect beauty, as long as I’m having fun and making someone feel better on the ride. We can’t get off it. There is no opt-out or unsubscribe to the consequences of appearance in our daily lives.
People enthusiastically desired space to build greater visions of sluttiness than that afforded by existing social networks.
-Lyn Corelle & jimmy cooper
While [apps like Tidner, Grindr, and Lex] have their uses, it’s clear that they reinforce social divisions along lines of race and class more than in-person cruising does, and generally leave us all anxious and frustrated much more often than they satisfy our needs and desires.
-Lyn Corelle & jimmy cooper
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
-David Foster Wallace
Back in July, I wrote about how fatphobia is the literary world’s final frontier and how anti-fat sentiment is rampant in contemporary American fiction across modes, from commercial bestsellers to high literary novels that win major prizes. I also broke down that this matters because anti-fat bias in America is only getting worse, body size fluctuates over the course of a life, fatness is racialized, gendered, queered, and classed and—I forgot to say last time—42% of Americans are fat people. 42% !!!!! So if you are writing about America you are writing about fatness.
I’m honestly wracking my brain to think of a time when naming a character’s specific weight as a number in pounds would be the best choice on either a craft/characterization level or a human level. The only thing I can come up with is a book in which this way of thinking is organic to the character’s internal experience and where the book takes the experience of eating disorder, weight obsession, anti-fat bias or weight stigma as its main or one of a few main plot lines. So I guess my short answer would be that “there is always a better alternative” to naming an exact weight number except when doing so is meant to highlight the character’s obsession with naming exact weight numbers in a novel that develops/interrogates that obsession.
He wore thigh-length black cutoffs and a loose short-sleeved plaid. The top three buttons were undone, revealing his nest of curly chest-hair. He was so pretty, I too was becoming undone.
-Clark Ruhff
Our individual desires, not yet spilled out into the shrine before us, were bursting from each of us. I was breathless, waiting for one of us to unplug the dam.
Clark Ruhff
I don’t necessarily want to fuck. I want to feel the warmth.
-Scott Branson
Like a good Catholic I’ve been trying my best to atone.
-Lyn Corelle
Public environments where women can easily, within 10 or 20 minutes, meet and fuck other women do not and have never existed.
-Kathy Welsley[?], “Cruising for Dykes”
Cruising is not a sex act, but a social situation in which different kinds of sex acts can occur.
-Kathy Welsley[?], “Cruising for Dykes”
I’m as eager for sex forests and gas station gloryholes as the next dyke, but until the real sexual revolution, one which is also a social and political revolution, it’s difficult to imagine their actuality.
-Kathy Welsley[?], “Cruising for Dykes”
Dyke cruising is personally exciting precisely because of its mass and anonymous character: it’s not something I do with friends, but with complete strangers, who have lives that intersect with my own only for the brief period it takes to relieve our fleeting desires. And it turns out that in wanting to fuck nobody in particular, just anyone, I really just want communism, for lack of a better word. A world where anyone can find satisfaction, where one well-ordered life intersects with another only insofar as those lives find their ends in each other.
-Kathy Welsley[?], “Cruising for Dykes”
Don’t be greedy, she says with a smirk, like she wants more than anything for me to be greedy.
-Robin Hustle, “The Ground is Wet and So Am I”
I like you just out of reach, and I will summon you always by naming that distance, taut with possibility—I tug you on the other side of it. Besides, close would never be close enough. I love you to the bone.
-Linden, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass”
I yearn for you beyond time.
-Linden, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass”
Queer sex isn’t liberatory just because it’s queer. We need to undertake a deeper interrogation of our sex lives and desires. To quote feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan, “It would be disingenuous to make nothing of the convergence, however unintentional, between sex positivity and liberalism in their shared reluctance to interrogate the formation of our desires.”
-coolsquid, “No Orgasms Allowed”
I am asking that we do not confuse the necessities of negotiation under oppression with the signs of emancipation.
-Amia Srinivasan
Is the same thing happening with us and our sex? Are we taking the pleasure we feel from sex and proclaiming it revolutionary just because it feels transcendent?
-coolsquid, “No Orgasms Allowed”
When did we buy into the idea that we know what we want, whether in sex or elsewhere? […] Our desires emerge in interaction; we don’t always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn’t know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want only in the doing. This […] must be folded into the ethics of sex rather than swept aside as an inconvenience.
-Katherine Angel
I’m not gonna sit here and deny that queer sex doesn’t feel better than straight sex. Obviously smashing your body against somebody else who has done the slightest bit of interrogation over how their gender/sex forces them to perform resembles something closer to pleasure than the mere replication of socialized traumas.
-coolsquid, “No Orgasms Allowed”
I guess what I want is something that doesn’t emulate, in any way, the shape of sex as we’ve learned it so far. I’m morally opposed to a sex that follows the same common structural patterns of pleasure that we can find in any average norm’s bedroom. What if it looked like two slugs intertwined in their own slime, or an ant slave captive to cordyceps? Or running your hands through tall grass, or laughing with your friends when you shoud really be asleep? Sobbing naked in a canyon after diving into the only small, freezing puddle left? Just kissing for hours without coming up for breath? […] Why is sharing an orgasm with another person given such priority and importance when it’s something I can do all by myself given little more than a few spare minutes?
-coolsquid, “No Orgasms Allowed”
Listen, maybe it’s all unacceptable, but don’t let that stop you; desiring things that are bad for you is kinda hot, actually.
-coolsquid, “No Orgasms Allowed”
Sex is so, so tricky to talk about. On the one hand, it’s intensely personal, private, and euphoric; on the other, it carries the weight of a very public politics that has tattooed itself into our skin and doesn’t become less real as we undress. Sex is never pure function, an uncorrupted purely mechanical act. Who would want it to be?
-coolsquid, “No Orgasms Allowed”
I have become expert at forgetting.
-Anne Germanacos
I write to him saying: I am weak with love for you.
-Anne Germanacos
My mother in a nightgown—white with small blue flowers. Her legs are white, with small blue flowers.
-Anne Germanacos
These new syllables require a new mouth. I’ve made mine more agile for him, more worldly. And still don’t know how to tell him I love you in enough languages.
-Anne Germanacos
What is a mother but a house? This one has been so solid, even in illness and bad weather, dependable.
-Anne Germanacos
I love the idea of God, but don’t believe in it. Even today.
-Anne Germanacos
Hands: I sit on them to quiet their flight.
-Anne Germanacos
Here in the erotic: your glance, my tongue.
-Anne Germanacos
Most things are made on the edge of despair.
-Anne Germanacos
Endings are also beginnings, of course.
-Anne Germanacos
All love stories. Not sure I can write any other kind.
-Anne Germanacos
I write myself a new body.
-Anne Germanacos
The truest grief may come at the edge of elation.
-Anne Germanacos
I root for the underdogs but especially the sad ones. The ones who didn’t manage to spiritually bypass their way out of despair.
What is sick, the context or the person? In Palestine, we see many people whose symptoms—unusual emotional reaction or behaviors—are a normal reaction to a pathogenic context. There are many people in Palestine who are suffering. But Western-developed tools for measuring depression, such as the Beck inventory, do not tend to distinguish between justified misery and clinical depression.
We describe our psychological experience in terms that we hope to be understood in the West, so we talk a lot about PTSD, but I see patients with PTSD after a car accident. Not after imprisonment, not after bombardment or being labeled as a person against the law and having a relationship with prison like a revolving door. The effect is more profound. It changes the personality, it changes the belief system, and it doesn’t look like PTSD.
I have made my own measures of what constitutes good mental health in Palestine: To be able to have critical thinking and to maintain your capacity to empathize. It’s important to develop your own mental health standards. It’s not just the definition of the World Health Organization.
- Dr. Samah Jabr
I know
she will not be in her bedroom, a room
I realize I have hardly enteredthese last few years, the door so rarely
unlocked. But walking by with a basketof laundry for my son, I am pulled
by a thread, I think, of her perfumeadrift in the hall, her door ajar, a window
that must be cracked to the cross breeze.
-Matt W. Miller, “Far Away”
When I catch myself in the floor length
mirror, I’m not as small as I imagined I’d be.
No, I don’t look different at all. I’ve lostnow, her scent, that curl of flower that must
have slipped past me like a wraith,like a breath of days spun through years,
like a rain that hushes the silence.
-Matt W. Miller, “Far Away”
I’ve come to the realization that this grief will never go away. It will constantly change and shift, but it will always be there—determined, fresh, raw, waiting for me.
Many people think the process of having and living with a mental disorder is chronological: you get an assessment, then a diagnosis, then some treatment and finally you’re in recovery. If only it was this easy. It is messy and complex, and even though I am technically “in recovery,” I still receive treatment (if you ignore the long waiting lists, the arbitrary thresholds I am constantly expected to meet to prove I need the help I have gotten in the past and constantly fighting for access to my medication). With changes in symptoms as I’ve gotten older, I still find myself seeking new diagnoses and validating old ones, having to sit through the same assessments and answer the same routine questions. It’s not chronological, it’s not like a line, it’s more like a circle—never-ending.
When I have to talk about my feelings, but don’t yet know what they are—which is often the case if I haven’t written about them first—I feel like a bird of prey hunting something very small from very high up. I speak, which is to say that I circle, with the hope that the person listening has the patience to wait for the final descent, if it’s even worth making; that whatever’s down there is animated by flesh and blood, and not a trick of the sunlight or my own hunger.
War is an incantation. The church of nationalism utters it and basks in salvation; all who accept its grace are able to be cleansed as well. We all understand the concept of self-defense, but war is a blessing that offers to remove the hard grimace from that dirty task, a path to move from defense into offense without passing through the hell of self doubt. War is mankind’s ultimate religion. It is the faith-based belief in our own righteousness in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
Forgetting isn’t just an incidental occurrence, a distraction, to be excised from the final draft of the story of learning. Sometimes, it’s an inherent part of learning itself.
When you realize something (e.g. about yourself), the natural result is that you realize other things (e.g. about others). I’m starting to see the device of the singular epiphany as a weapon in the arsenal of the Status Quo. It directs us to exceptionalist narratives instead of intersectional ones, and keeps us from making the bigger realizations.
When I was getting started as a writer, I remember fantasizing about publication as a magical finish-line that would someday free me from the activity of (always, endlessly) writing and rewriting. How wonderful it would be, to officially finish a text and be free (obliged?) to move on to something else.
But if publication marks the completion of a piece of writing, it also marks its birth—its entry into the world as an object with material reality. The text starts having its own adventures, and dictating your further fate and movements. In a way, that’s the beginning of the real story, not the end. What if there were formal conventions for how to tell that story—other than tacking on a “foreword to the Xth edition” every few years?
For me, it’s really simple. If people you consider political allies are telling you, ‘This is not helping the revolution. This is even slowing the revolution,’ then they’re right. That’s it.
There’s the official desire, and there’s the secret desire. There’s never just one desire.
“Our culture is at the stage of memories. It’s not at the stage of history,” Sciamma told me, in an early conversation. The historical record is so incomplete that it has to be supplemented, even supplanted, by remembered stories. “You still have to tell the story. You can’t quote. Not yet.” She added, “That’s lesbian culture. Sorry.” Gesturing with a cigarette, she emphasized the second syllable in a French-sounding way that made it clear she wasn’t sorry. Then she quoted Sappho’s Fragment 147: “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time.”
“Someone,” she emphasized. “Not ‘this country,’ not ‘poetry,’ not ‘literature.’ Someone.”
When the dissonance between your life—being asked to behave normally, go to work, not express your justified anger at yet another U.S.-backed atrocity—and the rhetoric of those in control of your life (politicians, the media, et al), feels particularly mismatched, as it has these last few months, I think that can exacerbate our feelings of isolation. The normal reasons we all feel isolated—social media, over-work, bad urban planning—are enough. Adding to that the feeling that no matter what we do, we are alone in a struggle against violence, can all drive a person and population to feel powerless, and thus very alone.
Of course, even in times that don’t feel like crisis, we are still in crisis. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, we are in a loneliness epidemic. We spend far less time with friends and loved ones than we did 20 years ago. And that’s directly leading to deaths of depression and general unhealthiness.
If we do not wish to be identified with an actively violent state, we increasingly no longer feel like part of a collective whole. We no longer feel like a country, we no longer feel like a people. This, given the aforementioned deteriorating social conditions, has been happening for decades, but recently, we, I think, have reached an inflection point wherein our collective whole no longer feels good to be a part of in essentially any way.
I understood that there was a lot you couldn't say, and still you managed to thread that needle. That’s what it is: threading a needle. It’s using the truth in a way that is useful to the book, while being aware of not being able to tell the whole thing. I always tell my students… well, I'm teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop right now, which is intense, holy shit. So intense. My students are brilliant. They're in this pure state that I left behind decades ago, this kind of literary purity. They're immersed in the work, the art, without the [influence of the outside] world. And us old war horses who teach them come from the world of professional writing and publishing, and all we think about is how to make our editors happy. [Laughs.] It’s refreshing, like dipping back into my youth, back into the way I looked at books and writing. I’m remembering now the headiness of feeling like it’s all ahead of you and you haven’t been disappointed by bad reviews and bad sales and come down to earth with the reality of being a writer…
There are times when I feel urgently that I have something to say that's autobiographical, and that I don't need to fictionalize it. I want to address it, head on. It's a particular feeling, the sense that this is something I need to say bluntly, just me to the reader, without any intermediary.
Autobiographical writing was never something I wanted to do. It’s not like writing novels, something I want to do very badly. I think of myself as a novelist, but then there’s this — this autobiographical urge.
What I’m trying to write isn’t the literal truth of my relationship with my mother, or my relationship with any of my sisters. What I’m trying to write is the feeling. Feelings that I’ve had, that I give to my character. Or aspects of relationships between mothers and daughters or between sisters, things I’ve experienced, that I use to create fictional characters. I am not writing about myself or my mother or my sister. But I am writing about how it feels inside those relationships, some truth at the core of these relationships that I feel everyone can relate to in some sense.
This storytelling urge, I mean, it's ancient. It's human. It's what we do. We make stories to make sense of things. And I think children need stories, need dark stories like fairy tales, where the darkness is in an imaginary world but it relates to what they're experiencing — and the same impulse was in me when I used my little figures, moving them around and making them interact in ways that somehow soothed that part of my brain that was disturbed and upset and had no agency because I was a kid.
The reason why I write everyday is selfish: it makes me know who I am. It anchors me in myself in a way that nothing else ever can or will.
The worst part of it is that I’ve forgotten your face. Or the idea that each tide was a slender finger pulling at these knots, loose end then left to work on another day.
Tweets:
I made so many gay stickers this year. Anyone want to do an art trade?
That’s all I have for you today—
-Despy Boutris
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I don’t think I would’ve finished this book if I hadn’t run out of other options, but it was okay. For another day: the Bluetsification of books must end. Not everyone is meant to write in hybrid form or vignettes, and that’s okay! (ETA: I want the Holzerfication of everything to end, too.)
This one was fun! And, if you’re into cruising—in theory or in practice—might I recommend this fun shirt?
I loved it. I cackled. Extraordinary cast.
I cried.
I’m still watching so NO SPOILERS but it’s so good & I’m obsessed.