round-up: 12/09

reading recs, quotations, tweets, & more

Dec 09, 2023

Happy Saturday!

I have been pummelled by work and life this week, so the newsletter is short. I got into two car crashes (one was my fault; one wasn’t), too, and had to pay to get my bumper reattached, so it’s a great time to buy a zine or a T-shirt or become a paid subscriber.

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.

Some things for you:

What I’m reading:

A Complete Guide to Lesbian Christmas Movies
Merciless, Brutally Honest Feedback1
Quitting the Adjunct Hustle
Book of the Other, Truong Tran

Quotations:

I think what people want, especially now, is they want to know that the people that they care about, or think they know, or look up to, or read or watch on television, feel the same way they do. And they want to know, are these people on the right side of history? And some of that comes from a good place, and some of it doesn’t. It’s challenging, because I don’t think you have to speak up about everything, even now, and I also think people assume that if someone has not said something on social media, they haven’t said anything at all. I think that it’s really dangerous to conflate social media with the breadth of reality.

-Roxane Gay

We’re often told, if you’re going to criticize something, you need to have a solution. I actually don’t believe that. I think that you can absolutely critique institutions that demand critique.

-Roxane Gay

Anytime I feel like I’m overwhelmed or scared to say something, I remind myself, even though it’s scary, even though you don’t know how people are going to respond to what you’re saying, you have to tell the truth. And you know, it’s a useful reminder. I think that most of us are invested in the truth, but sometimes you don’t know how people are going to respond to the truth. People say they want truth, but it’s rare that they actually mean it.

-Roxane Gay

Over the years, all of my books have been banned. So many people try to treat it as a badge of honor. It’s not a badge of honor. This is ridiculous. And the book that surprised me the most is Sacrifice of Darkness. Because it’s harmless. It’s a graphic novel, set in a fictional world where a man flies an air machine into the sun, and the sun disappears. What exactly is bannable? It’s bewildering. But so many very important books are being banned, like Maus and Persepolis, and many, many others. Children in particular are being robbed of necessary literature, and for what? They’re going to learn about the world anyway.

-Roxane Gay

There’s a school of thought that artists don’t really have any responsibility to anything but the art. I think that’s a delusional stance that only a very privileged few can make. But I think it’s a shared responsibility. I think that everyone who creates art and puts ideas into the world has a responsibility to be true, has a responsibility to conduct themselves, hopefully with some kind of ethical code.

-Roxane Gay

I’m just going to mention these three rules that Lou [Reed] and I had… The first one is don’t be afraid of anyone. Imagine your life if you’re not afraid of anyone. Two, get a really good BS detector and learn how to use it. Who’s faking it and who is not? Three, be really tender. And with those three, you’re set.

-Laurie Anderson

The most famous example of an unreliable narrator in literature is probably Lolita’s Humbert Humbert. He tells us what happens, and the monstrous actions he takes—grooming his adolescent stepdaughter—but he does so in a way that absolves himself of fault. He tweaks. He omits. He manipulates. We can feel him doing it through his feigned astonishment and unctuous language. He doth protest too much. He seduces and lies to us in the same way he seduces and lies to Lolita. He tries to control the reader in the same way that he controls this young girl.

-Summer Brennan