round-up: 12/21
recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
& 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.
Things to read:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
An Eros Encyclopedia, Rachel James (3/5 stars)
Quotations:
When confronted with death, we often makes these useless little equations. I saw this person X times, X days-weeks-months ago. They don’t add up to “and so they cannot be dead,” but we must hope somehow that they will. It’s a familiar arithmetic.
In a period of 6 years in my 20s, I attended 15 funerals and only two weddings. For a while, it felt like the sky was falling. Every couple of weeks I would be jostled into awareness that someone who had been standing right beside me, or off just a ways down the street, had disappeared.
All around the world, in nearly every culture and throughout history, people have venerated their ancestors by passing on their names and telling their stories. What is remembered lives, the adage goes. I experience this viscerally. Having spent much of my life mourning the loss of vibrant friends, mentors, community members, and even enemies, it’s no wonder why I have dedicated myself to a practice of ancestral veneration. Nearly all of my friends are dead, but in me their stories live.
When Giovannitti first started working as an escort, she found that fucking for money did not have an impact on what sex meant to her in her personal life. Rather, the high hourly rates and flexible schedule allowed room for other aims: making art, learning, becoming herself. This is one of the industry’s best-kept secrets: By making pleasure one’s work, it becomes possible to work less. Plus, she says, “I don’t actually think it’s possible to take sex out of the workplace. The dynamics of exploitation in waged work under capitalism are inextricably linked.”
There’s a pervasive idea that by selling sex, you’re giving something up, polluting something pure that would remain otherwise untouched by capital.
I don’t think anyone should have to trade sex to pay rent, but I also don’t think anyone should have to trade labor of any kind to do that. I find inspiration in the workers and thinkers on the margins who lean into the criminality of sex work—operating with a desire to subvert dominant systems as opposed to being assimilated into them.
I got tired of people asking if my jaw fell on the floor because I got nominated for a prize. I’m like, Do you think that I believe my book is a piece of shit? No. I worked extremely hard on it! Why should I be broadcasting insecurity?
Clothes are so intricately tied up in our body and how we feel about our bodies. And we can't exist in this society without clothes, so we have to deal with them in one way or another. And I think so many of the messages that we get through diet culture really affect how we feel and how we approach clothes.
We're kind of in indoctrinated into this idea that bodies shouldn't change, that bodies should land in one, ideally thin, place and that if we deviate from that, our whole lives should be about getting back to that. Our whole life should be a project of kind of holding onto or getting back to a body that we had in the past. And if you think about how that applies to clothes, that means that we are going to be holding onto clothes that don't fit because again, we're taught that we should get back into them. We can't let them go because that means we've given up.
Women have been conditioned to be uncomfortable for the sake of being pleasing to others' eyes. We're not doing it for ourselves necessarily. Or maybe we're doing it to get a certain reaction, but it really is to conform to what we've been told is ideal.
Women of a certain age are not allowed to do things that someone younger would be allowed to do or people of a certain body size or shape are not allowed to participate in certain things based on the size of their body. So that's where I always want to start is, what is that idea? And where does it come from? And is that important to you?
It's always, for me, about whether something comes from an internal desire or from an external expectation.
I read a lot of memoirs. I’ve read them habitually my whole life. And one thing I found myself reacting against often was narratives that started when the writer was a child, then dug into this deep, traumatic childhood and stayed there for too long. I don’t always feel like very young children have narrative agency when it comes to trauma memoirs. It was very important to me to never have the reader be in a moment where there wasn’t real conflict as opposed to [watching] a kid have all these terrible things happen to them while their parents control their lives. There’s no story there. So it was important to me to not do that. I also never wanted to feel like I was in a position where I was boring myself just to get information across.
I’m vegan, and if you are a vegan talking to people who are otherwise completely ethical and even extremely progressive, and you bring up veganism, the kind of cognitive dissonance around talking about Big Ag and child labor in slaughterhouses and impoverished communities poisoned by toxic runoff from pig farms, is just crazy. Everybody just shuts down.
The playing field is definitely not level and it’s not fair and nothing’s fair and you have to work from where you start. That’s fine. But I think at that moment in the book I was feeling incredibly frustrated because my mom was so sick and I was doing a reading at an art gallery and I just started to feel like what is this for? Who is this for? What are we even doing here?
I grew up reading the New York Times Book Review because my grandmother subscribed to it in Houston. She was my cultural arbiter because she traveled everywhere. And I remember I used to read it in the bathtub, and I would feel like, “One day. You know? My byline’ll be in there.” It wasn’t until I left Texas and went to Brown that I realized, “Oh, all these people’s parents work for NPR. And they all have enough money to leave college for a year and intern in New York.” And it’s not that I was poor. I had support, too. But you realize, “Wow, none of this is democratic.” At all.
I definitely don’t think it’s our responsibility as writers to show people what’s right. I don’t know that what I’m talking about is even a political responsibility. It’s not. It’s to keep writing and to write well and to be true to whatever that invisible dream force is that drives you to do it is, as opposed to the one that says, make as much money as you can and then die.
I feel like it’s very clear in this book that I’m not better. You know? I’m still broken. What happened to me as a kid and the things that happened to my mom and the things that happened to my grandmother and the things that happened to my great grandmother…writing this book about all that for me was not an act of catharsis. And I’m not saying there would be anything wrong with that if that was the case. But I went to therapy to get therapy. I wrote the book to write a book because I am a writer. It’s a story I wanted to tell. It’s for other people.
The universe loves us and is happy we are here. It wants us to observe it and to experience it joyfully. I try to remind myself of that every day, and I find that to be a kind of salvation, always, in the face of everything.
For most of the rest of the world, it was almost unbearable to see the devastation, the destruction, the carnage being inflicted on Palestine while members of the U.S. government wrung their hands, talked about humanitarian aid, and simultaneously gave Israel more arms and more bombs. They allowed Israel to bomb Palestinians, and then they dropped food packets afterwards. Let’s face it, it’s been hard to see the U.S. as a moral force in the world for a while. In a peculiar way, you could argue that Trump is going to be to the U.S. what the U.S. has been to the rest of the world — completely amoral.
What keeps you awake at night?
She wanted a writerly, magical answer.
A black forest, a shining maid walking through it.
The woman—she was a guest, a visiting artist.
I was a guest to her visitingness: polite guest
at an affable table.
My neck, I said, meaning pain
of the basest physical kind. Meaning also
sadness, and worry—
How to enter / The hive of that mind and undo what / The imagination had done there?
I think I am like the persimmon tree
She makes wine from: all full & fruit falling.
I was less than a name in somebody’s craw
When they painted this with milk, lime & rust.
Nothing will grow on rust: let me be rust.
I was hoping to look domesticated,
or at least domesticable,
that I too could walk the trails
and then return home, stretch out
beside another human and watch something
on a big screen.
Late that night I took off the skort
and lay down on the kitchen floor of a house
where years ago a boy and his girlfriend
overdosed in the basement, a fact
I try not to remember.
Sometimes it can be hard to love
the grass. Pasture blades make my legs itch. Pollen
plugs the sinuses.
We have invented a whole new way to kiss.
It is the same. It’s new because it’s now.
Call me sage woman,
palette and canvas,
your planetary, primordial home.
Call me always quaking
into rooms that are not ready,
the good curtains set beside the sill
and everyone’s gone quiet,
everyone’s looking for the source.
These days I move from room to room looking for a thing to haunt.
Why not take the smashed pinecone
of my life, render it in purple?
I wouldn’t
press myself into a grief box, but I will confess I’m happiest
under a sleeping sky, love the darkness like I loved to run
through old-growth Doug firs and cedars.
I want to bird his place, be
the marginalia of his day, the song
he cannot place.
There is still a prudishness about sex, not only in America but everywhere. Sex and comedy are the two subjects that are never taken seriously, though we think about sex constantly—and about comedy periodically, if we’re lucky, if only in the form of self-satire. I suppose prudishness guarantees paternity, so crucial in keeping bloodlines pure.
Gay men have seldom been candid about their sex lives and are even less so now that they are getting married and fathering offspring. Paternity is not the problem for them so much as respectability.
Maybe an Englishman would have known how to reply, but I was disarmed, nonplussed. He invited himself up to my cockroach-infested, mold-in-the-coffee-cup studio apartment, despite my objections. I could dress myself presentably but my apartment revealed the depths of my poverty. Within seconds he’d wrestled me to the broken-back cot with the dirty sheets and peeled off my jeans and underpants and stuck his cock into my hole. He later told several mutual friends he’d never seen such abject squalor before. The next morning my rectum hurt, but I thought nothing more of it.
There was a close friend of mine in London with an unheated apartment near Bond Street, in which I stayed in the sixties countless times. In 1970, when I lived in Rome, John came to visit me for a few weeks. He was what I called in those days “a character.” He hated the royal family with a passion. He seemed terribly repressed and proper, but when a lover told him, while they were driving through Scotland, that he was leaving him, John said in a clipped voice, “Very well,” turned the wheel, and drove them off a cliff. They both spent the next year in full-body casts. John had his nose broken and remade several times but he was never quite satisfied with it. Every morning he’d make tea and listen to the “wireless” chat shows, including the Woman’s Hour. He knew every bus route in London and even their late-night schedules. He was good at living on nothing a year; he made orange juice from powder in water. He ate something called cheesed cauliflower.
Wasn’t the body or even the personality under the look more important than the accessories? I would wear anything from a red hankie back-left pocket (aggressive penetrator) to yellow back-right (piss swallower), if I thought someone, anyone, would like that.
We had memorable sex but afterward he complained I was somehow too experienced, too slutty, too quick and adept in assuming the position. He didn’t like how I’d expertly swiveled my ass up to his waiting cock. What he wanted was a timid, gray, recently divorced elderly man who would reluctantly give way to his ardor—someone wooden and naive, astonished by his own acquiescence, endowed with the purity of the until-recently-heterosexual, the clumsy paterfamilias who’d shamefully nursed forbidden fantasies of a fiery young redhead, someone who would finally surrender to the redhead’s passion but mutter later that that battering had really hurt, darn it. I felt I was being punished for not being a nerd.
I was so insecure about my body that my very shame felt erotic—vulnerable, despicable if despising was on the program, worthy of being punished, eager to be punished. His mouth, now that it was closed in an unsmiling line, was exactly as long and straight as each eyebrow, a Morse code of male beauty or maybe like the oblong pitches in a medieval hymnal.
What boundaries we ask of each other, these invisible lines, these cages we beg of each other, precious shells we weave for each other, and it is over a lifetime.
-Rachel James
Whose house is this?
A flesh resting uneasily between ambitions.
Who lives here?
A woman and her audience.
-Rachel James
I thought: it must take another person to show me things I’ve already got.
-Rachel James
O flight! O an owl calls in the night cannot be seen but sees. O to be noticed!
-Rachel James
O suffering plums. O ripening fruit!
-Rachel James
O volume
O pretending
O pretending to be thinking
-Rachel James
I would take you in my mouth and heat you. I would build you a fire and peel your wet layers off as if you were a delicate water lily yearning for land.
-Rachel James
If I say everything, I will be unhappy, but what is the right amount to say.
-Rachel James
my pricked finger drips
into your glass
and I wait
-Rachel James
You offer the palms of your hands covered in my sweat and I lick them tasting you tasting me
-Rachel James
Hunched on my hands and knees I feel bestial. Hot pools and heaving.
-Rachel James
o oceans what’s in your suds
o currency red mountain
gods strike me what’s in your
suds making you bubble like that
o waves strike me
-Rachel James
Warm yearning. I put a pillow over my head for a darkness. Alone, mind traveling. Riffle through an index of possible pleasures until one catches.
-Rachel James
Dawn holds. Somewhere a sun reaches the horzion.
-Rachel James
I would hold you if you wanted me to. I would sing or be silent. I would embarrass myself, anything to relieve your suffering.
-Rachel James
In the steam room she slides her hand over my thigh and I open my legs
-Rachel James
We have no say in what we do to each other.
-Rachel James
I do not feel like eating oranges or kissing anyone
-Rachel James
Apologies in advance. I’m dreary reading texts from childhood.
-Rachel James
We found him curled up in the dirt. He looked like a newborn fawn.
-Rachel James
Something I do to push people away is to be slightly obsessed with them.
-Rachel James
I wonder if anyone shares my feelings and thoughts. Why? Because if no one does I’d like to know. Why? I might feel differently about my self-worth. Why? Because either I would feel connected to others or I would feel permission to excel in my uniqueness.
-Rachel James
I know I like you now because I am mad at you. It is really embarrassing to want things.
-Rachel James
For me, [working smarter means] figuring out what I need to do and figuring out the least amount of time it takes to do it. I don’t have to answer every email that’s sent to me. I appreciate that people send me emails, but I don’t have to respond to them. Not sitting at a desk any longer than I need to sit at the desk just because I feel like I should sit at the desk. Really trusting myself to know when I’ve done a good day’s work. And I think a really important thing about working smarter is always leaving something for yourself in the morning so there’s always momentum.
I really don’t recommend this career to anyone, to be honest with you. Unless you can’t shake it. Unless you’re just like, “I’m so hooked on writing and I have so much I have to say, and I’ll just do whatever it takes to make it happen.” It requires so much work, indulgence, and focus.
An artist is usually either a witch or a businessperson. I fall into the witch category. The few times that I’ve tried to put myself into the businessperson category, it’s not been very satisfying. So the only ethics that I try and follow is not to be a businessperson. I try to be sincere as much as I can.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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Btw, I have a substack newsletter too. But I found it hard to make my tweet appear clickable in my post.
I've read the How to write on Substance and found this instruction:
""For a tweet, YouTube video, Vimeo video, Spotify track, or SoundCloud embed, just paste the relevant link on a new line (don’t grab the embed code; it won’t work).""
All I do is paste the link as advised.
But it doesn't work. Anytime I post, I'll just find the link as I pasted it, instead of seeing the post and having it clickable.
Is there any thing I'm not doing right?
Thanks for your help.
Hi Despy
Thanks for your insights on poetry. And for your good poems, too. I always look forward to your newsletter to read whatever you have to share on poetry.