round-up: 12/23

reading recs, quotations, tweets, & more

Dec 24, 2023

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.

Some things for you:

& an apt quotation, for anyone remaining quiet on the subject of genocide:

where are you. is it worth it. why wont you look. is it worth the price of not seeing. of not wanting to see. is this worth the price of not saying.

-Truong Tran

Housekeeping:

There has been so much death in our community this year. I’m thinking especially of Heba Abu Nada and Refaat Alareer, who were killed by Israel.

I have a lil poem out here.

dbouts

A post shared by @dbouts

What I’m reading:

What I’m watching:

Bones, from the beginning, again
This beautiful Tiny Desk Concert1:

Quotations:

I think, rather, that the notion of noble artistic poverty is a beautiful one meant to contradict our society’s seemingly fundamental edict that money = worth. No, the artist says, imagination, meaning, truth, connection, spirit, love, liberation, beauty, presence, collectivity = worth.

-Sarah Menkedick

Art is work. It requires years and years of training, diligence, skill, and self-discipline.

-Sarah Menkedick

What is the movement between wholeness and fragmentation? Is it polarity, a spectrum, participatory? What created the fragment? What is in between the moments? What is missing?

-Arabelle Sicardi

How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?

-Nina Simone

The main emotion my mom had for me was jealousy. She was jealous of everyone I ever loved, of everyone who ever loved me, of everything I ever accomplished, of every dream I ever had. The funniest thing she ever said was that after she and my dad got divorced, it'd be me and her competing against each other for men. For men! As if I would compete with my own mother for any reason. As if there'd ever be any reason for me to compete for a man. (A man!) She didn't like me. She didn't know me. We had nothing in common.

-Heather Hogan

Sometimes life refuses us plot. Almost all the time.

-Maggie Smith

I urge those still on the fence to recognize that, if you truly believe what’s happening to the Palestinian people is wrong, there is nothing controversial about stating that belief. And I question (for myself, for others) what it means to want to be a part of a “world” where stating such a belief feels like a risk rather than a responsibility.

-Zeba Blay

I wish I could write an actual negative review of the work of those playing in my same league, if a negative review is what is needed, for this is the literature I’m interested in. And I wish that my peers could do the same with my books. And I wish that we could sit in a panel one day, and have a proper loud disagreement, passionately tear apart one another’s work in front of an audience, instead of politely agreeing on a number of points we don’t really care that much about. And then we could go and have a drink together and perhaps make up and agree about something else. Or not — we could also remain rivals for life. I wish all of that could happen. Because my impression is that right now writers, critics, editors, and so on, are doing the job of book marketers, instead of helping shape a stimulating literary discourse.

-Fernando Sdrigotti

In 2009, when de Botton released his The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, New York Times critic Caleb Crain gave it a very negative review. As I haven’t read The Pleasures…, I can’t comment on the accuracy of Crain’s piece, but I don’t feel it is necessarily ad hominem. Crain seems to have read the book and has actual (strong) criticism to level against it. In any case, whether fair or not, this review would have long been forgotten, were it not for de Botton’s rage, expressed as a comment on Crain’s blog:
Alain de Botton says:
29 June 2009 at 1:52 pm
Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon – so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.
What beautiful words! I will hate you till the day I die. These are the words one reserves for a lover who’s broken one’s heart. And yet, here de Botton is venting them at a book reviewer. Even if de Botton oddly expects Crain to care about the pecuniary aspects of his publishing career, and this comes across as entitled to me, these virulent but sincere words make me want to read him. Responding to negative reviews is often advised against but in a healthy literary culture this should be the standard response. We need more hatchet jobs and confrontational authorial rage. We need a culture that encourages fair and open negativity. We need to create the spaces for this culture to breed.

-Fernando Sdrigotti

As writers we have a right to be emotionally-invested in our work, but this is our issue, not something that should concern our critics or readers. Since they’ve spent money and time on whatever it is we put on a page, they have a right to react whichever way they see fit to our work: they have a right to dislike our writing and tell us all about it; they have a right to demolish our work too, even to the detriment of its commercial success. I say “they have a right to demolish our work”, not the person behind it — these things aren’t synonym, no matter how much some might insist they are, either out of real (confused) conviction or cynicism.

-Fernando Sdrigotti

Time does that thing it always does and keeps ticking along.

-Luce

I’d say if you’ve ever struggled with your mental health you’ll understand the discomfort that comes with sitting down and reflecting on the past year, especially if you don’t feel like it’s been a good one.

-Luce

Can anyone else relate to that feeling - like you used to be a fun person, and now your brain is plotting how to leave the gathering before you’ve even arrived?

-Luce

Cam vocabulary’s internal limit, the singular word, function in the way a syllable might? Repeated, can a word change the shape of the mouth from the inside, reforming the soft palate and the tissue of the cheeks into a new chamber?

-Bhanu Kapil

How do you survive what’s not meant to be survivable?

-Bhanu Kapil

that the book should be the place of stifled screams. of silent tears. of wounds that never heal. in a world torn with departures. that it should be the place of unending questions. of fragmented speech. of uprooted quotations. of words in exile. and of a writing forever circling back on itself…

-Richard Stamelman, “The Graven Silence of Writing”

this is not. the performance of outrage. of anger. or otherness. this is anger.

-Truong Tran

i will call it a text. for those of you. who need to see it. as simply as such. it is the longest text. ive written to date. it is written in the flawed language. of an immigrant. who knows only. how to write this. in the english language. i am invoking my immigrant. identity in this instance. because i have. reason to believe you will not. see me. until a time when. youll want to see me.

-Truong Tran

when language fails. i choose to fill this. with the absence of language.

-Truong Tran

you have been writing the same story. the fact is there is no right way to write this story. it is an impossible story made up of facts impossible to imagine and so you keep trying to write the impossible.

-Truong Tran

the fact is everyday you write the same poem. tell the same story. list the same facts in the hopes of finding a new poem. story. something other than this fucking story.

-Truong Tran

i am writing from the inside. of this body. looking out.

-Truong Tran

what haunts you. what hunts you. what are you hunting.

-Truong Tran

the tide is changing. the water is rising and i have no metaphors to hold back the waves.

-Truong Tran

i do not get to choose my politics. i do not get to choose my fights. i do not get to look away. i do not get to hide in language. i do not get to sit this one out. i do not have a choice in the matter. you do not get to ask this of me.

-Truong Tran