round-up: 12/30
last one of 2023!
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
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:
Housekeeping:
I thoroughly enjoyed doing this crossword puzzle. It took me 12 minutes and 43 seconds. Beat me!
I have also been getting back into bagels.
If you’re in LA, I highly recommend Belle’s in Highland Park. Great vegan cream cheese.
What I’m reading:
Reading books is not just a pleasure: it helps our minds to heal
The Brooklyn Museum’s Much-Criticized ‘It’s Pablo-matic’ Show Is Actually Weirdly at War With Itself Over Hannah Gadsby’s Art History1
Love Me Tender, Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)2
Quotations:
[Turbulence] seems to be such a part of becoming. And I’d extend this, of course, to any kind of love—not just romantic or sexual. It changes us.
It’s very easy for me, also, to feel like a ghost at times, difficult to feel like I am present. It seems to me a reasonable response, as we watch the crises escalate and the extinction continue. But the book wants to be present, not metaphorically but physically, through embodiment and community. It wants to be present through the ruptures. And we need ruptures! We can even, at times, emerge from them joyfully, loving, curious. Ghosts are powerful, too, and they can guide us forward, but for now we’re here, in a world on the edge of collapse.
I’m very interested in joy, and very interested in what joy and pleasure can bring, and especially as political tools, as tools for change, as tools for upsetting the status quo, whatever the case is.
Who can tell you not to mourn the dust?
Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Escape is vital, in some cases, as a survival tool.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I’m not sold on pessimism as the new optimism. I need something that allows us to hope for something greater while confronting the mess of whatever all this blind hopefulness has driven us to.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
What good is endless hope in a country that never runs out of ways to drain you of it?
-Hanif Abdurraqib
We are all going to die. That’s true, though I hope I get a few more trips on this sometimes wretched ride. I have tasted enough of its highs to know that they’re worth sticking around for, though not worshiping as a sole survival tool in the face of its lows. I’ve abandoned hopeless hope, but I am not rooting for the meteor. I’m still rooting for us, my people and their people and their people beyond that.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I had moments where I thought life was done with me and I thought myself done with it. And, perhaps like some of you, I have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness I know and my fear of the darkness I do not.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I wonder, always, how art can immortalize even imaginary lives.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
To be black and still alive in America is to know urgency.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
May we all be buried on our own terms.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I am sad yesterday, and I might be sad tomorrow, and even the day after. But I will be here, looking for a way out, every time.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
There’s no such thing as a mother. Mother as a status, an identity, a form of power, a lack of power, a position, dominated and dominant, victim and persecutor, it doesn’t exist. None of these things exist. There’s only love, which is completely different. Love that doesn’t need love in return, love that doesn’t ask for anything, love that knows what love is, love that never doubts, love that knows pain is nothing, that pain has nothing to do with it, that it’s futile, that violence is always about the person inflicting it.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
I know it’s all right. I didn’t dream it all up.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
So of course she leaves me, she’s gone before I can say Wait, before I can say Listen, before I can say Come back.
-Constance Debre (tr. Holly James)
& it’s a shame to still have living hands & barely anything left worthy of touch.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I want the sunlight whistling its way across our faces to be always amber & never an absent hue that might mistake our lineage for something safe. I am talking of artifacts again & not of how I cup my hands to the chins of those I love & kiss them on their faces
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Once you understand violence, once its presence is constant enough, it can become something you survive until survival becomes your normalcy.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
We write because it is the thing we do. Because we love it. Because we want to make our art, communicate our vision, shift our lives. Scratch that itch.
Writing is also work that straddles this divide; we want to plunge into our own depths, and we want to make something beautiful that will change the world, and we hope that it will not only do that but change it for the better,
Even though you write out of a deep solitude, you generally write because you want to say something to other people, and you secretly hope it will benefit them in some way, by offering pleasure or new insight into the familiar or visions of the unfamiliar or just descriptions of the world and our psyches that make the world new and strange and worthwhile again.
You make art because you think what you make is good, and good means that it’s good for other people, not necessarily pleasant or easy, but leading toward more truth or justice or awareness or reform.
Because pleasure is part of what gets us through and helps us do what we’re here to do. Because the political struggle is to protect the vulnerable and the beautiful, and paying attention to them is part of the project.
Writing is work that can hold up its head with all the other kinds of useful work out there in the world and it is genuinely work. Good writers write from love, for love, and often, somehow, directly or otherwise, for the liberation of all beings, and the kindness in that is immeasurable.
I want to make things that are good and I don’t want to make things that are bad. It’s pretty simple, really.
I care a lot. And I put a lot of care into what I say and how I say and how I present my thoughts and what I don’t say. I don’t agonize — that’s not part of the process for me — but I’m constantly calibrating the magic space between a leap of faith and deep consideration.
It’s time to bring back the romcom, the mid-budget crowd pleaser, the auteurs with specific points of view making art for niche audiences. This applies to mediums beyond cinema as well. Be it visual art or music or fashion, it’s time to divest from the dream of mass appeal and focus instead on honing in on a unique aesthetic or voice.
I’m sure it has something to do with the ubiquity of social media and the absolute panic it inspires in publishers, studios, and execs of all kinds, but whatever the reason, man, entertainment sure does feel the need to constantly remind us that it’s aware of itself.
Novels will pause to insert some multi-paragraph piece of meta-commentary, delivered by either the omniscient narrator or a side-character’s ham-fisted monologue, that lets me, the reader, know that the author is a good person who doesn’t agree with what’s happening here. Movies will stop to wink at us. Don’t worry! We know we’re doing a tired trope right now! See? We quipped about it!
Even more egregious is when it comes in the form of something like, “Ugh, we know this is a story about a straight white couple! How boring of us!”
Oh my God, just tell the story you set out to tell, stop apologizing for it, and leave the criticism to the critics. Your job is not “being a good person.” Your job is to seduce me into the world and the characters you’ve set up. I give you my suspension of disbelief, you give me a story. It’s all very fair, and I’m tired of storytellers weaseling out of their end of the bargain with this constant meta commentary. Own it!
I want to return to certain feelings on my own time. I want to encounter, re-encounter, fixate and linger. Playlists are a wound-dweller’s (to borrow Leslie Jamison’s term) best friend. Emotional masochism, but also, a constrained surrender to sensation, to memory, to specific losses and textures, formalized, made finite and, crucially, pauseable. I give myself over to lonelinesses and longings and intimacies I don’t often permit myself to revisit otherwise, outside of the timed decadence of a playlist.
There’s the sense that to bear witness is not enough, to throw our bodies and selves into communal action is not enough, that our politicians and governments are death-machines committed to manufacturing more death at any expense.
Things change. People hurt each other. We all want different things. You can never know for sure your life will be running in complete parallel with someone else. The more you hold onto a perfect vision, the more disappointed you’ll be. Enjoy the collisions you have with people when you do.
I don’t think I’ve changed much since January. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I didn’t read as much as I should have, and I’m still often impulsive and angry and fickle. I drank a lot of wine. I cried an average amount, but mostly over things that don’t make any sense. I try and do the things that will make me happy, but I have no idea what those things are. I am very bad with money. I am trying to be more ambivalent about my appearance. I am trying to be less shy. I am trying to speak less.
There is nothing better for one’s mental and physical health than a brisk walk up a steep hill.
The essay is so incredibly trans: you’ve found some unsayable truth, now throw out all the rules that keep you from saying it.
Everybody wants to be liked, of course, but for trans people the stakes to being liked are really high. If you are afraid to be seen as a pervert freak, afraid that you'll lose everything you value and might get killed, it chills your writing. For some white dude to be awful, he’s just another phallic narcissist, bravely saying how it is. No biggie, here's your Pulitzer. So it’s not a surprise to me that trans people, in memoir, sometimes throw out the honesty and ethics required for truly good narrative structure in favor of likability. We face so much higher political consequences for being honest.
Is my sense of being trans a result of some perception created in my mind? Or is my mind as trans shaped by some rules of physical reality that we have not yet uncovered? We don’t yet know. Science doesn’t really know. Instead we perpetually hesitate between possibilities.
I think that Southern For Pussy shows that you can make a great film with trans subjects for a cis audience. But the result will not be the same as if you make it for trans audiences. I contend that we generally polish ourselves more if we think we’ll be talking to a cis audience. The same holds true for many minority groups, and much of the work that we hold up as transformatory is work intended for an in-group audience.
The way that writing gets passed around makes the creation of trans art a communal act. We are still forming our own literature, we are writing in response to one another, in conversation with one another, trying to incorporate every new idea that someone manages to finally figure out how to say and then build upon that idea the new things that are suddenly unlocked for ourselves. It’s exciting.
Maybe I’ll talk about one thing that’s been on my mind lately, which is the very serious pressure trans writers face to conform to particular stories. There is pressure from cis people and the mainstream lit establishment to tell Disney-ified Inspirational Stories that don’t challenge cissexism (if they want any trans stories at all), there is pressure from within ourselves to avoid the stories that are particularly dark or shameful (every writer deals with that but the average trans writer deals with it a lot more than the average cis writer) and there’s pressure from within our own community as well, I think, since most of us (self included) have our own visions for how we wish trans stories were framed. I think the only way to address that is by having more kinds of stories out there.
I hate the idea that literature should be apolitical or somewhat apart from social justice and I think that ethos is actually very present and powerful in the mainstream literary world and there’s pressure from that world—especially in fiction—to present “balanced” work that “takes into account all sides” and “look isn’t everybody tainted and isn’t everybody to blame for the sorrows in this world” blah blah blah and it’s furthered by white/straight/male people who are resistant to having their privilege disturbed and basically fuck that with a fucking hammer.
It is said we cannot truly retain the memory of pain, but surely joy is even more difficult to recall.
-Nayland Blake
I began to remember, again, this form of the box, of Louise Bourgeois’s Cells. How could it be filled with sentences? How could a paragraph be a Cell or memory room? But like Louise Bourgeois’s Cells or Cornell’s boxes, a sort of nice imperfection to the collage, a sense of drift. This is still something I’m writing to, still. Danielle Dutton gave this interview recently about Margaret the First, saying she thought of each paragraph as a box, and I thought, Yes! A box! Or a room. To go into a series of rooms.
Tweets:
That’s all for today—
Happy New Year!
-Despy Boutris
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God, I love art criticism.
I finally finished this. 5/5 stars, by my standard, which is, generally, “Did the book accomplish what it set out to do?” Yes, it did. Sometimes, I ignore this standard, but only when a book accomplishes what it sets out to and also is bad. But this one wasn’t bad.