round-up: 1/24
reading recs, quotations, resources, etc.
Happy Tuesday!
I have a long one today, so please open up this email in a new tab if you want to get to the end!
Housekeeping:
The newest issue of The West Review is out now & I highly recommend that you read it.
Here are a few previews of the poems included in the issue:
The issue also features two reviews of new poetry collections. I loved these books and highly recommend purchasing & reading them.
And, as a reminder:
Although, yes, I’m willing to go broke to ensure that writers are compensated—at least a little bit!—for their contributions, I’d really prefer not to. If you live in the US and are looking for some new reading material, I hope you’ll consider purchasing 5 books for $30 on The West Review’s website. It’s a great deal, and 100% of those funds go to writers. It also gives me an opportunity to reorganize my beloved bookshelves.
What I read this week:
The time has come: Looking back at earlier newsletter entries, I was surprised to see that I reread Susan Sontag’s journals every year, almost to the day. Anyway, I’m rereading them now.
This is a great reflection on professional jealousy1, and how it's often not really jealousy but disappointment (but nevertheless a very unpleasant feeling)
To read:
Quotations:
Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. This occurred to me after a recent conversation with Jade about sex, leather, and our relationship; in essence, about how we talk to each other. The conversation was a successful one, but due to its duration and intensity (and the makeup sex that followed) it was a good example of what we usually mean by lesbian processing, an epithet informed by stereotypes about women in general being overemotional and queer women in particular placing a hysterical, unscientific, and unsexy level of importance on communication; this being set in opposition to normal heterosexual relations, which happen without anyone having to think, without there even needing to be consent, because these relations are natural and unchanged and unchanging since forever.
When you’re a dyke, your fate is to always be seen as either utterly ridiculous or an ugly threat.
As with the other stereotypes, lesbian processing is something that we dykes often poke fun at ourselves, but I think that the humor limns what should be a goal for all intimate relationships: regular and honest communication among equals. When done correctly, processing, lesbian or otherwise, is a tool for deepening connection and intimacy.
Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. Being both gay and non-monogamous puts me at heightened risk of being annoying. Like vegans or those who use they/them pronouns, the non-monogamous have a reputation for sanctimony and condescension meant to conceal the flaws in a less-than-peachy romantic relationship. I’m not interested in pretending that Jade and I don’t have to deal with jealousy, or insecurity, or hurt feelings, not because I mind lying but because I think it’s silly to aspire toward perfection that doesn’t exist (especially because its puncture is more humiliating than the failure to reach it in the first place). But I don’t think romantic relationships have to be hard, or any harder than any other kind of relationship, and my relationship with Jade isn’t hard at all. It makes my life better and easier. That’s why I’m in it with her.
We are aware that heteronormativity motivates with punishment. It also motivates with incentive, which is something that straight people have a harder time acknowledging, especially these days. The gender and sexual scripts that we all know, though maybe don’t always recognize, often offer both punishment and incentive: girls wear pink, boys don’t cry, marriage is romantic, the nuclear family is safe, natural, and eternal. There are scripts for sexual intercourse, too, and while they can be stifling, constraining, or boring (or worse), these scripts are also incentives in themselves. That’s because, when you believe that there’s only a handful of ways to fuck, sex becomes remarkably easy. This is one of heteronormativity’s incentives to conform.
I don’t mean that straight people can’t or don’t do weirdo sex shit, or that being able to do a handstand while getting drilled means you have some kind of advanced understanding of sexuality and yourself, or that sex that looks normative can’t be pleasureful. What I mean is that we’re initiated into sex as something that can be learned, mastered, and replicated, over and over, like it’s a product on an assembly line. It is always the same, across time, space, and bodies. We’re all familiar with the script of cis man and cis woman having vaginal intercourse, so much so that most of us can do it in our sleep, even if we don’t appear in the script whatsoever.
So what’s the benefit of this sex script, then, if it’s so deleterious to pleasure and connection? How is this an incentive of heteronormativity, and not a punishment? Well, if you know exactly how sex is supposed to be—what you’re supposed to do, how you’re supposed to do it, and how it’s supposed to make you feel—then you don’t have to be present for it, do you? You can do it, or have it done to you, in your sleep. It’s not just that deviation from “normal” sex is pathologized, criminalized, or unimaginable—it’s that following the script for normal sex can be done with a minimum of static, if not effort or pain. Heteronormativity renders sex as a specific series of acts that is done with specific people, with specific goals in mind, so much so that concepts like consent are challenging to understand and difficult to introduce into our sexual practices. Sexual practices like consent that we, as good feminists or leftists or whatever, can all agree are good are also difficult, because they require effort, negotiation, vulnerability, accountability, and presence.
Fascism only talks ideology but it really is just marketing, marketing for power. It’s recognizable by its need to purge, the strategies it uses to purge and its terror of truly democratic goals. It changes citizens into taxpayers so individuals become rife with anger at the notion of the public good. It changes citizens into consumers so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity, nor our compassion, nor our generosity — none of the virtues that human beings aspire to claim, none of that but what we own. And in so doing it produces the perfect capitalist: one who is willing to kill a human being for a product — a sneaker, a jacket, a car, a company.
-Toni Morrison’s 1995 “Remarks Given at the Howard University Charter Day Convocation”
We fear the children we would protect.
-Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child
A vicious question mark snaked around being, […] trans children must find a way, despite all the odds, to survive, to grow, and to endure.
-Jules Gill-Peterson
We have not even yet begun to ask what it would mean to let trans children name their own desires and be recognized as entitled to direct their own affairs.
-Jules Gill-Peterson
Trans children have been reduced to figures for what they are so clearly not, abstract ciphers of this or that etiology of gender, this or that political platform.
-Jules Gill-Peterson
We make children vulnerable by the force of law, the deprivation of their economic earnings, and the infantilization of their personalities, only to raid their bodies, minds, and souls to enrich an order of things that cannot stomach their savvy and enviable divergences from normativity. […] The child is a dehumanized social form, […] a politically disenfranchised person subject to a regime of racially and gender normative governance by medicine and other social institutions, including the family.
-Jules Gill-Peterson
The truth is, we don’t know trans children because we have inherited, reinforced, and perpetuated a cultural system of gender and childhood in which they are unknowable and, what’s worst of all, unable to be cared for except through forms of harm.
-Jules Gill-Peterson
Today’s trans children are not the first generation to identify and live openly as trans during childhood. They are not even close to the first generation to transition or to be medicalized during childhood and grow up as publicly trans. […] Trans children have a documentable past stretching the entirety of the twentieth century, long before today’s trans and gender-variant adults were even born.
[…]
The twenty-first century framing of trans children as new and lacking historicity is actually complicit with their ongoing political infantilization, particularly by medicine.
-Jules Gill-Peterson
Smudge-softened dust and glass and the crushed
flower petals of somewhere fall face-first and rub
shoulders with the quiet song of something, somewhere,
slowly frothing into life, while everything lost to skylight
yesterday unlearns becoming in the drains of the city.
-Umang Kalra
cool air brushes goosebumps
along my armskin. my hairs rise
like snakes.
-John Compton
kiss me so good i believe again
kiss me full of ghosts
-June Gehringer
There is nothing in it for me now—no joy, only sorrow. Why do I hang on?
-Susan Sontag, 1964
A constriction in the chest, tears, a scream that feels as if it would be endless if I let it out.
-Susan Sontag, 1964
Sometimes feelings are too strong: passions, obsessions. Like romantic love. Or grief. Then one needs to speak, or one would burst.
-Susan Sontag, 1964
A miracle is just an accident, with fancy trappings.
-Susan Sontag, 1964
My loyalty to the past—my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.
-Susan Sontag, 1964
The incredible pain returns again and again and again.
-Susan Sontag, 1964
If one could amputate part of one’s consciousness . . .
-Susan Sontag, 1964
I will never outlast this pain. […] It will only recede, diminish if I can somehow transpose the emotion—as from grief to anger, from despair to assent. I must become active. As long as I continue to experience myself as done to (not doing) this unbearable pain will not desert me—
-Susan Sontag, 1964
I’m so stuck on the “was” of people—
-Susan Sontag, 1964
I feel—when I am not sorrowing—so dry, like powder, like a helium balloon that’s been let go—
-Susan Sontag, 1964
As a writer, I tolerate error, poor performance, failure. So what if I fail some of the time, if a story or an essay is no good? Sometimes things do go well, the work is good. And that’s enough.
-Susan Sontag, 1964
Art is a form of consciousness.
-Susan Sontag, 1964
I’m not looking for a plot—I’m looking for a “tone,” a “color,” and the rest will follow.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
“I” am playing the part of myself.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
Madness as a defense against terror.
Madness as a defense against grief.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
One doesn’t learn from experience—because the substance of things is always changing.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation—however minute. I want the encounter with a person or a work of art to change everything.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
I haven’t learned to mobilize rage.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
I delivered myself into her hands—
-Susan Sontag, 1965
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
I have really known suffering. And I have survived.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
I wish I had something pretty to say but grief is terrible and ugly and unceasing.
Disappointment forces me to recognize that I really wanted something for myself, that I thought my work might be worthy of recognition, and within that framework (a framework my mind has designed for itself) desire begins to feel threatening, because to want something is to risk disappointment.
To desire is to make ourselves vulnerable; to come up empty-handed hurts.
I am against censorship. In all forms. Not just for the right of masterpieces—high art—to be scandalous.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
To smile at opponents and friends alike is to abase one’s commitments to the status of mere opinions, and all intellectuals, whether of the Right or Left, to their common bourgeois condition.
-Simone de Beauvoir
Grief cannot be converted into any other currency.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
I must not think of the past. I must go on, destroying my memory. If only I felt some real energy in the present (something more than stoicism, good soldierliness), some hope for the future.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
People say “it’s boring”—as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
The good thing about saying “it’s beautiful” of a work of art is that when you say that you aren’t saying anything.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
Is beauty important? Maybe, sometimes, it’s boring. Maybe what’s more important is “the interesting”—and everything that’s interesting eventually seems beautiful.
-Susan Sontag, 1965
I started to feel anxious, depressed, restless. But not about him. About me. Where was I? Why couldn’t I lay hands on my feelings?
-Susan Sontag, 1966
I’m attracted to demons, to the demonic in people. […] People who stand alone and burn. I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
-Susan Sontag, 1966
I’ve got this thing—my mind. It gets bigger, its appetite is insatiable.
-Susan Sontag, 1966
Each sentence, each breath, is a sundering.
-Susan Sontag, 1966
I am alone—I ache—
-Susan Sontag, 1966
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Have a great week—
-Despy Boutris
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Anne Lamott: “Jealousy is one of the occupational hazards of being a writer, and the most degrading.”