round-up: 2/10
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading/listening to
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.
And some things to read:
Housekeeping:
I had a very long week. Long month, actually. Long year. And, well I needed a few basic household items and thought it was a good week for the dopamine rush that comes with checking the mail, so here are a few lil things I bought:
And here’s a ring I made:
What I’m reading:
Is Poor Things the Best We Can Do for Female Sexuality Onscreen?
Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands
What does it mean when editors consider a writer's bio in judging writing contests?
What I’m watching:
Quotations:
I once read that fear is among the most powerful of all emotions and can overcome even the strongest parts of our intelligence. A persuasive temptress, fear can convince you that the mountain is a death trap and that a bad relationship is better than no relationship. The biggest mistake we make is allowing that fear to take over in thinking we have time. Time to love people later. Time to face the scary things later. But unfortunately, we don’t. Time is a limited asset, and if you’re holding onto something that isn’t for you out of fear of being alone or continuing to invest in a dead-end relationship, you're missing out on a chance to find what IS meant for you.
So I wrote this piece about how I loved being a single mother, and I came to that love accidentally, because when I left my marriage, I didn't expect happiness. All I knew was that I was miserable and I needed a change.
Single moms in movies, in books and TV shows: they're broke, they're hairy, they're looking for a man. I was all of those things, but it was kind of fun? It wasn't the bummer that it was made out to be. I realized that I was a better mom, a better friend, a better human. I really began to enjoy motherhood in a way that I hadn't before when I was married, because I felt like I could be my whole self with my children in a way that it had been tampered down in my marriage. We could just sit and could watch Survivor without worrying about what the other partner will say about swear words.
Then I started looking up statistics and saw that across the board, across the political spectrum, both Republicans and Democrats think that single moms are a societal problem. Why do we think that? It’s poverty. So why do women get to this place? What it led me to see is that we have a system that punishes women for getting free, and then we punish them again because they need some help, because they had the audacity to get free. So I wanted to write about this narrative, to reclaim it. Or to claim it.
Honesty is a craft problem, and if you cannot be honest on the page, then don't write it right now. Write something else. Do not write in such a way where you're trying to make other people happy. If you're doing that with your family, you're not telling a good story.
I think people make a mistake when they try to see religion as separate from literally anything. I grew up Baptist in Texas, homeschooled, one of eight children. My mom's a big reader. My parents are very intelligent. Books everywhere. I blame the Bible for [a lot] because you give kids this tome [to learn], and it’s like, hell fire! People are getting raped! Naked men getting drunk in tents! Ghosts! The Torah is wild as hell. And it’s literature. You learn early that the Psalms are poems.
It pulls you into this really intense relationship with text, because you’re always trying to reconcile yourself with these words. Here’s a book, here’s your life, how do these things weave together? And I'm Type A, so when they were like, read the Bible in a year, I was like, six months, and I'll do it again! Why would I do that?
There's nothing wrong with belief. We all search for meaning. If we're finding it through science or poetry, I think that's fine. What bothers me is when we judge other people's forms of seeking, or when we use our own personal belief systems to kill other people.
Be in community with others, because that's the antidote to despair.
The only honest writing about a relationship is its obituary. Because we are not honest. We cover for our partners little pettinesses and we learn so early on — sorry to be gender essentialist again, but I think it still holds power as a narrative because we live in a culture that is gender essentialist, so just to caveat that. We learn early on that you fix men’s shit. You cover up for men's shit.
Like, I love my friends. I'm so honest with them. But there were things about my marriage that I had for 12 years, and I was friends with them before I got married, and I'm still friends with them now, but I was not telling them because I knew if I told them the truth, they would go, why are you there? And I did not have an answer, except for: I don't think I'm allowed to go.
It's really hard to grapple with the effects of honesty. Honesty is powerful and it can ruin your life, and that's why it's so scary.
The reason I say [honest is] a craft issue is because I think it makes it a little less scary. On the page, you can tell when a writer is avoiding something, what they're leaving out. So you need to know why. You need to know what the purpose is. And if you have something to say, you need to be able to say it. If you cannot say it, then you need to rethink what's going on here.
At the end of six months, when I looked back at it, I was like, I can't stay. Because that's how damning the list was. I thought it was just going to be me overreacting about the socks that he would take off and stuff inside the couch cushions. But no. It was far more. But we're so good at gaslighting ourselves. That's why real honesty changes things. Because, like you said, it makes you accountable. It makes you see the story in a way you'd probably rather not see it.
I mean, we’re all wincing as we order toothpaste from Amazon, or as we put gas into our car, or whatever, you know, I’m wearing a Nike hoodie right now fully aware of the harm that Nike has wrought across the world, right? I mean I’m living on stolen land fully aware that it’s stolen land, right? There’s no one who is not complicit in the violence of empire, or no one that I’ve met alive today. And I’m so much more, endlessly more interested in art that says, I’m complicit and so are you. What do we do about it? More interested than in art that says, I’m good and these people are bad, be more like me. And I think it’s very soothing to metabolize that latter type of art. I think it’s very soothing, in that it vents a kind of neoliberal guilt. If you read a book that says people like this are the bad ones, then you are tacitly a good one for reading that book, right? You’re sort of like inoculating yourself against the harm that it describes. Or you’re saying, well, since I have borne witness to this testimony, now I’m exonerated from the harm that it describes. And I’m interested in what that guilt might have otherwise applied itself towards had it not been vented in that way.
I've been living most of my life like The Giving Tree, letting people take and take and take and take from me, and so I've felt kind of like a stump for a long time. I don't want to be a stump, but people with axes can spot me from a mile away. So I'm afraid of getting close to almost everyone. I also never, ever want to take more than I give and make a stump out of anyone else. I live in constant fear of asking for too much, even though I almost never ask for anything.
I'm not going to accept another job that takes over my life, one where I'm required to do more than regular job stuff, one that leaves me a pile of frustrated, furious, demoralized bone dust. I'm going to stop saying yes impulsively so I can stop also canceling everything all the time. I'm going to let the people I love and trust — all five to seven of them — see me weak sometimes, see me really sick sometimes.
We live in a lonely world. No matter how ideal our lives might seem on social media, many of us are isolated and dealing with all manner of problems. I’m not sure why we don’t talk about what we’re dealing with more but I do know there is a lot of pressure to always make it seem like everything is okay, especially when you benefit from privilege(s).
I focused too much of my attention on things that were not him, which made him angry, which made me want to avoid him even more, which made him even angrier.
I never misrepresented myself; I was clear from the beginning that writing was my first love, and I believed him when he told me he was a feminist. I didn’t think to question it, because back then — when we were still childless and had jobs that weren’t yet careers — everything mostly worked the way we thought it was supposed to. As I found more professional success, and as motherhood ravaged my mind and body, nothing I ever did as a spouse was enough, and the happily-ever-after fairy tale I’d been sold started to feel more like a jail.
I so wish I could rely on my work to speak for itself, but almost no labor does. It’s why employers require interviews, resumes, and references. I used to think artistic endeavors should be different, but in a way, it’s even more important to provide context for ourselves as artists because art is so subjective.
I imagine every artist has felt this — “what would it be like to be a muse for once, the subject rather than the speaker? Is my being even capable of inspiring something beautiful, or are these hands only good for sculpting or strumming?”
I’d rather focus on the work, but I can’t help but wonder what I am outside of the work. I’d rather focus on the work, but where does the artist end and the person begin? I’d rather focus on the work, but I can’t pretend I’m not egotistical and vain.
It takes a level of vanity to not only make art, imagining thoughts are worth the ink or the data, but to ask for attention by pushing it through emails and social media posts. The internet holds nearly all of human knowledge, cat pictures and fossil records, Kurosawa and Gentileschi, but I ask for you to look at me instead.
Sometimes we’re attracted to things that torment us.
Acknowledging that love is sometimes impermanent and things get lost along the way and death is inevitable: these brave reckonings help us to turn our pain into something more beautiful.
Fearing impermanence and death, becoming panicked over abandonment, growing resentful or contemptuous in the face of intimacy because some part of our consciousness doesn’t trust anyone, or encounters real love as too big of a threat to our long-term survival: these enormous anxieties prevent us from calmly creating beauty around our pain.
Trauma is a wound from the past that stops you from growing in the future.
But trauma is not what happened to you in the past; it’s how you are reacting in the present to what happened to you in the past.
Once you’ve calmed down, remember that the trigger is a very small part of the mechanism. For the trigger to set something off, there has to be ammunition and an explosive charge. If I trigger you, who’s carrying the explosive charge and ammunition?
The more you get to know yourself, the less likely you are to get triggered. I recommend using those incidents where you are triggered to learn about yourself and discover why this little trigger sets out this huge explosion.
For example, is it because you’re still carrying this belief that you’re not loveable? Or when somebody is late to meet you for coffee, and you get really upset, is it because there’s belief that you’re not valuable? You’re the one with that belief. The other person is just late for coffee.
I still get triggered by things from my past, but I’m much quicker to recognise them and clean them up afterwards.
There’s a certain brand of trans literature that treats transition as a scar, a trauma that irrevocably marks the body. Instead of treating trans-ness as an ontological orientation, this brand of trans lit treats transition as an event with a definitive beginning and end.
Trans lit is often evaluated by critics based on what it says about the trans experience, instead of what it says about literature.
Too often trans fiction is billed as a political mode of writing focused on “representation.” The market posits that identities are a genre unto themselves without considering the ramifications of remaking gender in the image of acceptable dissent. Representation and cultural validity are not political identities, and an imprecise means to evaluate art.
Imogen Binnie’s Nevada finds clever ways around this temporal disparity. Nevada is a rare trans novel that incisively wields an ironic narrative distance from its characters, who all seem to think they have unlocked the secret of gender. Written in the third person present tense with multiple viewpoint characters, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman named Maria. She’s working at a bookstore (not unlike The Strand) before breaking up with her girlfriend and stealing her car to drive across the country. Once in Nevada, Maria tries to get a twenty-something guy named James to admit he’s a trans woman. She quips about biking around Brooklyn, failing to cum while getting choked, and hitting it big on the LiveJournal circuit. A throwaway joke about her transition is a rare instance of the past tense: “Whatever. It was a Very Special Episode.” She’s clearly not someone who likes to look back. This kind of bite evades the “before transition” origin stories that cis audiences crave. So many cis people want to witness a transition timeline, clinging to the alleged stability that terms like AMAB/AFAB bring. Scholar Laura Horak has dubbed this formulaic temporality “hormone time.” Binnie thwarts such simple readings through irony. It’s certainly not the only way to reroute audience expectations over trauma plots, but it’s one of the fastest ways to antagonize a cis reader while still creating an engaging story. For trans lit to grow, it must move beyond mollification.
Every love affair must cross the threshold of the mundane.
Tending to our lives can be an act of community.
Living in community doesn’t always feel good. But getting through, being kind, falling in love, doing good even when everything feels like shit—that’s how we live in the present.
I have never felt less like a person and more like a body.
What they don’t tell you is that when something traumatic happens, the earth does not stop spinning. Everyone will move on with their lives, and you will eventually do the same, though you will spend much longer in this purgatory, growing bitter and enduring a sort of itchy malaise that always follows stark, razor-cut moments. I couldn’t help screaming internally, fists beating on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum, “It’s not fair! Be angry on my behalf! Stop what you’re doing! Think about me!” And everyone was thinking about me, but it wasn’t making me feel any better.
This is how depression works: everything could be going right, and you hear people tell you positive things, but it feels like a boulder is sitting on top of your body.
Risk taking. Remembering the beauty of words. The beauty of sentences. That it's okay to be sensuous and sensual. To write thinking about texture and tactility. To be unapologetic.
Love today should be an active choice — something you grow and build together with a partner, instead of something that just happens to you.
-Andee Tagle and Clare Marie Schneider
Tweets:
Yeah!
Anyway
Here are some selfies I sent my friends this week.
As always, thanks for being here. Thanks to those of you who like reading this enough to pay me $5/month or more. And, if anyone ever wants to buy me a coffee, you can do that here.
-Despy Boutris
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A derm nurse recommended that I use this when I’m not using hydroqinone. If anyone else has melasma, you might try it, too.