round-up: 2/15
updates, reading recs, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Wednesday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
This is a quick & good read—for everyone, but mostly for editors who are charging for submissions.
I hate you! Stop that!
& here are some highlights for me:
Lit mags subsisting off their submitters—their rejectees—is not the right or ethical thing to do.
[…]
If a lit magazine charges submission fees but offers no payment, is the poverty supposed to be the proof of our art? And what about journals that charge fees but pay very, very nicely? I don’t want to complain about writers actually getting paid (especially very, very nicely) but a publication like that is even more likely to solicit work, making the odds in the slush even worse.
What I read this week:
Seven years after I met the infamous Instagram star, I’m ready to tell my side of the story.
New Organism, Andrea Rexilius
To read:
I Really Didn’t Want to Write This Promotional Essay Tied to My Book Release
Why Did the Harrowing Personal Essay Take Over the Internet?
Quotations:
I have at times lost touch with my body. I have felt more like an aura than an organism.
-Andrea Rexilius
Loving a person is a séance, in that it involves strangeness and necessity.
-Andrea Rexilius
I no longer wish to escape without a trace.
-Andrea Rexilius
I no longer want to leave stones behind to find my way back to the house.
-Andrea Rexilius
I am a girl, and what does it feel like to be a girl. It feels like a hand over your mouth.
-Andrea Rexilius
I have never much regarded death, or cared one way or the other, as long as I do not die by the hands of men, in strange and brutal ways.
-Andrea Rexilius
The moon was yellow. Tendrils. Clouds brushing the face. The sky not black but navy. The moon elongated. Harsh. Gloriously alive.
-Andrea Rexilius
Men want to see you bleed, my mother said. Like a gutted fish, she said. Like a submerged memory.
-Andrea Rexilius
I wake up in this haze of violence. To be human is to go to war.
-Andrea Rexilius
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually met the author. The author passes through my life, a kind of presence-absence, but we do not speak.
-Michael Palmer
I don’t know if I’m undermining identity so much as continually rewriting and revising it.
-Harryette Mullen
There’s no way to talk about Asian immigrants or the Asian American experience as separate from the Black American experience or the Indigenous experience or the Latinx experience because of the relation to whiteness. Nothing’s in a vacuum.
I wanted the audience to be unsettled by this first poem. To say, you’re not going to get to just sit here and happily consume exotic stories. That’s not what this book is going to be. I want to make you uncomfortable. I want you to be questioning your consumption of what you’re reading, to understand how that implicates you and implicates me.
I think it’s hard to sustain a rageful tone when you’re aware that your oppression pales in comparison to other people’s oppression. I mean, one of the prevalent feelings during the pandemic was like, Yeah, I’m having a hard time, but compared to the frontline workers, or the people watching their relatives in care facilities decline via tablets, I’m not allowed to complain because my suffering is not as great as theirs.
[…]
But how do we still manage to voice what is happening to us?
The comparative model, or “oppression Olympics,” as some people might call it, is itself a colonial strategy in which people are pitted against one another.
The so-called oppression Olympics is very much a function of racial capitalism. Whose suffering is allowed to rise to the point of being recognizable, and recognizable by whom? And for what purpose?
I just want poetry to have the same scope as other art forms. People never say, “Oh, all visual art is supposed to be beautiful and flat so it can hang on your wall.” I don’t see why poetry should have aesthetic limits as a genre. I always aspire to write poetry where after a reading, no one will tell me, “Oh, your poems are so beautiful.” I’ve started responding to that comment with, “Really?”
I think of poetry as the most concentrated form of language. If we give up unsettling people with poetry, then who exactly is supposed to be doing the unsettling? Part of my project, at least for the past two books, is to carve out more space for the analytic within lyric. I’m a constitutional lawyer, and my training is to pick phrases apart and to understand their history. I wanted to be able to deploy that in a poem.
More quotations:
You might note from what I’m reading this week that I’ve been thinking a lot about being a writer/artist & what that means re: a ~social media presence~ in the modern world. But I don’t feel like offering commentary beyond 1) these articles bring up good points, 2) this phenomenon feels very gendered, and 3) I often find it to be a bummer.
Anyway, here are some quotations from said articles:
Nowadays with social media so many people are also obviously performing rhetorically, whether it’s a political stance or a perfectly curated life. I grew up in an era where poetry was not considered a path to wealth, so I’m curious about the corporatization of literary careers, the role that awards play, and the phenomenon of the poet-celebrity.
The job of influencer, in other words, involves learning how to constantly accommodate oneself to the means of establishing and maintaining visibility. That work, in turn, could be broken down into three core pillars: consistent self-branding (defined by sociologist Alison Hearn as “self-conscious construction of a meta-narrative and meta-image of self); self-optimization for platforms (organizing one’s content to be recognizable by algorithmic systems); and commitment to selling authenticity (that is, doing all of the above while remaining “relatable” and “real”).
[…]
Such concerns (and behavior) were once mainly the purview of hype-house members, beauty TikTokers, Twitch streamers, and the like. But it has begun to extend beyond those who think of themselves as influencers. Considerations about how to present oneself on platforms have become a part of the everyday routine for a broader swath of the workforce.
[…]
What was once a matter of professionalization specifically for influencers is now becoming a part of professionalization in general.
Boundaries between personal expression and entrepreneurship, between socializing and commerce, are eroded while the routine, mundane, and the everyday are painstakingly aestheticized. Workers must play to audiences, clients, bosses and platforms all at the same time, with no guarantee that any of it will pay off.
Artists who feel the pressure to self-brand on social media as a way of finding success “are obliged to produce both art and a portrait of themselves as an artist.”
When a book’s image comes to matter more than the content, where does this leave authors?
With social media, the work of a writer—which includes writing and reading, alongside many other tiresome administrative tasks—can be distilled into a performance of intellect, despite its deeply private nature.
The book is a venerated symbol of one’s cultural tastes. It is tangible and static, an uneditable time capsule of ideas and thoughts that exists in stark contrast to our algorithmic feeds.
No art piece or artist works alone, even if they try to pretend they do. There are always traditions and lineages to pull from and be inspired by, and I wanted to highlight and celebrate and share them.
-Jade Song
Most published writers are expected to capitulate to the attention economy, distilling themselves into a literary brand. They must produce promotional content to canonize their work, slot it into identifiable genres, and earmark it for comparison with other successful titles.
The distinction between writer and influencer has become harder to parse. The two are increasingly inextricable. Most writers have to court an audience. “The problem is that art withers and dies without dissemination. The artist has a dual quest, to create good work and ensure that it’s shared,” writes Lauren Ocampo in an essay titled, “I Really Didn’t Want to Write This Promotional Essay Tied to My Book Release.”
The image management that once seemed incidental, or at least parallel, to the literary profession seems now one of its most necessary, integral functions. In the age of Twitter and Instagram, an online presence, which is necessarily public and necessarily consumable, seems all but mandatory for a writer who reaches (or hopes to reach) a certain level of renown, especially for anyone dealing in personal essays or cultural criticism. In the way that the influencer uses her image to sell her swag, the writer leverages her life to sell her work, to editors and audiences.
When it comes to the commodification of the self, the work and the public idea of the work are often conflated, just as the internet flattens everything else. It’s harder to separate the art from the artist.
The problem comes down to the way we view work, and what we view as “work” in the first place. There is a perception that to simply exist in public space, to influence by living, is not work at all. These influencers who produce photos of themselves, who turn their wider lives into content rather than confining themselves to a byline, are thus dismissed as vapid and shallow, sources of pleasure and no more. The writer, by contrast, is viewed primarily as a purveyor of intellect and meritorious beauty. The writer gives us art, gives us insight and rigor, contextualizes the phenomena that confound us. Their labor is seen as more valid. But these two imperatives are increasingly inextricable.
One must have a persona on the persona-based internet, but the persona must be honest, or at least maintain the appearance of honesty.
As a writer without much in the way of influence, I see these women and I feel an imperative to find the thing about me that could best be underscored, amplified, and repeated across platforms, the fragment of self that could become persona. I do not believe any of them to be calculating persona-crafters – I take them at their word that what they present is authentic – but I believe they have a very useful instinct, in addition to their talent for writing, for precisely which parts of themselves to share and how. Frankly, I fear that is an instinct that I lack but would do well to cultivate. The media industry is less stable than ever, and the one safe strategy seems to be the commodification of personality, turning your voice into followers and paid subscribers that no CEO can take away. We are all but forced to make ourselves, not just our words, the thing we sell.
It does not escape me that I have been considering only women, that the question of how to optimally present oneself online feels distinctly feminine, and this feels unfair even as the skill is somewhat advantageous, but mostly it feels inevitable. We are socialized to be highly attuned to making ourselves palatable for an audience, to be pleasing to the eye and the ear. This is the case as much on Twitter and Instagram as the physical world. And so we are slotted into this category, seen as much for our apartments and outfits as our writing, left to compete on every level at once.
(Anonymity is a luxury.) Instead we have the age of the woman writer-influencer, both journalist and celebrity.
Those who insist that the job of the writer is simply, only, to write are deluding themselves. Editors whose advice is to get off Twitter, put your head down, and do the work are missing something fundamental and indispensable about digital media. It’s that all the things that invite derision for influencers – self-promotion, fishing for likes, posting about the minutiae of your life for relatability points – are also integral to the career of a writer online.
A good amount of my book is about how capitalism, the internet, the monetized self are all destructive to our functioning as real humans; yet, the better I express those ideas, the better I become a marketable object myself.
-Jia Tolentino
Tweets:
