round-up: 2/7
Happy Tuesday, folks!
I have a long one for you today, so please open up this email in a new window if you want to read all the way to the end.
In today’s email, I have for you:
A poem
A call to action
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I’m trying to watch more movies!
Please tell me your favorites by tweeting me or responding directly to this email. I’d love to hear your recs.
This is Stella. She’s 16 and 1/2 and I will love her forever.
The vibe this week is this Ashbery poem:
Call to action:
I’m bringing these back (at least for this week), courtesy of Kate McKean’s newest post:
If you loved a book, tell someone about it.
Online, in person, in a review, at the library, to the person holding that book on the subway. TELL SOMEONE. This is the #1 way to support books you love and books in general. Word of mouth is the single most effective form of marketing. If you’re trying to market your own book, tell people what other books you liked, and people with similar tastes will gravitate toward you and click your links and be like Hmmmm, maybe I would like her book too…
& one more piece of advice, just for good measure:
mute/unfollow that person whose success makes you bitter.
You can subscribe to her newsletter for free here.
What I’m reading:
I didn’t know how to write about my sister’s death—so I had AI do it for me. (weird but fascinating conceit)
I followed Nancy Pelosi's diet of breakfast ice cream and hot dogs for a week (this made me laugh)
The Backlash Against America’s Most Popular Novelist Is Way Less Satisfying Than I’d Hoped
To read:
7 Apocalyptic LGBTQ+ Books to Read If You Like HBO’s The Last of Us
Fuck the Poetry Police: On the Index of Major Literary Prizes in the United States
The real secret to making it as a writer: Be fabulously wealthy before you even start
Quotations:
You go to an archive to talk to the dead. It’s like tuning in to a radio station, searching through static, or maybe like casting a line into a river at night. You order up boxes of files, and if you’re lucky, you discover an entire life.
[…]
The archive is one of the spaces where that exchange takes place, where the living go to encounter the dead. It’s a strange thing, summoning ghosts.
-Olivia Laing, “A Fold in Time”
What is the purpose of an archive? It safeguards history, it houses the detritus of the past for the citizens of the future to decode.
-Olivia Laing, “A Fold in Time”
I discovered that making things meant leaving evidence of life behind when I moved on.
-David Wojnarowicz
I sought out examples of GPT 3’s work, and they astonished me. Some of them could easily be mistaken for texts written by a human hand. In others, the language was weird, off-kilter—but often poetically so, almost truer than writing any human would produce. (When the New York Times had GPT-3 come up with a fake Modern Love column, it wrote, “We went out for dinner. We went out for drinks. We went out for dinner again. We went out for drinks again. We went out for dinner and drinks again.” I had never read such an accurate Modern Love in my life.)
I’ve never been good at keeping plants alive. I tend to do the opposite, actually, rationing their sustenance and relegating them to windowless bathrooms. I’ve corrected this tendency as I’ve grown more conscious of it, though no one would ever accuse me of having a green thumb. But this winter, for the first time, my Monstera is having problems. One of its leaves, an elder that incidentally gets the least sunlight of all of all his compatriots, has turned a sort of translucent yellow, recently and as if overnight.
Probably overwatered it, said Jesse. It’s true that the soil is still moist this long after watering day. Is it possible that I took care of my plant with too much gusto, that I paid it too much attention?
I killed a plant once because I gave
it too much water. Lord, I worry
that love is violence.
-José Olivarez
I seduce myself with my hope.
-Susan Sontag, 1967
I always feel like I’m eating when I’m reading. And the need to read (etc. etc.) is like an awful raging hunger.
-Susan Sontag, 1967
I wanted someone to be an iron lung to me.
-Susan Sontag, 1967
It’s in writing that I (most) experience my autonomy, my strength, my not needing other people.
-Susan Sontag, 1967
I make an “idol” of virtue, goodness, sanctity. I corrupt what goodness I have by lusting after it.
[…]
I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
-Susan Sontag, 1970
What can you do with the awareness of having sinned? Nothing. Live with it. (Being forgiven doesn’t cancel the sin.)
-Susan Sontag, 1970
I feel once again, and I rejoice, that I’m not busy dying—I’m still busy being born.
-Susan Sontag, 1970
I am the product of my history. That’s all my “nature” amounts to.
-Susan Sontag, 1970
I mustn't be afraid of showing anger to C.—afraid that I'll drive her away; indicate to her that I don't love her; show that I'm not "good."
[…]
The difficulty of contacting my anger (when it’s aimed at people I love) is that it directly contradicts my notion of how to deserve love—being good.
[…]
I am afraid of my anger.
-Susan Sontag, 1970 (& 1979)
My idolatry: I’ve lusted after goodness. Wanting it here, now, absolutely, increasingly.
-Susan Sontag, 1970
Oh, to be rid of my fixed ideas of how things “ought” to be—
-Susan Sontag, 1970
What I want: energy, energy, energy. Stop wanting nobility, serenity, wisdom—you idiot!
-Susan Sontag, 1970
God help me—help me—to stop loving her if she doesn’t love me anymore.
-Susan Sontag, 1970
Now I rage at my own weakness.
-Susan Sontag, 1970
Let me go on being naked. Let it hurt. But let me survive.
-Susan Sontag, 1970
I’m floating in an ocean of pain. Not floating—but swimming, badly—no style. But not sinking.
Like being run over by a truck. Lying in the street. And nobody comes.
I live inside a deep pain.
-Susan Sontag, 1970
I write badly, with difficulty. My mind is stiff.
-Susan Sontag, 1971
I am alone. I know that now. Perhaps I always will be.
-Susan Sontag, 1971
Solitude is endless. A whole new world. The desert.
-Susan Sontag, 1971
Every feeling is physical.
-Susan Sontag, 1971
My life is a brutal anecdote.
-Susan Sontag, 1973
A story is a voice.
-Susan Sontag, 1973
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.
[…]
The story must strike a nerve—in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.
-Susan Sontag, 1973
I’m now writing out of rage—
-Susan Sontag, 1973
How grateful I am to women—who gave me a body.
-Susan Sontag, 1973 (on the subject of sex)
I am a woman. And thereby, a whole new universe of death rose before my eyes.
-Susan Sontag, 1974
Women and courage. Not courage to do, but courage to endure / suffer.
-Susan Sontag, 1974
I’ve found a system of safe harbors, to ward off terror—to resist, to survive.
-Susan Sontag, 1975
I returned Sunday night. Have been meditating helplessly, suffering compulsively. I squirm like a pinned insect. There is no help for it. I am afraid, paralyzed.
-Susan Sontag, 1976
I have nothing to write about. Every topic burns.
-Susan Sontag, 1976
The function of writing is to explode one’s subject—transform it into something else. (Writing as a series of transformations.)
-Susan Sontag, 1976
I’m looking for new forms of advocacy.
-Susan Sontag, 1976
Let it hurt, let it hurt.
-Susan Sontag, 1977
Light snow, silence, empty streets, the fog, thrilling cold—so much beauty. Like breathing pure oxygen.
-Susan Sontag, 1977
Pulse of red on the horizon for the ten minutes after the sun has set.
-Susan Sontag, 1978
Madness is single-mindedness.
-Susan Sontag, 1979
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
-Susan Sontag, 1979
I’ve become passive. I don’t invent, I don’t yearn. I manage, I cope.
-Susan Sontag, 1979
Tweets:
