round-up: 3/17

book recs, quotations, tweets, & miscellanea

Mar 18, 2023

Happy Friday!

Here’s what I have for you today:

Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets

Housekeeping:

As always, if you live in the US, you can purchase 5 lightly used books for $30 on my website. It’s an affordable way to encounter new literature, and it helps support my Thai food takeout habit!

I’ll typically throw in a free lil zine or some stickers, too.

shop

What I read this week:

Ozempic gossip will destroy our brains
This Megan Snowe book

To read:

Quotations:

Every person who lives in a fat-hating culture inevitably absorbs anti-fat beliefs, assumptions, and stereotypes, and also inevitably comes to occupy a position in relation to power arrangements that are based on weight. None of us can ever hope to be completely free of such training or completely disentangled from the power grid.

-Marilyn Wann, The Fat Studies Reader

Famous people, though, can never be relatable where body image is concerned because they have inordinate money, resources, time, and incentive to manipulate their bodies. Stop going to the well of celebrity for any kind of guidance on how to feel about your own body. There’s no water there.
It is madness to take celebrity body change personally. There is no sense in having positive or negative feelings about their bodies, even if they never change, because their motivations, abilities, and agendas — as well as the implications of their actions — exist on an entirely different plane of reality.

-Mikala Jamison

I'm under no illusion that I'm going to save publishing or anything, but I am really confident that more people starting indie presses can potentially make a difference. It can provide other avenues for different kinds of books that maybe, like mine, weren't anticipated to be number one best sellers, but have kind of a cult following or a certain level of readership. I feel like people really are hungry for more things that are operating outside of traditional publishing structures.

-Chelsea Hodson

Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.

-Prentis Hemphill

Artist is a sensibility. It’s a way of seeing, doing, feeling, reckoning, connecting. Being a sensibility, artistry is distinct from commerce. Though it can be capitalized upon, it cannot be measured by, say, books sold or dollars earned. For these reasons, an artist need not be economically viable. An artist need not be recognized in their time. An artist need not be successful, or even not fail. They need only to be encountered.

-David Davis

I don’t make political art. I don’t make feminist art. I’m a woman who’s a feminist. I don’t make women’s art. I think those categories marginalize anyone’s work. I’m engaged with ideas of power and picturing, of pleasure and punishment, of lives and their beginnings and ends, and how, amid moments of pleasure and tenderness, there are explosions of destruction, subjugation, and the insanity of war.

-Barbara Kruger

Capitalism thrives on fetishizing individualism and deluding us into believing it’s possible to be a singular, inimitable constellation of interests and sensations.

-Sof Sears

what I mean is: sky’s frighted with false stars, adidas
across powerlines

-Kevin Varrone

The ice in her water pinks with sunset. The coral-blue
of the glass in uncertain light. Everything is dying
all the time.

-Andrew Kozma

Just after being caught, the dull knife
scattering jewels over the bloodstained wood. Skin slides off
as easily as clothing, under an expert hand. The raw sex of it.

-Andrew Kozma