round-up: 3/29
what i'm buying, reading, listening to, and some quotations <3
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m buying
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
AWP was this week, and I did not go because I didn’t want to use my PTO or pay for my own attendace—grad school spoiled me. I hope everyone who went had a blast and bought lots of new books.
I did make a tiny zine filled with tiny poems this week, though:
What I’m buying:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
A Brief History of Fat Fads in America, From Nut Margarine to Beef Tallow
Suspended for Pro-Palestine Speech: My statement on Yale Law School’s embrace of AI-generated smears
What Is Beauty? The History of Pursuing Ever-Shifting Ideals
Quotations:
The title Trauma Plot is a reference — sort of a winking reference — to Parul Sehgal’s essay against the trauma plot that came out in The New Yorker. I think that there are aspects of the essay that feel very rigorous and smart and aspects of it that I find very reactionary. She created a phraseological phenomenon that then became shorthand for a lot of people who were much less rigorous than she was, who then used the term “trauma plot” as a way of dismissing any sort of traumatic narrative or testimony in art and literature and culture. I don’t agree with how she identified it, or how she necessarily critiques it, but I do think she identified a real phenomenon in literature.
I’m not a cynic; I’m not a nihilist; I’m not an accelerationist or a doomer. But it’s just hard to look at what has happened over the past decade and to believe that people still want better things. I believe that there is the possibility of a better world. It just feels like the room for motion is so much less, and that’s terrifying to me.
In terms of justice within this sort of apparatus of the state do I believe that there’s a pathway toward justice? I don’t. I can’t speak for what other people want in terms of retribution and rehabilitation. I don’t think that the state will ever serve victims of sexual violence; that is just not what it’s designed to do.
When #MeToo happened, everything women wrote about rape outside reportage was crowned by the same bloody image—Judith Beheading Holofernes—by the Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. You’d think all of us were running around planning to cut men’s heads off, but I’ll admit, back then, I sort of was. I wanted my rapists dead. I boiled over with viciousness.
My tongue became a blade, yes, but my body, too, burst with white heat.
For most of my life, violence came in the form of a fist.
I couldn’t bear a closed space and never ate, but I was agile. My hunger left me edgy. Every part of me became a sharp point.
Once I started talking about the rapes, words tore through me. I became an oracle of my self, I wasn’t able to stop. Logorrhea is one name for this compulsion, a pathological need to divulge.
I’d pass him on the streets and his face tore through me like a nuclear blast. I’d be in a debilitating panic attack for days. Shell-shocked, I remember thinking, though of course I’d never been in war.
Shame particularizes. Shame isolates.
Although it’s fiction, A Little Life understands it’s possible to spend most of a life reckoning with sexual trauma. I surely have. One of the troubles with the dominant narrative of #MeToo was that it continued to imagine the experience of rape as an anomalous event in the usual order of a life, even as it underscored the overwhelming breadth of rape culture itself.
I write for the messy bitches. I write for girls who haven’t given their grief language.
Catharsis: I love this word, because I love everything to do with Dionysus, and catharsis is what he’s all about. Very roughly, it means something like “release”…but that’s misleading in English. It also means “purification” or “purgation” in a medical, religious, and ritual sense, and translators famously struggle with it because the meaning is so nebulous.
Hamartia: We’re often taught at school that hamartia means a fatal flaw, but it’s a devious word. In classical Greek, it’s an archery term: it literally means a “miss,” as in, to miss a target—so, a mistake, or a miscalculation.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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