round-up: 4/13
reading recs, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Recommendations
What I’m reading
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.
Things to read:
Housekeeping:
I just found out about this library of free e-books. Wonderful resource.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
I have learned a lot from my wife over the past five years even if I haven’t been able to apply those lessons to my own life as much as I would like to. When she speaks, she never says umm or uses other fillers. If her thought isn’t fully formed, she pauses, assembles what she wants to say, trusts that she has the right to take that time, and then when she is ready, she continues. It’s a real skill because often, people try to fill the space of uncertainty with random rambling as if that is an adequate substitute for coherence.
I have had nonconsensual sexual experiences during which I was calm. I have had consensual sexual experiences during which I panicked. I have found my consent in situations where people like me were allowed neither yes nor no. I have ended relationships of all kinds because I was triggered by something the other person did with my consent. I have had consensual sexual experiences with people who violated my consent previously, or who went on to do it later.
There was something about the skin of suburbia that never quite fit me.
There is power in naming things. I know farmers who do not name the animals intended for slaughter. Naming makes everything too real — too intimate.
The trope of the predatory lesbian lingers in every queer woman afraid to make a move, because she doesn’t want to be creepy.
This book, I feel like, to me it’s an in-joke with myself to have “essays” on the cover, because people have been calling me an essayist for years. And in my opinion I’ve never published any essays ever. I don’t think of any of my work as essays. I don’t have any precious feeling about that genre. That said, I don’t want to be a writer of bad sentences, and I want everything to be interesting. But it’s not like a bouquet of flowers, per se.
I think students also get tortured a little bit by trends. They’re worried that their work might not be of the moment, and they’re worried their sensibility might not be welcome. I want them all to have a place. I want them all to do what their sensibility leads them to do as well as they can.
Brontez Purnell was visiting my class last semester, and it was just so great. He was just saying, “I’m not ashamed of scrolling. Are you guys ashamed of your scrolling?” I like this idea that we don’t have to approach everything we do with an “Oh, God, I hate that I’m doing this.” That we can actually just be more cognizant and curious and then also accepting of what we are doing.
I would never say witnessing is not a lever of doing, or that it doesn’t have value in and of itself, or that it can’t be something really problematic in and of itself.
That model of the individual is comic, in a way, but also lethal. The goal is to overcome the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge, separate, and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual. That’s a translation from German. They say selbstständig, implying that you stand on your own. But who actually stands on their own? We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things. Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move, and so did my shoes, my orthotics, and the long hours spent by my physical therapist. His labor is in my walk, as it were. I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations.
Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.
Here in the United States, during the aids crisis, when it became clear that many people were losing their lovers and not receiving adequate recognition for that loss. In many cases, people would go home to their families and try to explain their loss, or be unable to go home to their families or workplaces and try to explain their loss. The loss was not recognized, and it was not marked, which means that it was treated as if it were no loss. Of course, that follows from the fact that the love they lived was also treated as if it were no love.
Certain lives are considered more grievable. We have to get beyond the idea of calculating the value of lives, in order to arrive at a different, more radical idea of social equality.
I am talking about how the term “reality” functions in social-political discourse. Sometimes “reality” is used to debunk as childish or unknowledgeable points of view that actually are holding out a more radical possibility of equality or freedom or democracy or justice, which means stepping out of a settled understanding. We see how socialist ideals, for instance, are dismissed as “fanciful” in the current election. I find that the dismissive form of realism is guarding those borders and shutting down those horizons of possibility. It reminds me of parents who say, “Oh, you’re gay . . .” or “Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.” Instead of saying, “This is a new world, and we are going to build it together, and you’re going to have my full support.”
The physical blow cannot be the only model for thinking about what violence is. Anything that jeopardizes the lives of others through explicit policy or through negligence—and that would include all kinds of public policies or state policies—are practices of institutional or systemic violence. Prisons are the most persistent form of systemic violence regularly accepted as a necessary reality. We can think about contemporary borders and detention centers as clear institutions of violence. These violent institutions claim that they are seeking to make society less violent, or that borders keep violent people out. We have to be careful in thinking about how “violence” is used in these kinds of justifications. Once those targeted with violence are identified with violence, then violent institutions can say, “The violence is over there, not here,” and inflict injury as they wish.
It’s unclear whether Trump is watching Netanyahu and Erdoğan, whether anyone is watching Bolsonaro, whether Bolsonaro is watching Putin, but I think there are some contagious effects. A leader can defy the laws of his own country and test to see how much power he can take. He can imprison dissenters and inflict violence on neighboring regions. He can block migrants from certain countries or religions. He can kill them at a moment’s notice. Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power, its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks: no shame, no legal repercussions. They have this leader who models that freedom. The sadism intensifies and accelerates.
It’s not as central in my life as it was, but all my commitments are still there. Israel has banned me from entry, because of my support for B.D.S. [the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement], so it is hard to sustain alliances in Palestine—Israel controls all those borders. I work with Jewish Voice for Peace. I’m particularly worried about Trump’s new anti-Semitism doctrine, which seems to suggest that every Jew truly or ultimately is a citizen of the state of Israel. And that means that any critique of Israel can be called anti-Semitic, since Trump—and Netanyahu—want to say that the state of Israel represents all Jewish people. This is a terrible reduction of what Jewish life has been, historically and in the present, but, most frighteningly, the new anti-Semitism policy will license the suppression of Palestinian student organizations on campus as well as research in Middle East studies. I have some deep fears about that, as should anyone who cares about state involvement in the suppression of knowledge and the importance of nonviolent forms of advocacy for those who have suffered dispossession, violence, and injustice.
he dead deer we saw
on the way to your place,
brain knitted wet outside
its chest, once lighthouse
twice blooded, pulse instinct.
who do we rot back to? steel
aluminum stare, ants crawling
the iced unblinking. the radio’s playing
a song about getting undressed.
wanting someone down to the breast
bone. & the vultures dancing halos
at the head, wingwritten crown,
a five second Jesus. & then it’s gone,
you’re driving so fast it breadcrumbs
the memory.
Tweets:
Can’t stop screaming over this
That’s all for today!
