round-up: 4/19
what i'm reading & listening to, and some quotations <3
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
Lately, I’ve been keeping track of my dreams:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Stressed out? These 8 skills can help boost mood and reduce anxiety
The Loves of My Life, Edmund White
Quotations:
Writing is hard. When I do it, it often causes me pain. No matter how much I try to just sit down and get the words out, I must first battle myself—parts of my brain engaged in combat with each other.
Everything good requires friction.
Today, our world seems intent on removing friction wherever possible. DoorDash makes the process of getting food frictionless (really, it just places the friction onto someone else, your delivery driver), Uber removes any possible friction (see: encountering other people) from your commute, internet therapy-speak encourages you to remove any and all friction from your personal life, even if that means being totally alone. And, of course, generative AI removes the entire process of frictive creation from your brain, outsourcing it to computers so that, yes, writing is easier, but easier in the sense that canned tuna on a frozen waffle is easier than cassoulet.
In any given moment, whether it’s in a movement or in a pandemic, or in a relationship, in a sexual encounter, whatever it is, we have choices and we have constraints, and sometimes they’re more dire in terms of their injustice than others. But, a practice of freedom to me involves a kind of active engagement with looking at what our choices and what our constraints are at any given instance and trying to flip the constraints that aren’t working for our goals, that aren’t working for us, and seeing how fixed some of them are and how stubborn and how moveable.
So, that’s a little bit different than perseverating on a time and a place when we will be free. It’s a more down-to-earth kind of practice. The two don’t obviate each other. You can aspire towards future versions of more liberation while also having practices of freedom. It’s not really an either-or, it’s more that the book focuses on one over the other.
One of my good friends and mentors gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten about this. He said, “Remember, your feelings about the work don’t determine the value of the work.” You can feel frustrated, disgusted, agitated, hopeless, every day, on and off, but you can’t necessarily believe all your moods. You just have to keep on working.
If you feel like you open up your files and everything looks like shit and you’re upset, that mood is going to make you want to invalidate your whole project. You just have to get kind of Buddhist about it and recognize all that is weather.
I do try to talk about art as a place for exploration of taboo, or images or things that might be unacceptable elsewhere. I think that there’s value in that, and I think that makes for a certain risk, that art has to take a certain risk. Not all art, necessarily, in the same way, but I think if it doesn’t take some of those risks, it is probably not living up to all it could be. And with risk comes failure. I think that is built into the process, and I think that’s okay, even when it’s appalling. Taken on a broad level, I think it has to be a part of the process.
I think restraint is an undervalued form of freedom. It kind of relates to what we were saying before about impulse, in that, a lack of impulse control, whether it be addiction to substance or fossil fuels, is a certain kind of freedom, but it can often actually be a compulsion that doesn’t actually lead to the state that we desire or the state that would cause less suffering and make us feel more free.
We ask sometimes if it’s ethical to consume good art by bad people, but those conversations are usually had in hindsight. Can I enjoy Rosemary’s Baby if Roman Polanski is a rapist? Well, that movie came out in 1968, no one is stopping you from watching a classic, and Polanski is going to die any minute now. But Rowling? Her work is still contemporary, still being updated, and she’s still getting rich off of it.
No one will stop you from watching the newest Harry Potter remake. No one will stop you from seeing it on Broadway. But is riding a broomstick at Universal Orlando worth the eventual subjugation of people just trying to live? Is your selfish and brief pleasure (around a FRANCHISE FOR NINE YEAR OLDS) more important than the fundamental existences of people you perhaps don’t even know? Do trans children, too, not deserve the safety you used to feel when you tucked into those books as a kid yourself?
I like to represent what goes on through someone’s mind while having sex—the idle thoughts, the resentful thoughts, the comic aspects of the body failing to meet the acrobatic ambitions of the imagination—and the sometimes enriching sometimes embarrassing or dull, often distracting or irrelevant or wonderfully intimate and tender moment of lovemaking.
-Edmund White
One in five Generation Zers identify as LGBTQ+, which might seem like progress, but nearly half are contemplating suicide and 70 percent are reporting they’re severly anxious.
-Edmund White
In my own case, Eros at least crashed through class barriers. I seduced or hired men of all creeds, races, and ages.
-Edmund White
What goes on in people’s heads when they have sex? Fear of a fiasco, delight in merging, yearning to dominate or succumb, hope for eternal love, cynical pleasure in duping a virgin, thereby adding a notch to their belt? Or just animal pleasure?
-Edmund White
I liked Buddhism because it led to the extinction of all desire, which in my place was noxious because it was beamed at members of my own sex, a longing I knew was bad if seemingly ineradicable.
-Edmund White
I always feel as if I don’t really know people unless I’ve gone to bed with them.
-Edmund White
I was stung from ten or eleven by sexual desire. It was a constant, nagging lust.
-Edmund White
We would wrestle for hours, not out of hostility or competitiveness but because it felt good—to rub our crotches against each other, to have my biceps pinned down by his knees and inhale the odor of his piss-stained denim jeans.
-Edmund White
When we long for something, say a cock, we fetishize what guards and disguises that thing, blue jeans and their metal grommets. I was a jeans fanatic.
-Edmund White
Desire, if it remained undiagnosed, unnamed, pure and all-consuming, spoke to her, to her innermost heart.
-Edmund White
I’m afraid that a generalized amnesia has blotted out most of those painful memories (a terrible thing for a writer to confess).
-Edmund White
I knew something was seriously wrong with me, that I was abnormal. I toyed with the idea that I was superior, as many gays once did.
-Edmund White
As a seven-year-old I had stolen cigarettes and smoked them in the basement; I needed to be transgressive, though everyone thought of me as a sweet good boy. I had to recognize my own lawlessness while appearing to others as a solid citizen.
-Edmund White
There is a pleasure in diving into the forbidden.
-Edmund White
I was obsessed with him, not sexually but religiously. It never occured to me to do anything sexual with him except kissing. Or just to look at him.
-Edmund White
I hadn’t promised (ever, to anyone) to be faithful, but I was in love, which at the beginning equals fidelity.
-Edmund White
I thought his bad grammar proved he was a lifelong top. I was surprised he was turned on by an inert bottom.
-Edmund White
So much of gay sex and love (all sex? All love?) is verbal, coded fantasies of possession or submission, pocket dramas of eternal love, parting, or reconciliation, of projection or triangulation, of love at first sight.
-Edmund White
Soon enough I was lonely and horny, two conditions so frequently coupled that it might be called lorny, which sounds better to my ear than honely, maybe because I think it’s related to forlorn, the saddest word in the language.
-Edmund White
I wanted to be pure, to stop acting out, to court a nice girl—to reinvent myself entirely.
-Edmund White
I was burning up with desire. The DJ was polite but uninterested, really an embarrassed monument to indifference. He moved so little, seemed such an object, that I had to stroke him to make sure he was warm and alive.
-Edmund White
Maybe writing itself needs to be written with a scalpel, not a brush.
-Edmund White
I was so insecure about my body that my very shame felt erotic—vulnerable, despicable as if despising was on the program, worthy of being punished, eagerto be punished.
-Edmund White
I said I wanted to go straight. I was determined to be a great writer—not bestselling but canonical—and I thought, this being before tell-all biographies were written, that all great writers were straight.
-Edmund White
For me love was always passionate and one-sided, aspirational and impossible, never domestic and mutual.
-Edmund White
What did it feel like to be in love?
Constant suspense.
-Edmund White
Words are our secret weapons even where touch is forbidden.
-Edmund White
I was always inclined toward love. If someone would respond to me, open up his body to me, smear kisses across my bruised lips, I would instantly begin to love him, to imagine our future, plan to prepare his favorite dishes, find his points of secret vanity and play up to them.
-Edmund White
Although maybe I became a conscious sexual masochist only as I got older, even old and jaded, I was always a psychological masochist, invariably unhappy in love.
-Edmund White
I say I’ve said farewell to S&M sex (maybe all sex) but I still respond to edgy personals. And if someone were to twist my nipples through my shirt, I would still fall in love.
-Edmund White
AIDS made us fear sex, though, in a Russian roulette way, we still pursued it.
-Edmund White
Age doesn’t make us wiser but provides us with more grudges.
-Edmund White
I am oddly lesbian in my taste for sexlessness, for slippered tea and friendship, for “Boston” marriage, after a short season of lust.
-Edmund White
Am I alone in thinking the passionate lover is so jealous he doesn’t mind if the beloved doesn’t put out as love as she or he doesn’t sleep with anyone else, that he would gladly adopt chastity if it guaranteed fidelity?
-Edmund White
There’s no fag like a dead fag. What was that joke? Hi, Mom, first the bad news. I’m gay. Then the good—I have AIDS and I’m dying.
-Edmund White
I was a seemingly mild boy full of inner rage.
-Edmund White
Oh, I want to get away from here and lead a clean, simple, antiseptic life…
-Tennessee Williams
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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Thanks for the Scaachi Soul quotes about JKR. It's interesting that very few people (myself included) didn't pick up on her incipient meanness way back when.