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round-up: 5/13

despyboutris.substack.com

round-up: 5/13

reading recs, quotations, & tweets

Despy Boutris
May 13, 2023
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round-up: 5/13

despyboutris.substack.com

Happy Saturday!

Here’s what I have for you today:

  • What I’m reading/watching

  • Quotations

  • Tweets


What I read this week:

  • Dear Animal, MK Chavez

What I’m watching:

  • John Mulaney’s new comedy special (loved it)

  • The Fabelmans (too long; loved it nevertheless)

  • Beau is Afraid (I have never been more stressed out by a film in my entire life)


Quotations:

The initial question that sort of comes up over and over—or used to, I think it’s slightly more nuanced now—is “Can you separate the art from the artist?” And that’s one of the first principal questions this book asks. And because I believe that biography befalls us, and because I believe we can’t pull out our response to the biography, I think the decision to separate is a flawed decision. It’s a failure before it begins.

-Claire Dederer


I always knew that I would burn.

-MK Chavez


The petal skin of my inner thigh blossomed / red & purple.

-MK Chavez


The collision of our breath

makes the universe fall,

when your hands touch my face

everything opens.

-MK Chavez


I like how we look. What a turn on. Let’s not mind being the abomination.

-MK Chavez


Language is gut. Twisted rope.

-MK Chavez


The sky is bereft / of hope.

-MK Chavez


Last night I dreamt of you. I was trapped in a house

with a million rooms. You were behind each door.

-MK Chavez


You were assemblage of saline and troubled root systems, mangle of habitat. You being woman, being girl, you pillar of salt, you became the kind of terrain that accepts whatever settles into it.

-MK Chavez


There is nothing / but silence between us.

-MK Chavez


In an effort to explain myself

I sometimes uttered, I am the aftermath

of war.

-MK Chavez


What if the reality is that most people really do try to help others once disaster strikes, at least in the most immediate aftermath? What if it isn’t human nature that produces any ensuing trouble, but institutional or elite failure to imagine or encourage better outcomes?

-Matt Bell


In her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit investigates the aftermath of five disasters, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the events of 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. In each case, Solnit argues that while institutions often fail or are simply too slow to respond to large-scale tragedies, many ordinary people immediately spring to each other’s aid, sharing resources, rescuing neighbors from danger, and otherwise forming effective temporary communities defined by mutual assistance. For a moment, neighbors are not competing for space or resources or power or attention, instead sharing what they can with those around them.

-Matt Bell


It is the devotion of the moth to the moon / that drives it to its end.

-MK Chavez


When your mouth met mine

it was Vitruvian. We leveled the place.

-MK Chavez


You, being poet, / and you, being woman, / knew it was too late / from the start.

-MK Chavez


In the city of want we find ourselves / behind every door.

-MK Chavez


Tweets:

No, I still can’t embed them because, yes, Elon is still a brat.

I love pettiness.

Wow. Expensive chapbook contest.

Gross.

Late-stage gaylorism.

Oy vey!

Big mood.

An icon.

Yeah.


Have a great weekend—

-Despy Boutris
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