round-up: 6/08
what i'm reading & listening to, and some quotations
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
How to Fuck Like a Girl, Vera Blossom
I Love Shopping, Lauren Cook
Quotations:
Being trans is a prayer for and belief in something better.
-Carta Monir
Remember people love you, even if they only think of you in the dark of their room, kneeling at their bed.
-Vera Blossom
This is how I began my foray into girlhood: with lots of sex.
-Vera Blossom
I was feeling self-destructive and in need of anything to make me feel better. I was too much of a square to binge drink and did not know where I would be able to get drugs, so I turned primarily to sex.
-Vera Blossom
I was so hungry, so desperate for physical touch, the heat of another body pressed up against mine.
-Vera Blossom
It feels so reductive to dissect oneself into categories like this, but the gay hookup scene—as it perhaps always had been—was focused on bodies seeking bodies for sexual catharsis, not really on people seeking people.
-Vera Blossom
Voracious gay sex is how I waded into girlhood. While you’re fucking someone, the edges of your body start to blur and are replaced by feelings of pleasure, stimulation. I felt around for the edges of my gender in the bodies of the men who fucked me.
-Vera Blossom
I want to live in that obsession of mutual desire and affection, where the psychic storm between two minds conjures a lusty fantasy, and every conversation drips with seduction.
-Vera Blossom
Sex doesn’t have to begin and end with a kiss and a cum. It can begin at first glance, at hello! It’s not over when your insides are flooded or when someone screams with pleasure. It can continue into the laughter after the orgasm, into the conversation that you have once your brains are temporarily clear of that hedonistic fog of lust, to dinner and breakfast and lunch. So many people give up before I’m satisfied. Leave it on the couch, in the condom. Always the foreplay, never the after care. It’s like these people have never thought about the narrative structure of a good story. I can’t truly be a sex addict under these dire conditions. I want more more more more more more more more, and I don’t want it all to end right in the middle, right when it’s getting exciting.
-Vera Blossom
The rest of the communication happens between our bodies.
-Vera Blossom
I don’t want to blend in. I want to be worshiped.
-Vera Blossom
Once, a teacher, fed up with my insubordination, shot back, “So, are you a girl?” I didn’t really feel like a girl at the time, but I knew I was something else. Definitely not a boy. I knew I was a fag. Maybe I was a monster.
-Vera Blossom
The gap between how I felt in my mind’s eye, in my fantasy, and how I was actually seen was a deep, deep chasm. When the dream world and material world don’t align, it’s devastating.
-Vera Blossom
Trans panic is a fucking bullshit excuse for defense, but it also defines a phenomenon: unhealed men who feel surprised that they are attracted to a girl with a dick.
-Vera Blossom
Remember, beauty is a tool—you can use it to bring yourself closer to a heavenly alien creature, paint a picture of the kind of person you want to be, use it to scare away predators—or like camouflage to get through the day.
-Vera Blossom
Passing is dangerous because it locks you into patriarchal ideas of beauty. You’ve gone through all this trouble to transition, to live your full life, only to find yourself locked into the binaristic jail of gender. You realize that the other side of the bars is also a jail.
-Vera Blossom
Maybe it’s not money that I like, but a sense of security that I find comfort in. Material happiness, cozy creature comforts. Money buys that.
-Vera Blossom
I live for that attention, though. That visibility makes me feel like I exist. That I’m here. So much of my life has felt ghostly, apparition-like. Half here, half in my own imagination.
-Vera Blossom
I know it’s not enough. I know that the capitalist death machine is large and powerful and bloodthirsy. I know that we can protect each other from falling to the wayside, from being forgotten or going hungry, from being eaten up, chewed and grinded into nothing by the cogs of it all, but we can only do so much when we’re all dealing with medical debt or student loans, or we’re all sick or we’re all hungry, and our cars are out of gas and all of our money is being leeched to build missiles and shoot them at poor people halfway across the world. I know that all of that—the fame and the money and the attention—can keep you out of the death machine’s grasp for a little bit, but it’s not true freedom. It can’t be.
-Vera Blossom
I love how it feels to have attention rained down on me—it makes me feel alive—but it’s not going to fill my belly.
-Vera Blossom
There was a mutual desire that was so all-encompassing that whenever we could get naked, we flew into each other like magnets. We had sex like we were trying to fuse our molecules together to create one singular new being.
-Vera Blossom
Your home is inevitably a reflection of the irrepressable: your taste, your money, your habits.
-Vera Blossom
I lov that fireflies only twinkle in July when it’s hot and sweaty and they’re all desperate to breed. I can relate.
-Vera Blossom
Another trick to cruising: pay attention to the eyes. We love to talk about the poignant, silent gaze between lesbians in cinema, but fags have their own silent language of looking. I was always searching, peering into the eyes of old, white retirees, corporate regulars coming in after work, wayward blue collar gays of color, looking for something. A message. A returned glance. Flash of pupils. There’s an entire language contained within the shapes of sclerae.
-Vera Blossom
Being a girl is an ongoing art project.
-Vera Blossom
I can feel the world rushing in, alive and wet. For once, I am ready to welcome it in, ready to engulf me, ready to spend whatever years I have left on this Earth dripping and throbbing with life.
-Vera Blossom
The sky is appropriately grey because I am consumed with ennui. I like when the weather matches my melodrama.
-Vera Blossom
I want to step on your fragile body, I want to hurt you in a way that feels unsafe, because you trust me not to hurt you in a way that you do not want.
-Vera Blossom
I wasn’t shining the way I wanted to. There was a hunger deep in me that I could not sate, a powerful draw to be part of the world, and for the world to know me.
-Vera Blossom
Memoir scrutinizes the nature of lived experience as a portal to the world. All we know is lived experience, it is our channel to everything: the divine, social, physical, and intellectual aspects of being are all accessed through the body and the personal faculties of the individual. In that sense, memoir is the most interdisciplinary of genres, and perhaps the most ancient.
One of the great powers of memoir is its invitation to connect over shared experience—and this is an essentially feminist gesture: to share our experiences and thus understand how they arise out of a shared culture or society, how they are a consequence not of our essential nature, but of how we have been socialized.
When I teach, I begin every class by questioning two words: intention and motivation. Motivation is often a given. We are motivated to be writers. We are motivated to be doctors. We are motivated to be good brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, et cetera. But sometimes motivation can be skewed. We start to write for a prize; we write in order to get published in a certain journal. We write for things and we lose sight of why we were writing in the first place. This is where the word intention—thank goodness there’s a discretion between the two words—comes in. I feel intention is where you can truly root your desire for wonder as a writer.
It exists as an undercurrent, long before you knew what an MFA was, what a publishing deal was, what a contract was—maybe it was just two years ago, maybe it was ten years ago or twenty years ago—the intention of that person that found this art and saw something so close to magic and realized, I will do whatever it takes to participate in the great river of this magic. That epicenter, that intention, launched you here. It launched you into unknown territories, into places you couldn’t fathom. And the cost that you couldn’t fathom you ended up paying in order to do this magic because everywhere outside of this room conspires to snuff out the writer’s voice.
when I was a young boy growing up in New England, when they asked you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” no one ever gave me the choice to be a poet. The idea was as inconceivable as unicorns. I imagine the awardees tonight and the ones that have received this prize through the years, often arrive at the page through error and failure and wandering. In many ways, we weren’t supposed to be here. And if it feels like a miracle, that’s because it is one.
Words weigh nothing, and yet they make everything occur.
Language has never been on neutral ground. To write is to fight against the erosion and transformation of meaning always, for better and for worse.
Perhaps the most luminous North Star of any education, literary or otherwise, is a question that has since been the pillar of your work. Not so much, “What do you write about,” but rather, “What are you writing towards?”
I do think everyone is always making desperate choices towards a promise of more.
-Lauren Cook
Sometimes just listening to what someone told you is enough of a religion for me.
-Lauren Cook
I feel full of love all the time. I try to spread that love as often as I can.
-Lauren Cook
honestly I’m in the mood to chop some wood, but there’s no wood to chop
-Lauren Cook
I wake up in the middle of the night to write down “tamed grass”
-Lauren Cook
Most people decide that new pain is the solution to keeping them from thinking about old pain
-Lauren Cook
The only time I can pace myself is when I pretend it’s a character I’m playing.
-Lauren Cook
I check Instagram stories and I see that the same storm over me is the same storm over you.
I think it is kinda cool that humans can’t really predict the weather that good. The weather is the top and we are the bottom
-Lauren Cook
It’s so crazy that scientists want to try to find ways to live forever when nobody is even going to want to do that anyway because being alive runs parallel to suffering with no alley in between.
-Lauren Cook
When people tell me their problems I often shut down because I feel like I am always held together barely by anything and one more thing could take me down. I think that is shitty.
-Lauren Cook
I don't love self-help. It seems to me to be a genre that capitalizes on a very common desire: we want someone else to give us a solution or to promise us that there's a simple solution to something that definitely does not have a simple solution. I would say that memoir is just art. But interpreted more loosely, I think my work is self-help, but it's just me helping myself and making that process transparent to other people.
Mostly I see [writing] as a survival mechanism. It's not a mercenary impulse. It’s not like, “I'm going to do this interesting wacky thing so that I can go write about it.” It's more like, “I am undergoing this incredibly difficult thing, let me fantasize about a way to make it worth living through.” And writing is usually the answer to that for me. It's sort of an antidote to regret.
My experience of feminism is a deep-seated belief in justice, a life devoted to cultivating it in whatever small way is possible.
Writing is at the center of my life. The Venn diagram of my interests is like, it's not a perfect circle, but it's really close. And so spirituality, art, making, feminism, they're all just different applications of what I consider to be sort of the essential truth of what I know about being alive, which is that there are a certain set of pursuits like honoring and respecting and working for justice for all people, relationships based on true emotional intimacy that aren't avoidant of conflict or difficulty, and trying to establish a regular connection to something greater than myself.
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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