round-up: 6/1
a quickie
Happy Thursday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What’s on my to read list right now
Quotations
Opportunities
To read:
Quotations:
13 years ago, my mother died by suicide. I say “died by” because “committed” implies a crime. She did not commit a crime, but she also did not make a choice, or see her life as one with choices.
Publishing a book is always a little baffling because, to me at least, there’s always this element of being misunderstood or misread no matter how generous the person is being. And that makes sense. You wrote the book out of a particular set of attitudes, feelings, sensations, and ideas that were totally singular to you at the moment of creation. And the reader is coming to the text with their own set of attitudes, feelings, sensations, and ideas at the moment of reading, and they are performing some kind of function upon this thing you’ve made. For me, I’ve learned to stop looking for the shape of myself in how other people read me.
I’ve ended up in a place where, a reader’s reading is theirs and my reading is mine. And once the book goes into someone else’s life, that’s their business. What goes on between the reader and the book is their own private affair.
I decided that I would just get on with my life and write the book that I wanted to read about the kinds of people and things I wanted to read about.
One night near the end of our marriage, while making dinner, I took my engagement and wedding rings off and placed them on the windowsill above the kitchen sink before plunging my hands into a bowl of cold raw meat. After dinner, I washed the dishes, lining them up in the dry rack while staring out over the hill. That night, I did not put the rings back on.
This is how a marriage ends. Slowly, piece by piece, and then all at once.
Having been exiled from Eden with the choices that I made, I can return but I can't ever actually go back.
I think shining a light into places that might otherwise stay hidden is one of the most political things you can do. It's the people and the moments and the things that we feel are not worth talking about that are sometimes the most important.
The specifics of the ideal include alarming thinness — a 50kg standard, with only a little leeway for height differences. Then it’s long luscious hair, porcelain white, creaseless skin, a delicate nose, big eyes, that glowy skin, and a soft, “V-line” jaw. There’s no singular explanation for the standards, but they are intertwined with geopolitical history. The double eyelid surgery has roots in both Japan (which brutally colonized Korea) and in America (whose troops occupied the South). The higher nose bridge and V-line jaw are mainly achieved through plastic surgery, and cosmetic surgery itself is born out of war — it emerged as a way to correct battlefield disfigurements. Fair complexion is a class performance dating to earliest dynasties, where the aristocrats who could afford to stay out of the sun were the palest, and aspirational for lower classes.
Looking back on my first night in Seoul, I can’t believe how hard I was on other people, how judgmental, of women I saw with their post-op bandages. I thought of it as vanity, when now I understand their decisions to modify their bodies as totally rational for a broken system, and we should challenge the system instead of judging the woman. As a mom of girls, I’ve really endeavored to a) keep them away from social media for as long as possible and b) model for them, showing instead of telling, that our bodies are instruments for doing and feeling, and not ornaments for the gaze of others. That’s incredibly hard in an increasingly visual and virtual culture. But I don’t think we get to cultural change without a critical mass of us shifting our perspective in our own lives.
I see beauty culture as hustle culture that’s reached into our bodies. Hustle culture as applied to disciplining or modifying our bodies isolates us from one another because we end up in competition, looking over our shoulders, and scared to ask for help when we need it. It’s a recipe for inequality and marginalization on one end, and anxiety and exhaustion across the system.
I needed a word as crushing as the experience.
I am queried, daily, by friends and colleagues about how I’m feeling. I try to explain that I am terrifically, ineffably, surrealistically sad, but I am not always unhappy. Hana, after all, is our joy. But the pain she feels over losing her sister is concrete and multidimensional; it is preoccupied with the altered present and it is aware of a changed future. In the early days, her hurt was so raw we could just barely keep hold of her in its tumult. Hana worried that she was so angry with God that God would be angry with her. We explained to her that we come from a tradition of questioning and of confronting God. We reassured her: We are all angry. She is, after all, only 9. She still needs us to run with her to the park, to continue to experience the world anew. We cannot sink. We must all float together.
This isn’t to say the skin doesn’t need day-to-day support. It does! That support rarely needs to touch down on the dermis, though, since — disruption from topical products aside — the root cause of skin conditions is rarely surface-level. Take acne, for example: The condition is tied to gut issues, stress issues, hormonal issues, or genetics. No matter how “science-backed,” no serum goes that deep. The buzzy beauty ingredients inside said theoretical serum can all be otherwise obtained, anyway, from sources that leave the skin barrier and microbiome blissfully unbothered. Eating salmon and nuts supplies the skin with essential fatty acids. Exercise elevates antioxidant activity. Sleep stimulates self-exfoliation. Facial massage boosts lymphatic drainage. Meditation increases moisture (seriously). Vitamin D regulates oil production and vitamin C contributes to collagen production.
Cue the chorus of skincare influencers: “Well actually, the skin stops producing sebum and hyaluronic acid and collagen as you age, so you’ll need more skincare eventually!”
That’s true, in part. The skin’s production of these chemicals does slow over time. But churning out less hyaluronic acid in your fifties is no less “healthy” than, say, entering menopause or going gray. It happens. It’s fine. It’s life. Bodies change. Collagen levels drop. Trying to compensate with collagen crème “doesn’t help,” Romanowski says. “It’s like trying to fix a hole in a cotton blouse by dumping strands of yarn on the shirt.”
Opportunities:
If you have a finished book to submit, this is a good prize.
The Akron Poetry Prize
Deadline: June 15
Entry fee: $25
The prize includes:
-$1,000 cash prize
-royalties
-discounts on any books purchased from the Press (your own or those of others)
Additionally, the Press is open to considering subsequent poetry collections by its authors (no contest; no reading fee).
Okay, that’s really all I have for you today. As you may know, I recently got a new job and the transition/move/search for housing has been keeping me very, very busy. I’ve barely had time to catch my breath. I won’t bore you with the details. Here’s a silly little video, though.
And a new artist I learned about:
And some sweet lil cats:
