round-up: 6/8
some solid recs, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
& 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:
After a year of not going on my website once, I remade it. It felt kind of weird to remove “editor” and “educator” from my bio, but—truth is—I’m neither editing nor teaching at the moment, so neither belonged there. Maybe, one day, they will again.
I simplified my shop, too.
I have a new (old) poem out in a food anthology:
& a few things I’m into right now:
Also this very-modified-to-my-preferences (read: noodles, crispy tofu) miso soup:
A list of things that randomly feel good
Wearing other people’s clothes that randomly really suit you
Coffee someone else has made for you
When someone leaves a table at a café just as you enter so you can take it
Getting a haircut you like and going out straight after like something a celebrity would do
Buying a pair of pants and they’re magically the right length
Remembering someone’s birthday on… their birthday
Arriving to meet a friend somewhere at the exact same time as them
Searching for flights, and there’s a cheap one at the exact time you want it
Putting something on a shelf and it looking like it's meant to be there
The kitchen sink when it’s been cleaned
Opening the book you’re reading on exactly the right page
Getting a text back from a crush within a 13-minute timeframe but in a totally chill girl mutually crushing way
Not being exhausted on Friday afternoon and having the joi de vivre (and let's be honest, disposable income at this point) to go out with friends
Leftover pizza for breakfast
Sleeping in clean sheets that have been dried by the sun
Walking onto the bus and sitting down at the perfect time it accelerates so it all happens in one swooshing motion
Writing an email and sending it without even having to think too much about it
Getting dressed in a combination you’ve never tried before, and it just really ~ working ~
Someone apologising straight away and you both getting over it
Someone you like saying ‘obsessed’ about anything you’ve just said
A stranger in a store saying ‘great choice’ about whatever you’re buying
The tired body feeling after dancing really late the night before
Being on the back of a Lime scooter with someone who rides with conviction
Someone carrying your bag for you like it's no big thing
Anyone being nice at the airport
A cute DM from a stranger
Writing your name on a form and it fits perfectly inside the box
Going to a party and meeting a stranger you genuinely like
Losing track of time
Finding something you thought you'd lost forever
Packing for a trip and having space in your suitcase
Having just the right amount of change
Loving a new song so much you play it on repeat the whole way til you get to where you're going
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
Emotions are both semantic and somatic. If you feel like you are banging your head against a brick wall, it should not be surprising that you have headaches. Back pain besets those carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Kidney problems befall the deeply pissed off. Skin problems afflict those with intimacy issues. Bowel problems are linked to a particular world view, conclusive evidence that everything turns to shit.
Grieving never goes away, but it evolves over time. You sort of just learn to go about your life with this new thread that’s knit into your being.
Sometimes we shout into the void because we want somebody—anybody—to know that we’re still here, to anchor ourselves like a lifeline when we feel adrift.
The fact that everyone is sunk if they don’t fight their way to at least a managerial position is not a problem with mobility. We can’t all be managers, and we shouldn’t have to be, to guarantee basic survival. It’s that normal jobs have been criminally robbed of their dignity, not to mention their compensation. Upward-mobility-as-survival-prerequisite is the worst of the “they want you to think” thoughts. This is entirely a problem of corporate greed and deregulation and wage theft. I hate to see anyone think that it’s reasonable to be in crisis because they didn’t get promoted. And to talk of mortality—this is to say nothing of the fact that our safety net has not remotely kept up with our raw survivability. We’ve never been able to keep people alive longer, but it’s a debtors’ prison waiting to happen.
I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
-Anne Sexton
Usually it really bothers me when people say I'll always be some young age in their imagination because it feels kind of evasive, like they're not willing to grapple with this older, better, stronger, more radical and complicated version of me. This so-far best and happiest version of me. Because, well, this me is harder to love than that me. Or, well, at least harder to like. So much less demure, less pliable.
It's so very rare to ever really be seen.
I speak, which is to say that I circle, with the hope that the person listening has the patience to wait for the final descent, if it’s even worth making; that whatever’s down there is animated by flesh and blood, and not a trick of the sunlight or my own hunger.
I believe firmly in fat liberation and try to practice neutrality regarding my own body. I eat somewhat intuitively, and avoid upsetting information like my own body weight or calorie counts. I also see numerous benefits to adopting a harm reductionist approach to disordered behaviors such as restriction and excessive exercise: recovery is not binary, and actions that fulfill my psychological or sensory needs are not all bad, they simply come with their own risks and benefits that I can make careful decisions about.
What I want most is to center my desires without pathologizing them or feeling guilty for having them.
I love being queer. It’s one of my life’s greatest blessings. That part is never complicated. It’s always good. In the heat of the summer and the dark and frigid winter, it’s always good. The idea that a month or a clothing line or a proclamation can contain it is laughable, but I love to see them try. I love to see us try to put words to something bigger than the whole sky. I love us. I hope we never stop trying.
Desire, for me, is at the heart of what it means to be alive.
I’ve known sexual desire since as far back as I can recall wanting anything. It’s confusing to me that this can be a controversial statement, but it is. I know I’ll probably get shit for saying this, but since I used to feel odd, and deeply ashamed, for being this way, I’ll say it anyway: from a very young age, I’ve been aware of sexual desire, which isn’t at all uncommon.
In fiction, we can easily make the distinction between author and speaker. In poetry, we often conflate the two. We all do. I do it too. When Crush came out, I thought: Sure, if you want to believe this is an accurate portrayal, go ahead, I won’t argue with you. But it became a bigger problem than I expected. People wanted to know if it was true. Not just the accuracy or the honesty—they also wanted to know the name of the dead boyfriend. I was uncomfortable with handing out all-access passes. In War of the Foxes, I was working with fable: I personified everything and played the ventriloquist. The fishsticks spoke; the characters were animals or figures in paintings. It seemed to be a foolproof plan to force a distinction between speaker and author. It didn’t really work. People would still ask, “Is this true?” I think they were asking, “Can this happen to me?” and the answer to that is “Yes.”
I had a stroke. It wiped me clean. I had to claw my way back into a self, into a body.
They don’t leave. No one leaves. All the dead stay very close. They lead to more dead.
I like lying and singing. I like inventing things, making them up. I like mystery and the unsaid, the broken line, the incomplete.
Poetry has to have movement; it should play if it can.
I like to have prose blocked and justified. If there’s a ragged right edge, I can’t tell if a piece is a paragraph or a poem in long lines. In poetry, the line is the unit of meaning. In prose, the sentence is the unit. They do different things.
The fundamental power of poetry is the friction between the sentence and the line. It’s the only thing poetry has that nothing else has.
Fear was bigger than pain.
Maybe I do need to write, but I don’t need to publish and I don’t need to share—and that’s a different thing.
The thing is, that threats of pain really are everywhere. Cars blitzing through red lights without a second look at the crosswalk. Electrical appliances glitching and starting fires. All the various toxins in household cleaning supplies. Climbing ladders, handling power tools, bubble baths, the literal sun.
I had to work with my brain to help it understand that we’re mostly safe now, safer than ever, and we don’t have to be constantly on guard, and we also don’t have to be afraid of being afraid.
One of the things that worries me about the play is that everybody in it, except for Roy, is sort of a decent person trying their best. And that’s part of the appeal of the play, but it’s the part of me that I worry about being excessively liberal, that I genuinely believe people are primarily motivated by the good. And I wonder if that makes everything a little bit vanilla. There’s a certain kind of writing that starts with a more cynical set of assumptions about people, that produces a harsher picture of reality. And the world is a harsh place, so I’m trying to figure out what it is in myself that resists seeing the world that way. Excessive optimism or sentimentality or something . . . I don’t know.
The idea of the United States armed forces going in and suppressing and controlling a population of any sort is so fraught with history. And I don’t trust our government, I don’t trust our motives.
Capitalism is always going to be successful economically in the sense that about 10% of the population will have a lot of money and 1% will have immense amounts of money and everybody else will live lives that are either full of fear or full of poverty, and there’ll be huge numbers of people out of work. Socialism is simply the idea that people are better off if we work collectively and that the economic system we live in is made by people and therefore can be controlled intelligently rather than let loose. There’s no way that can’t be true. As long as there are decent people in the world, there’s going to be a demand for socialism. I mean, the demand for health care right now, which is a demand that 80% of the people in this country share, is a demand for a certain kind of socialism. People wanted to get rid of Bush because they wanted the restitution of the social net that FDR put into place. We don’t want to live in an outlaw, in a bandit country anymore.
Yeah, well, welfare is the demon and people don’t even think about what it means. What it is basically is the fear and terror of being poor. Fear of the notion of being dependent in a country where dependency is a shameful thing. Everyone recognizes their potential for being homeless, for being on welfare, so we hate people that are because they frighten us.
When one loses people that one loves, one’s inability to accept that life ends with the material body . . . sort of punches holes in the walls of one’s resistance to the notion of something beyond.
I feel in a certain sense that the theater is the closest that I come to a religion.
The thing with pretty privilege is that it’s conditional and not an equal playing field. It’s not extended to women who are trans, Black and Brown, disabled, and/or fat. Pretty privilege is a very specific type of pretty, and it’s synonymous with being thin, white, and able-bodied.