round-up: 7/13
recommendations, what i'm watching/reading, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m watching
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& 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:
I am going to NYC for my birthday. I have been there once. Please give me all your recommendations by replying directly to this email or commenting below.
What I’m watching:
What I’m reading:
My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him
Andrea Robin Skinner reminds us that monsters lurk within classic Canadian literature
Quotations:
You are terrified that the men will hurt you and you are terrified they won’t be bothered.
People hate children. This is something I believe strongly to be true, even though a defensible version of this belief would have to have a million qualifiers. There is of course plenty of piety and rhetoric around children and their importance and so on, how they are innocent and the future and a hundred other things along these lines, but that has nothing to do with actual children and how people feel about them. There’s plenty of piety and rhetoric around veterans, too. But that doesn’t mean we as a society treat them particularly well.
-BDM
Maybe I just think body hair and natural musk and blood (unrelated) and skeletons (also unrelated) are weird because I never like being reminded that I’m nothing more than an upright mammal who can yap.
I still have dreams about the degree to which this man controlled my life. In the dream, I am always in Alabama, always stranded by bad luck or no ride back to the airport. I am myself. Or someone a lot like myself. The dream is literal. Or it is a version based on the actual facts of my life, a fiction, that I recognize immediately as a fiction and yet am powerless to do anything about it. I am in my aunt’s house, a man or a woman, a girl or a boy, it does not matter. And he is looking at me from the front room. Or a doorway. I cannot leave because I am not allowed to leave. I must stay in the house. I must stay in this place. He reaches for me. I feel his hand cupping me. I wake up. Another week passes, the dream begins again in its new, but same form. I am always waking up from that dream. I am the safest I have ever been and yet the dream is the same.
Something happens to you when you experience something awful, the worst thing that can happen in fact, and no one around you does anything. When the fact of the awful thing happening to you goes unrecorded and unremarked. It is a kind of death and a kind of dream. You are in a play you are powerless to leave. Every day, you must see their face and you know must know that the people meant to protect you have chosen not to. And they don’t have some grand or profound reason for not protecting you. It’s just that they’ve chosen not to. When I was a child, I thought, oh, I guess I should die now, my life is worthless. But also, there was such fear. I remember the fear most of all. How it would seem to recede and I’d be playing in the woods by myself, throwing sticks into the air and trying kick them on the way down, and then all of a sudden, I’d feel this terrible twisting fear in my gut. The whole world would go quiet and I’d be standing there alone, so afraid, and not entirely sure where it had come from. Now I know this to be the result of repression temporarily relieving some of the psychic burden, and how sometimes the repression lifts just slightly, and that which has been repressed comes back.
A while back, I did an event with Claire Dederer for her book Art Monsters, a book that tries to think through our feelings and anxieties about what to do with the art of monstrous people? I enjoyed the book though I disagreed with its premise in some ways. The question of what to do with the art of monstrous people simply is not one that ever occurs to me. I do not think of the artist when I am engaging the art. I do not think of the person behind the curtain pulling all the strings and I do not ask or think to ask of how their biography might be influencing what is at hand. Everything I have learned about an artist and the relation of biography to their work has been against my will. I simply do not find it that interesting. It’s not like with politicians or monarchs or judges or people who exercise actual power over the material facts of our lives. Who decide life and death. People with actual power to bring about sudden and material harm to us based merely on their own whims and fancy.
No one should feel silenced. That is a second violation, compounding the first.
What confuses me is when people claim victimhood or betrayal in a wrong that had nothing to do with them. As though your liking Alice Munro’s stories entitles you to emotional damages from the revelation that she abetted her daughter’s molestation and later refused to leave the man who did it. It’s almost as if people are embarrassed or saddened or disgusted or enraged by the idea that someone so loved and so cherished and brilliant could also be common and small. There have been attempts to read the facts of the abuse backward into Munro’s fiction, pointing out all of the ways the stories are about repression and thwarted confession and the abuse and maiming of children. What I find remarkable is that what so many of us love in Munro’s fiction is the way she reveals how common and small we all are, how at bottom, we are capable of true ugliness and viciousness, that this is not the province of sneering villains but the woman on the corner or the man in the fast car or the quiet old lady in her house in the woods—what amazes me is that we can acknowledge this and yet be confused when confronted with a real-world example of someone who seemed remarkable but who is simply selfish and small.
Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person. To grasp for some justification as though there must be some brilliant dark inner turning of the mind that will explain it as opposed to accepting it as the everyday course of life, I mean…that, to me, betrays a lack of understanding of human nature.
I find the handwringing and legacy pondering rather distasteful in the face of what was done to Andrea Skinner. I’m just going to be honest. I don’t think it’s interesting. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s even the right set of questions. I am not eager to read the work and interrogate and refine and try to sus out fact from fiction, etc. I do not feel betrayed by Alice Munro. I do not feel the need to throw her books away. I do not feel the need to rend my garments and demand we dig her up so that she can pay for her complicity. I do not even care to know how she personally justified it to herself because I think the answer there is actually pretty boring and ordinary. People can justify anything to themselves. Is that so interesting?
There isn’t “the art and the artist” and one does not “separate art from artist.” To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world. The very question is stupid right down to its core. The better question is why do you need to feel comfortable in the rightness of the art you engage. Why do you need to create a safe art that has no harmful valences in it? I know why. You know why. Because otherwise, one has to own up to the knife you hold behind you, ready to plunge it into your brother’s back. Otherwise, you have to own up to the commonness and smallness and the very humanness of monstrosity itself.
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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