round-up: 7/20
housekeeping, what i'm reading, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
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:
My birthday’s on Wednesday, and so of course I want to buy myself a gift. First and foremost, I desperately need a bookshelf.
Here’s what else I’m lusting after right now:
On the subject of shopping, there is something deeply wrong with a society that charges $40 for a single scrunchie. Are people okay?
This week, I used an old zine as inspiration for a recent fanfic chapter I wrote, which was kinda fun and different. On that note, “autofiction” is a stupid term, and our own thoughts / experiences / world views inherently show up in our fiction.
I also wore a dress because I turn femme in the summer.
What I’m reading:
100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read (incredible; hilarious; no notes)
Quotations:
When we used to fuck, my mind would spiral into some nether space where our souls appeared to meet. Hours passed like minutes, and without any pain or concern.
I am always clutching to my idealized reality firmly with both fists.
I am always clutching to my idealized reality firmly with both fists. Whenever my hair looks good in a photograph, I immediately get to stressing about the fact that my hair has already grown some imperceptible amount since when the image was captured. Then I cut it, hoping to restore it to its former perfection — and my head gets completely mangled by my clippers and shears. I deny myself my favorite foods and drinks sometimes, knowing that the meal will too quickly be over. The moment someone begins to love me is when I start picturing them dead.
When a partner remarks that he’d like to get a bigger mattress, I want to chop off the sides of the bed to force our bodies closer. I want to hiss at every new person that enters the friend group to scare them off. Though all my queer loved ones are enlightened polyamorists, whenever someone I love starts texting someone new I fantasize about slipping away with their phone in the night, unlocking it, finding the new contact, and blocking the threat into oblivion.
I don’t do any of this, of course. But in my selfish, rotted heart, I want to be like Hannibal Lecter, drugging his patients and hypnotically conditioning Clarice to be in love with him. When I learned that Jeffrey Dahmer drilled holes into his lovers’ heads and filled the cavities with hot water and bleach to keep them from abandoning him, I could kind of understand it. And I hated myself for it.
I am terrified of the urges for control and permanence that lurk inside me. I’m afraid of where they might take me, and so I never give voice to them — In fact, I rarely give voice to any of my desires at all.
Preparing for loss does cause me sadness and anxiety, but these emotions can be adaptive. A life without worry is not my aim. I survive, and I do not believe I am owed happiness, and I have found that keeps me from being frozen or outraged at life when the hard times come. They will come.
When the possibility of change fills us with dread, it’s worth asking ourselves what it is that we’re coveting. And when a terrible loss rocks our world, we can search for what’s precious and fleeting in the new reality that remains.
Is this a trans thing or what? Or maybe this happens to everyone who walks the non-linear path. My semi-delayed life feels like it’s only getting sweeter with age. My potential is ripening, limitless, now that I know myself a bit better. Can you feel it? You’ve got your whole life stretched out in front of you. There are major storylines that haven’t even played out yet. Forgiving your mother for all the ways she didn’t know how to show up for you. Big dinner parties in candlelight next to all your favorite people. Holding a baby in your arms, tears streaming down your face. Love is real, and life is a fucking gift, and it is beckoning you to surrender to the green in everything. Surrender to the smell of white sage and thunderstorms and the rise and fall of your dog’s chest in the middle of the night. Surrender to the sound of music. Surrender to the way time changes everything it touches. Let yourself be touched by your life, be changed by it.
There are some artists that I can no longer enjoy because I know what they have done; there are others that I continue to enjoy, despite knowing what they have done. This is not uncomplicated for me, nor do I think it should be.
I used to think my body craved
annihilation.
In my less charitable moments, it felt as though we’ve reached a point in our culture where the pinnacle of moral rigor in the novel form is an overwhelmed white woman in a major urban center sighing and having a thought about the warming planet or the existence of refugees. This brought to mind a recent spate of novels about white women’s existential malaise in the face of social ills — “Want,” by Lynn Steger Strong; “Drifts,” by Kate Zambreno; “Weather,” by Jenny Offill. There’s an aesthetic gesture cohering with each publication cycle that one need only evoke the tableaux of feeling overwhelmed — via modular narrative, fragments, a loose lyrical style, modernist pyrotechnics or the vaporous disembodied narrator — and move on by describing, I guess, grass growing as a protest.
I have sometimes wondered if living in the place where she slipped away has pressed me a little too tightly against my grief. The mail that comes in her name. The old scent of the house slowly replaced, until the only spot that still smells like her is the inside of the closets.
My friend asked me to go wedding dress shopping with her. I touched her back to prevent her from walking into the bike lane; she tried to walk outside of me on the sidewalk. I took a lot of photos of her holding her hair up and looking at herself in the mirror—I liked when she wasn’t looking at me at all.
This year, I got two parking tickets. I accidentally put my own number down as our emergency contact instead of my mother’s. I wore UGG slippers. I waited to hear back from my agents. I waited to hear back from my lawyers. I listened to "Glycerine" by Bush. I was the big spoon. I was the little spoon. I was everything you needed and nothing that you wanted.
We were subletting the apartment of a woman named Sarah with excellent taste in plants and periodicals. I looked at my husband looking at her things and wondered if he was getting a crush on her. (There isn’t a man on earth that can’t fall in love with a woman through her absence.)
In the official cabin portrait from that summer my arm is wrapped around her shoulders, her two small hands holding on to my dangling one. I am 19 years old. Later, I sat on the deck and looked up at the stars, remembering taking my campers to the tennis courts at night to lie on their backs in a circle. One of them said it scared her to see the sky like that, so big. I tried to remember which one had said it, but in a way they had all said it with their awed silence. I looked for Orion, the way I always do. I started crying again.
A friend of a friend says she doesn’t dream about her husband. I have dreams about losing mine more than having him. I think: life is short but it fits so much hurt into it. I think: life is long and it produces so much love.
Writing, how I do it, is not inventive or imaginary, it is merely a means of paying attention.
The writing I admire and aim to produce works in a language that is entirely without artifice. This means, to be direct, short blunt words without flourish, minimal description, limited internality, and a lot of direct observation of the external world. I prefer to write in the first person, for the same reason, an atheist stance—there is no one outside of the story, there is no place outside from which to tell it. The narrator is only a person desperate for a voice, desperate to name experience, to bring our vast amorphous perceptions under that pretense of control we only get from language. Something clear to anyone with eyes in their head is that the world is at heart unknown and unknowable, mostly unsayable—and still the writer’s task is to try and try to approach this place to which you know you will never arrive.
But Plath’s singular place in American literary culture is most clearly exemplified by the third figure who stalks these two Plaths: the Plath reader. In popular movies, TV shows, and books, Plath’s writing and her biography are collapsed into a shorthand that marks the Plath reader as a tortured teenage girl, doomed by her own adolescence and burgeoning sexuality. In the 1988 cult classic film Heathers, for example, reading Plath is an indication of death, pure and simple: after discovering the Cliffs Notes for The Bell Jar lying on Heather Chandler’s coffee table, her homicidal peers mask her murder as a suicide. Rory Gilmore of Gilmore Girls suggests Plath as a subject for her college application essay, but her mother replies that this “might send the wrong message,” a message Rory understands as “the sticking her head in the oven thing.” The cliche of Plath as angel-of-death has become so entrenched in the collective imagination that it has even been used as marketing copy: Publishers Marketplace recently reported a book deal for a novel, slated for release in 2025, in which two young women “become obsessed with a campus legend surrounding the deaths of Sylvia Plath-adoring sad girls.”
I’m writing to let you know I’m releasing you, I’m amputating you. Be happy and never seek me again. I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want you to hear from me. If there is anything I’d enjoy before I die, it’d be not having to see your fucking horrible bastard face wandering around my garden.
That is all, I can now go to be chopped up in peace. Good bye from somebody who is crazy and vehemently in love with you.
-Frida Kahlo (in hospital, awaiting a leg amputation)
Last night I felt as if many wings caressed me all over, as if your finger tips had mouths that kissed my skin. The atoms of my body are yours and they vibrate together so that we love each other. I want to live and be strong in order to love you with all the tenderness that you deserve, to give you everything that is good in me, so that you will not feel alone.
-Frida Kahlo
Letter to Josep Bartolí
1948
Can verbs be invented? I want to say one to you: I Thank you for receiving it, thank you for living, because yesterday you let me touch your innermost light, and because you said with your voice and your eyes what I had been waiting for all my life.
Frida Kahlo
Letter to Carlos Pellicer
November 1947
My nick, you’re the sweetest person I’ve ever met. But listen, my love, I really don’t need the money now. I still have a little bit from Mexico; plus I’m a very rich bitch, did you know that? I have enough to stay one more month. I already have my return ticket.
Frida Kahlo
Letter to Nickolas Muray
27th February 1939
I don’t like gringos that much; they are very dull people and they all have faces that look like uncooked bread.
Frida Kahlo
Letter to Isabel Campos
3rd May 1931
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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