round-up: 7/27
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/watch:
Housekeeping:
I went to NYC for the second time in my life this week and ate a million bagels and so much pasta and sushi. Lovely city for those who like to walk in excess and breathe in exhaust. Just kidding. I had fun and it was pretty and I never want to leave.
And I got compliments on this shirt which was nice.
Highly recommend Ess-a-Bagel, Spicy Moon, and Momoya. Delicious.
It was also my birthday this week. I bought myself these as gifts and all my bestest friends took me out for good food and got me presents. I love presents. Merry times!
What I’m reading:
A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes
Quotations:
Sometimes I have a craving to be engulfed.
-Roland Barthes
I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I melt.
-Roland Barthes
I entrust myself, I transmit myself (to whom? to God, to Nature, to everything, except to the other).
-Roland Barthes
Absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain.
-Roland Barthes
Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you. To speak this absence is from the start to propose that the subject’s place and the other’s place cannot permute; it is to say: “I am loved less than I love.”
-Roland Barthes
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival; for if I did not forget, I should die.
-Roland Barthes
I am wedged between two tenses.
-Roland Barthes
Absence persists—I must endure it.
-Roland Barthes
I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need.
-Roland Barthes
The absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out.
-Roland Barthes
My language will always fumble, stammer in order to attempt to express it.
-Roland Barthes
(Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?)
-Roland Barthes
It is my desire I desire.
-Roland Barthes
Turn back, look at me, see what you have made of me.
-Roland Barthes
Are not excess and madness my truth, my strength?
-Roland Barthes
I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult.
-Roland Barthes
What I hide by my language, my body utters.
-Roland Barthes
What will the world, what will the other do with my desire?
-Roland Barthes
Marriage is just deeply informed by the idea that you get married and you stay married. And I think it’s also rooted in this idea that your happiness is frivolous, that you have to sacrifice for children, for family. It’s important to realize who’s being asked to sacrifice and whose misery is being put up on that cross.
I am not anti-relationship. I am so pro-relationship. But I am anti the legal structure of marriage, because it is founded on women’s inequality. Look at the history of marriage. Look at these laws of coverture. Look at the laws in America where marital rape wasn’t even illegal until the past 20 years. And that’s because wives are property, and that’s the way that our legal system views women. And I think a lot of well-meaning couples get into marriage and think it will be different.
But then you realize the whole system … Who gets paid more? Who takes the hit when you have the baby? Where is the child care? Why is it unaffordable? You get into this system and you realize that it’s not your well-meaning intentions that are bogging you down, but it’s this entire system that is built on the unpaid labor of a wife. And you can be the most well-meaning egalitarian couple, and you have one, two kids and you’re like, “What the fuck? Now I’m a tradwife because we can’t make it work anymore.” That’s the system that I’m critiquing. With women we’re like, “Oh, you’re miserable in your marriage? Well, I don’t know, try sexy night.” No, you feel miserable in your marriage because you never get a break because this whole system is packed on top of your shoulders and you can’t fricking breathe. And then the one time you get a moment to breathe, he’s like, “Hey, we haven’t had sex in two weeks.” There’s a whole capitalist system built on the misery of women.
I’m not saying you can’t be in love or you can’t have relationships, but I am saying those relationships should not be predicated on your misery.
I tend to feel uncomfortable as soon as anyone wants to categorize me as an artist or a writer. I like to inhabit the interstices between these fixed categories and disciplines, the blurry liminal spaces.
I don’t work from a narrative-driven place but rather try to anchor myself in a feeling.
to enjoy myself. enjoying you enjoying. yourself to(o). ooo! enjoying. to enjoy myself enjoying you enjoying me enjoying myself enjoying you enjoying yourself . enjoying enjoying yourself enjoying me enjoying you/me. enjoying.enjoying myself you yourself enjoying yourself enjoying me enjoying you enjoying yourself. enjoying. enjoying you. enjoying me.
-Vladimir Lucien, “uses of the erotic”
What else can I confess?
That I was a child? I carved myselfinto the civil shape of a knife.
Pared until only the edge remained.
-Nora Hikari, “Imago Dei”
It’s the most obvious sign I care about a person: If I love you, I’m fretting about you.
It can feel as though I’m risking far too much by writing anything, even fiction, giving the slightest indication I might want a great deal for myself, might have desires like my characters’.
I find poems are much harder to force—you really do have to wait for a poem, because a poem never starts with a subject or theme. A poem starts with a line, almost always, some fragment of language that seems to hold all the material the whole poem will need. I do collect certain types of idea, and certain images, with the hope of somehow getting them into a poem, but I always need a line to arrive before I can start. And usually, the insight comes after the line.
I think essays are different in that they do usually start with the theme or the subject matter, something I know I want to think about enough to build an essay around, and I can work in that thinking and note-taking stage for a very long time—but when it comes to the actual writing, there’s a strong similarity in that the writing is much easier when I know how I want to begin, when I hear the first sentence and then can imagine how the structure and tone will all follow from there.
There’s some kind of force we can feel, like heat or electrical currents, when writing seems to come from a real human voice, a real mind, with all its specificity and arbitrariness, its sometimes irrational or even indefensible quirks.
I got married because I believed the hype; I didn’t know how deeply patriarchy had already poisoned the men of my generation, how most of them, even if they didn’t say it out loud, wanted traditional wives.
Like you, I assumed that any man who was attracted to me was attracted to me because of — not in spite of — my intelligence and ambition. But plenty of men are attracted to big game, women with public-facing careers, only because they like the challenge of reducing a strong woman to a bang maid. I didn’t fully comprehend that until after my divorce.
Infidelity is abuse. It is sexual, financial, and emotional abuse.
Democrats don’t care about us. Never have, at least not enough. It’s always been Stockholm Syndrome. You learn to love the parent you’re less afraid of, even if neither cares for you much. Some of us are less afraid of Mommy Dems because we believe they might serve some sort of pause function for impending climate catastrophe. Others hope to get a drink from the pacifying breast of a Mommy Dem whose motherly gaze might be enough to let us fall asleep to escalating war crimes and brutality at home. It would be far too much terror for us mere infants to face the reality that nobody is looking out for us, that we’re all alone, that we have no Mommy. We have to hold out hope to survive.
Translation: I became obsessed with romance. Romance is a human need, in my opinion, but I wasn’t seeking it from a place of pleasure. I was seeking romance from a place of terror. I wanted to be saved. I wanted to live happily, somehow. I wanted to live happily ever after.
I also think it’s time for idealism again. We have been living in cynicism, depression, and a sort of status quo for a number of years. I don’t think we can have a diversified culture by just accepting it. We need our personal energies behind that. Every place that I’ve been teaching, I bring together everyone in the classroom. I see apathy and I say to them, “This is our time, let’s try it again.” We need to learn how to grab hold of the life force again. That use of the erotic that Audre Lorde wrote about so beautifully. She was our great living representative. Somebody who has changed all of our lives. She told me if I ever encountered a racist comment, to not let it go by. I extend that to anti-Semitism, to homophobia, a comment on size or looks, all the different ways that we as people feel the need to disparage each other.
As a woman, I’ve been trained to be liked. Trained to do the sort of social things so that people will like me. I realize that we have different ways of working with people. We become communal and involve everyone in the process of filmmaking, which isn’t the usual purpose of a director. We can get terrific results from that.
When I had my experience coming out in 1970, I touched a woman’s body for the very first time when we made love. All the corpuscles on my skin that have nerve endings that go to the part of the brain that is about touching were highly charged by touching a body similar to my own. I feel that my sight is connected to my sense of touch. When I look at the world I can feel it in my body. I don’t need to go over there and touch that pillow to know the difference of textures around me. My textual sense is in my eyes. I think it was Aldous Huxley, who pointed out that children know the world through touching before they can ever see. They can’t even focus, yet they are touching. They put things into their mouth which is full of sensory touch organs. Of course, the clitoris has more nerve endings than any other organ in the human body. More than the penis. The thumb is next.
It’s a whole new respect for the thumb. (laughter) So, I began in my work to connect touch and sight. In Dyketactics!, I had 110 shots and every shot in that four minute film has a quality of touch about it. Either a literal one, a woman touching a woman or a more metaphoric one, brushing of hair. As I said before, we know the world in ways other than sight. For instance, I’m driving down the road, and I look out at a plowed field. I can feel that texture in my body through my sight. It came back to me, through my lesbian experience of touching a body similar to my own. I think this reaches out to Foucault, talking about how Western knowledge has been limited by sight. That’s why there are so many hands, and clitorises, and feet and skin in my movies because that is our organ of touch. Skin takes up 97 percent of our body. We are touching even when we are sleeping. Air is touching us. All the films I make, I try to make experiential. If it’s underwater I take the viewer in the swim. Through the pond, down the river, into the ocean. That’s in Pond and Waterfall.
Times have changed and it’s okay to be all of myself now. All dyke and all artist.
It’s pretty boring to think that you’re going to be cast as lesbian, or heterosexual, or bisexual for all your life. Why not just be known as a filmmaker? Why does it have to be “woman filmmaker.”
Old stereotypes of lesbians not liking penises is out. We are polymorphous perverse. We like everything.
Tweets:
Adding this to my email signature rn
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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