round-up: 8/26
reading/watching recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading / watching
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I don’t have my heat press in LA so I haven’t been able to make stuff the way I usually do, so you can now get a few things here instead.
What I’m reading / watching:
Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
CODA (highly recommend; I cried)
You Don't Know Dick: Courageous Hearts of Transsexual Men (highly recommend)
To watch:
To read:
Quotations:
Child psychologists these days are starting to understand that playing pretend is actually an evolutionary biological function, in which kids tell themselves and each other stories to rehearse for grown-up life. They’re building social intelligence and emotional intelligence that’s preparing them to survive all the challenges of being a person in the world.
My life is not a soft story, but my heart is a soft heart. Soft the way bread dough is soft, because it’s taken a beating. Soft with intent and soft with promise.
Only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man – let me offer you a definition – is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall – or when he’s about to drown – he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
-Graham Smith, Waterland
Queer people are not strangers to the kind of classic careless storytelling where writers seem to think that being cruel automatically elevates their writing and makes it prestigious and automatically good, when that's not the case, more often than not.
There's the Bury Your Gays trope, and then within that trope, there's the very overused example, which is two women finally giving in to their attraction for each other, their love or desire — and then two seconds later shooting one of them dead. Or like running one of them over with a car or whatever.
You and I have both put in a lot of work in our own lives, and also together, in dealing with our extensive childhood traumas. Even adult traumas. We both are realistic and honest with each other. We love each other and we get along very naturally, very easily — but still, in a real relationship where you're committing yourself to another person, it's hard work if you want it to last. It doesn't matter how easily you click or whatever. And that's not a bad thing. People put a negative connotation on saying something is hard work, but the work and the result of that work is what's fulfilling. I know what it takes to make a long term committed relationship work with someone I am naturally drawn to, someone I adore, someone who sees me in ways no one else does, and someone I see that way too, but also someone who has her own trauma that interacts in really complicated ways with my trauma.
Similarly to how I was saying that dealing with emotional trauma is always a process. It's never linear. I also think that's true of physical trauma. It is a cycle.
Art touches people in really deeply personal ways, so that means it has the power to hurt people in deeply personal ways, too.
We clamor for the right to opacity.
-Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
To write a character into darkness, remove her from the scrutiny of the light and allow her to put her feelers out in the damp belly of the forest without witnesses.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
As a rule, I could only be defined as a liminality—a not-this-not-that-ness.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
Hugging you now would be like trying to hug a filing-cabinet or a chandelier. I worry I would get stuck and have to walk away, maybe bleeding, maybe intact.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
I’m getting all mixed up, finding it more and more difficult to stay in the present—it makes more sense to me to dwell in what came before, as if it’s the only time I can still inhabit.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
I didn’t run after you. I waited, as if my waiting could erase what had just transpired, freeze and rewind the moment of your departure.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
Now wild, now shy, now ravenous, now satiated, my body took on another name by the hour.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
I lay there a long time imagining the shape you had taken, saw you in that empty palace where some glorious forest had once stood, obliterated by the light.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
I exist here, in between decades.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
I wondered—is solitude about silence? Or can it get pretty loud?
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
The feeling was a dull ache, a tiny catastrophe making acid waves in my stomach.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
My desire fo you made me nauseaous most of the time.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
Tweets:
Have a great week—
& look at the pretty light in my apartment.
