round-up: 9/09
reading recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading / watching / doing
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I painted something small and silly:
And I made some new stickers to send to my friends:
And shared some screenshots of my Notes app, because Notes app notes are always wonderful and chaotic:
What I’m reading:
Skinny, Pretty Writers Getting Better Book Deals Isn't Even the Whole Problem
Gen Z is the job-hopping generation, even for those with master’s degrees
What I’m watching:
Friends1
Severance (again)
What I’m doing:
Still playing chess, compulsively, and in these pants.
Quotations:
Studies show that every form of bias and discrimination in American life has either gotten better or stayed the same over the past ten years, except for anti-fat bias which has gotten worse. If you’re not a fat person you should care because: 1) Body size fluctuates over your life; if you are thin now, you might be fat later. 2) Hopefully you don’t want to be an asshole; you care about all human beings being represented in works of art with nuance and dignity. And 3) Fatness is racialized, gendered, queered, and classed.
Writers do not suffer consequences or much backlash for including fatphobia in their texts. It is possible to reach the highest echelons of literary acclaim and financial success while being actively fatphobic. You can win the National Book Award and be fatphobic. You can win the Pulitzer Prize and be fatphobic. You can be a New York Times Bestseller and be fatphobic.
If it weren’t for punctuation, everything I write would be one long monotonous scream. If it weren’t for the parentheses, my edges would be indistinguishable from the world.
A pedagogy of the dysphoric is not a comfortable thing. Asking trans writers, the traumatized, the marginalized, the depressed, the overwhelmed, to dwell in their bodies is not always pleasurable. I try to be careful, try to be mindful, try to provide rest and alternatives. I’m also always learning from my students, how I could have done things better or differently. I’m always being reminded in ways that let me see through the barrier, the membrane, from my life to theirs.
“For me, the notion of decolonization dissolves the boundaries between self and collectivity, between the individual and the system. It interrogates how we, as individuals living within and being part of collectivities, reproduce and sustain systems of oppression.”
-“Decolonizing Teaching and Learning through Embodied Learning,” in Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization
In a lifetime of lies I could never fully unravel, that was her first one. The good part and the mama part. Oh, she wanted to feel like a good mother. And she wanted people to think she was a good mother. But I had too many welts and bruises left by hickory switches and leather belts, too many secrets I was never allowed to speak, too many hidden tears and childish prayers that my life was just a bad dream for that to be true, even by rural Southern standards. And the mama part: Well, neither of my parents had exactly wanted me, but there I was, a baby bump on their wedding day; and then, a living, breathing human being.
She would have wanted me to say that she was beautiful, and she was. That she was smart, and she was that too. That she was funny, and she could be. One time she called an Atlanta Braves baseball player a turkey butt and she laughed at herself with such childlike joy it felt like Christmas morning. I could have lived inside that sound forever.
The language I need to think in isn’t social language, rather a kind of intimate dream language that I have to speak in my own mind before I can translate it outward
When I left him, the choice was quick. I was in yoga teacher training, listening to the instructor explain the concept of false centers. Sometimes, she told us, we believe our centers to be in places that, anatomically, they are not. But even though these centers are false, we’re so used to tuning to those points, we don’t realize we’re sending our bodies into misalignment.
Our lives can be like this too, she explained. We build around a person, and the structure we’ve built prevents us from seeing the instability of the foundation.
Our society idolizes not just youth but thinness, as well as a woman’s ability to deny.
That’s what you do in California: drive. You can hike, too if you like — but first, you have to drive.
When I write about fantasy, my focus is often on sex and (sexual) desire. This is because I’m interested in these things, and because you are, and because so much of our notion of the sensual is sexualized. I have no doubt that we’ve the capacity for sensuality without sexuality (and vice versa), but because former is so rarely legible except through the latter (and vice versa), even I sometimes miss the forest for the trees.
Tweets:
Have a great week—
-Despy Boutris
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For the first time, believe it or not. FWIW, I’ve never encountered another TV show that leans quite so heavily on homophovic/transphobic jokes. However, Ross’s comedic timing is so akin to childhood favorite Josh Nichols’, of the beloved Drake and Josh.