round-up: 9/14
housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m watching
What I’m listening to
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 haven’t written a poem in a while, but have been sharing screenshots from my Notes app, which is maybe its own kind of poem.
What I’m watching:
What I’m listening to:
And especially thing song:
What I’m reading:
‘Good Omens’ Final Season Suspends Production Following Neil Gaiman Assault Allegations
The Delimitation of Self: Kevin Claiborne on Mixed-Media Art, Blackness, and Material
Quotations:
Exercise is just the single most important intervention you can think of for your health. There are plenty of other important ones. I’m sure we could talk about diet, we could talk about sleep, we could talk about other things. But I truly believe that nothing is more important among those than physical activity and exercise. And that there are deep-seated reasons within our human history to believe that that’s a reasonable assumption to make.
But I mean, you name the system in your body, and exercise improves it and makes your chance of disease in that system less: 60 percent less likely to have [atrial fibrillation], 50 percent less likely to have diabetes, 70 percent less likely to fracture your hip, 50 percent less likely to have colon cancer, 25 percent less likely to have breast cancer, I think 25 percent less likely to get depression; 70 percent of people who are active in their daily lives report better sleep. And over many years, you’re much less likely to die. So, I mean, you pick your system. Exercise, it really is the magic pill.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
In her final speech at the I Am Your Sister conference, she began by stating what we now call a land-back ethic on Columbus Day, revealing something about her lifelong values. That’s not just because she identified as a Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet warrior, mother. She was a student activist on the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and she was a student traveling to DC to protest the United States’ murder of the Rosenbergs. We can deeply understand her actions and thoughts if we look at everything.
I believe that the main takeaway from her entire body of work is that nothing is disconnected. So that’s why the scale of the life of the poet is the life of the universe: because she didn’t see her life as a small thing that was being lived inside of one human body. She saw life as occurring simultaneously on all of these scales. It takes a great poet to even try to say that.
My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.
Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.
I think we have art because there are situations and experiences that are so complex, they defeat all our other tools for thinking.
I knew that I wanted the book to have lots of aesthetic experiences. I remember saying to someone early on — and I think she was sort of horrified by the idea — but I was like, I want to write a book that's just someone having aesthetic experiences. That’s all. Just someone experiencing art.
for much of my life, I have been trying to find a way to write about art that is at once rigorous, or sort of holds itself to account in terms of standards of attentiveness and factual claims and kind of analytical rigor, and yet also conveys a sense of why all of that is worthwhile. Like, how art helps us live.
I really do believe that if an artist is working well, their art is smarter than they are. And I don’t think that’s mystical. I think that’s really concrete about how form functions.
It’s very clear to me that my narrator is not me. It was always clear that I was writing fiction. My books are full of invention.
When I first started working in prose: I would have a sense, writing a sentence, that suddenly the floor gave way and I would be deep in the narrator’s past. Something in the sentence had triggered that. I’m a sentence mystic. It all happens at the sentence level for me.
I am someone who writes sentence by sentence. I discover things about my narrator in sentences.
And it is a book about becoming aware of death, which is the most banal recognition of bad feeling — the bad feeling that everything in our lives, in whatever stage of capitalism this is in 21st-century America, is designed to make us forget. And yet it is the knowledge that we will die that, to me, defines humanness. We are the animal that knows we will die. We are the animal that must make meaning, and we are the animal whose fulfillment comes in loving and being loved. Those are the three facts about human beings, I think. Pushing away that knowledge [of death] makes those other two things impossible. I think it’s impossible to generate genuine meaning without an awareness of death, and I think it’s impossible to experience genuine love and being loved without a recognition of mortality, finitude, this radical vulnerability that the narrator is forced to recognize.
What if we don’t push those feelings away, what if we don’t repress them? What if we don’t distract ourselves from them? What can we do with them? What do they make possible? I think that recognition of death makes possible everything that we genuinely value about human life.
Unlike other academic disciplines, art is a practice. It’s an existential practice, and it’s a way of life, and you cannot live someone else’s life for them. I will never tell a student, Throw yourself into the abyss! Because when you throw yourself into the abyss, there’s no guarantee that you come out. The history of art is full of people who don’t get out. As an educator, I must do no harm. I will not say, In this piece, you need to face up to this thing that is going to cause you overwhelming pain. The way I deal with it, when I have a gifted writer who is working on a piece that is obviously not satisfying them, I might say that they seem to be letting an impulse to protection dictate where the piece goes.
I think the artist is a heroic figure.
It’s because being an artist means you don’t let yourself be distracted from these difficult things. You don’t let yourself be distracted from humanness. You don’t tell yourself myths.
I think of James Baldwin, who suffered so much for his art and suffered so much in his own effort to pierce these myths that we tell ourselves, that our culture tells ourselves. I guess the job of the artist is to stand outside [that culture], to position oneself against that, which is always going to cause one suffering. And I will never tell a student this, but this is a truth of art-making. Or maybe I don’t think that about all art; you know, it’s a melodramatic way of thinking about art. I’m a pretty melodramatic person. There are many other impulses to art — the impulse to beauty, to grace, to play. Great art can always have a quality of lightness. But a lot of the art that I love best has required this sort of, you know, suffering, in some sense.
Our job is to examine paths other artists have taken, and to sort of bear witness in our own life and work to the choices we ourselves have made.
In one sense, it’s a book about a guy who never leaves his bed. In another sense, it’s a book about everything that I could make it about. It’s about what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a thinking creature in a particular body, what it means for that body to break down or threaten to break down — but to me, most fundamentally, this is a book about love.
Keats sort of says, If you want to convey melancholy, write about joy. He says, “Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.”
I do think this is a happy book. It’s a book with a lot of pain and a lot of suffering, but I think it’s a happy book. It’s a book that is finally about someone recognizing — by refusing to deny — the fact of death, the fact of darkness, the fact of finitude, the fact of limitation, that he is able to enter into the full presence of his joy. And it is not by rejecting negativity or pretending that negativity doesn't exist. It is accepting negativity — acknowledging negativity, in some sense embracing negativity — that allows him to step into the fullness of this joy. It is not an operatic or dramatic joy. It is a common life, a commonplace life, you know — a life in this Midwestern town, in this little house, that is also extraordinary.
I guess this is what it is, you know? A moment where the finite touches the infinite, which is the promise of art. And it’s why my sense of art, finally, is incarnational. I am not a religious person. I am atheist, but I find Christian theology super helpful for thinking about art, because the whole premise of Christian philosophy is that there is a moment at the center of being where the infinite and the finite touch. I think that is the experience that art gives us.
I think we have that sense that there is something, as you say, something sort of thrumming, something that is at once contained and also uncontainable.
Tweets:
It’s almost spooky season and you know what that means
