round-up: 9/28
housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m buying and lusting after
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
& 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:
Gaza publishes identities of 34,344 Palestinians killed in war with Israel
Israel planted explosives in Hezbollah's Taiwan-made pagers, say sources
Housekeeping:
I went on a trip this month, which is something I do very rarely, and it was beautiful and relaxing. Look!
I wrote a teeny tiny fiction collection in undergrad and at the start of grad school, and the publisher shared a pic recently. I love them! Yay.
Things I bought this week:
Things I lusted after:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself
Getty Apologizes After Exhibition Kick-off Event Injures Spectators
Quotations:
i find myself resisting the urge to try and name it, or turn it into something it isn’t. it’s casual, we’re casual, and it’s fine. it’s more than fine. it feels odd to say that, and even odder to feel it. to be truly okay with whatever the outcome is, to—for once in my life—have the ability to both live in and enjoy the moment without harping on what could be.
i have always—always—found peace in being able to take my pain and turn it into art (or at least, what i like to think is art). which means that i find myself a little bit stumped on what to write about in the moments i feel really, truly happy. or, if not happy, content.
why do i feel like i’m only interesting when i’m in pain?
and also: what the fuck do i write about when i feel something akin to happiness?
pain and i are well acquainted. pain and i are like two peas in a pod. pain and i go way back. happiness? serenity? peace? these are emotions with which i feel rather unfamiliar.
Choosing to become a writer has been an exercise of boundary-setting with the world. I choose to write because there’s a level of personal control and freedom attached to it.
Writing looks deceptively individualistic, but it happens in the context of the collective, whether that’s because I’m writing about things that have happened to me, or a loved one has supported me to process emotions that then end up on the page, or read my work and given me feedback.
I am the product of the people around me and I think the writing process is a journey from believing in the individual to believing in the collective.
To write is to be consumed.
I am really trying to let go of puritanical ideas of being a writer. I am a writer, but I’m also a cat owner, and a partner and someone with laundry, and I need to not overwater the writer plant for it to thrive.
Whenever I read dating stories, I'm just like, 'Oh my God, I'm so glad I'm done with that. Dating is well and good, but the sort of uncertainty and the getting to know each other, I feel like I'm always getting to know my wife, but I also
It's always sad when people think asking for my bare minimum is asking for too much because we tell ourselves that we should just be grateful that anyone's interested in us at all. And I certainly been there and it's a miserable place to be where you just think, I don't deserve any better than this and it's never going to get any better than this.
Even if you’re talking about heterosexual relationships, work that portrays sex as positive or neutral is a danger to their bottom line, regardless of whose sexuality it is. I think they like to focus on queer and trans people for obvious reasons that aren’t even worth explaining—yeah, they’re homophobic—but I do think that generally speaking, the kinds of people who are passing these laws, who are advocating for these groups, whatever: they are also just generally very sex-negative. (I would say, specifically homophobic and transphobic.) And I think, if you had a straight character having a sexual awakening, I also don’t think they would really like that, because that would show agency and pleasure, which would be against their philosophy.
I think there’s a fairly good argument to make that all art is political in some way. This always felt like a very understood thing to me, and yet people do push back against the [idea]. But even something that considers itself apolitical, is political, by the fact that it considers itself, or the author considers it, to be apolitical. And I think that what we commit to the page as authors, what gets bought by publishers, what gets read widely: those are all political questions.
I think some people do believe that just by accessing material about [queer] sex, it could, I dunno, ‘gayify’ a straight person. But that’s not of course what happens. What happens is a person who is new in their sexuality who might access some kind of sexual content, might sort of be like, ‘Oh, am I gay?’ It creates this avenue for them to understand [themselves]. And also, in this case in the context of a piece of art, it’s like you’re reading something and understanding something that’s happening, artistically speaking, and you’re also getting this dose of yourself. Now if you are a bigot who doesn’t want your kid to be gay, I can see how that would translate–if you are very, very stupid–it would translate in your brain, to, like, ‘Oh, my kid read a book and became gay.’ But that’s not what happens; we know that’s not what happens.
I’m not letting random homophobes and politicians dictate what I write.
Truly, I am such a cantankerous, contrarian person, that I’m just like, ‘If they don’t want me to write about this, then I’ll just write more of it. It’s fine. What are they gonna do about it?’
It’s hard because I know a lot of these [book] bans are framed as ‘protecting the children’ or ‘keeping kids safe.’ But that’s not what keeps kids safe. And also if you scratch all of this rhetoric, right underneath that little surface of keeping kids safe is racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. [It’s] not that subtle.
There are queer kids in red states. I think also people forget this. Even when you’re in the most conservative place, there are still queer, trans, like, they still exist. And we shouldn’t abandon them, we should be fighting for them, even if we’re coming from places that are more progressive.
It’s heartbreaking as an artist, and—and I feel weird calling myself this—but as a queer elder. As a person who is, you know, a queer adult, it’s really terrible, because for me, like, one of the weirdest things about coming of age when I did—in high school in the early 2000s—is that I just didn’t see stuff about people like me, so I sort of struggled to understand who I was. In some ways that’s different now because of the internet, obviously. As I’m sure you know, it’s really different being your age and there’s a lot more out queer people. At that age, I knew one girl who was gay, when I was in high school, and she was actually amazing to me, because I was like, ‘Wow, you really know who you are.’ But you know, you just never met other queer people. . . So I think that part of it is they [the people banning books] can see that they’re losing this fight—that queer people are now able to understand themselves earlier in their lives, but they are trying really hard to make that.
As somebody who spent my young teenage years not really understanding who I was, it breaks my heart to think that some random politician who’s trying to further this bigger political agenda is going to interfere with young peoples’ abilities to access art. That is terrible, and yet people do it all the time. Obviously we’re in this weird historical moment right now that’s been going on for a while and we’re just in this cultural contraction. . . but it’s terrible. It’s terrible and it feels very discouraging. It’s very heartbreaking. And I feel sad—very, very sad.
Let’s say something about distances that escape through the body. About what the body needs to say as its joints go silent. Let’s say the body needs to remain quiet to say something about distances. Something left undone, you clarify. Something we did not say and now these swift fingers attempt to stammer on the keyboard. Because, after all, what are we but awkward fingers stammering in an attempt to name? Trainees? Tightrope walkers? We bet everything we had that the body could say something about our distances. Did we lose it all? What was it, anyway, that everything that we bet? What was it but the body and its distances? Let’s say something now, that nothing has been left standing. That someone delivers a speech to us about that everything left unsaid. Say someone, for example, stands upon the ruins and delivers an eloquent speech on the void. Or on what, once broken—after the collapse—can no longer sustain itself. Say someone—despite the collapse—sustains themself on an empty speech. Let’s say something about the body that falls on the ruins or on the void or on the collapse. Let’s say something about a bet that in the void vanishes. Say someone, say that speech mentions distances or everything the body did not say. Say someone flaunts a border. Say someone else tries to defile it, you add. Say someone knows their body is also a distance. Say someone builds themself up or rebuilds themself out of distances that open or close. Say someone rewrites herself with a speech of an other. Say someone or say their distances. Say everything be said and simultaneously each of the words written here be lost. Say someone trims off all the lifeless branches. Say each of the fallen stones give shape to a new structure. Say each word might be a stone and no one throws the first. Say someone structures a body as distance. Say someone names themself in the loss. Say the unbreathable air from the fires is expelled, is vanished. Say someone. A trainee or a tightrope walker. Say a body or a speech. Say this distance be sufficient to name ourselves otherwise.
I repeat “dead” aloud enough times for its meaning to loosen
from sense. Once the word I repeat is no longer comprehensible,
it begins to attack everything else I know.
Your creative identity is how you and your work make people feel.
It’s what you create, but also why. It’s what you create, but also how. It’s what you create, but also what inspires you. It’s what you create, but also your fears and dreams. It’s what you create, but also your collaborators. It’s what you create, but also your community.
Clothing can signal a person’s station. It can flaunt itself. It can be a rebellion. It can be compliance. And clothing can also declare allegiance to a class or group of people without even saying a word.
I love queer love. I love reading about queer love, especially. Maybe because there was no such thing as queer romance novels when I was growing up, or even for most of the time I've been a grown-up. For so long, our stories — if they existed at all — have been tragedy on tragedy. Pushed off roofs, mowed down by cars, stray bullets, deadly diseases, alien attacks, werewolf bites, cis men, getting gunned down on a lesbian wedding days. So there's something extra special about the familiar beats I can now rely on from queer romance. Familiar in the wide world of tropes and storytelling, and also familiar in my own personal world where I'm always seeking and sinking into soft things.
Some people expect politicians to be heroes, and treat them as such. They pick a team, and they embrace a candidate, and they fawn over them, and idealize them, and treat them in the way that fans treat celebrities, or that medieval peasants treated kings. Not only is this unhealthy for the fabric of our civic society; it is unrealistic. You cannot be a fully moral person and be elected president of the United States. They all oversee awful things. John F. Kennedy, the most celebrity-esque president of the 20th century, perpetuated a Cold War that brutally oppressed and murdered peasants across the world. Barack Obama, his 21st century counterpart, was drone striking faceless foreigners in the name of American imperialism, when he was not smiling his way through the act of stabbing his gay and lesbian friends in the back. You can make your own list for every president.
McRuer defines five principles of crip theory. The first is “Claiming disability and a disability identity politics while nonetheless nurturing a necessary contestatory relationship to that identity politics.” The second is “Claiming the queer history of coming out—“out of the closets, into the streets”—while simultaneously talking back to the parent culture.” The third is the demand that “another world is possible,” and that this world is an accessible one. The fourth principle is that any movement that denies the fact that a disabled world is not only possible but desirable needs to be “cripped,” – ie. challenged or subverted. The fifth is a commitment to interrogating and transforming the sites – material and otherwise – where disability emerges, always with an eye to the not-yet-visualized future.
What more is there to say? If anything is true in general of the human animal, it’s that we know that we will die, and that our fulfillment comes in loving and in being loved. Those two facts light up our existence with meaning, and they seem to me to be at the heart of art making.
Art is always bigger than anything we can say about it.
My only wish is that authors write the books they feel they have to write. That kind of urgency makes any subject revelatory. But the revelation comes in form, in the material stuff out of which art is made, which for writers means language. I wish more writers would pursue their formal obsessions: experiments with time, with perspective, with the diction and sentence shapes that excite them.
I think we need art because there are situations we can’t think about with our other tools for thinking. I couldn’t reason my way to an understanding of what had happened to me; I needed to dwell in it. And to do that I needed the tools of fiction: character and scene, and also the peculiar pressure of the aesthetic.
People sometimes treat my fiction, which often uses material from my life, as though it were a transcription of my experience. It isn’t. It has always been clear to me that my books are, and that I want them to be, fiction.
When people ask me, as they sometimes do, how much of a novel is “true,” it feels like a category error. The ideas of true and false don’t map onto the literary object we’re supposedly discussing. Lived experience has been utterly transformed.
I think that’s just baked into art as one of the challenges; we always feel the poverty of our medium. (We also often feel its richness.) Art tries to make incommensurate things commensurate. Trying to put the world on the page is a wildly quixotic endeavor: How does one translate sight or taste into language, much less feeling? I’ve often said that writing sex (which I’m often asked about) and writing the experience of eating a muffin are equally difficult to do well, by which I mean absolutely impossible. All writing strives to cross that gap between experience and the medium we have to express experience.
I think I’ve always been interested in the body in crisis—and sex and pain are both kinds of crisis.
Capturing the texture of existence is at the heart of artmaking for me. If there is a hope of uncovering the revelatory, of arriving at something “universal” to human experience, it lies in the devotion to the particular, in examining the moment-by-moment experience of an embodied being.
Surviving as an educator means drawing a boundary around one’s care for one’s students, leaving it, as best one can, in the classroom. That doesn’t negate the care; it doesn’t make it unreal.
Writing is such a private act; for the years that I work on a book, I’m not thinking at all about who might read it. I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it. I sometimes think that the usefulness of art depends on a commitment to defending art’s uselessness. What I mean is that it’s only through an utter commitment to its own private, often formal or aesthetic ambition, however sealed off from utility it might seem, that art can become publicly useful—that it can “shine a light onto human realities,” in your beautiful phrase. I’m being vague; I’m not sure I can do better. Maybe what I mean is that we can never know how our books are going to be received, how they will be useful (or fail to be useful) to other people. The idea that we can know the effect of anything we make is always an illusion. But for art to have a chance of reaching other people at all it has to have integrity first and foremost as art.
Art calls us to attention—attention to the world, to the personhood of others. And attention is the heart of care.
I am thinking about all the chapters, phases, meltdowns, miracles, outings, innings, high points, low points, comings, goings, trials, and tribulations of our first decade of marriage. I am thinking about the things that felt unbearably hard and the things that strengthened us, the rocks against which we sharpened our commitment to each other, the tides that carried us to shore, the moons that waxed and waned as we cycled through so many spirals of growth, apart and together. I am thinking about how much older we will be in another 10 years, how the hot flashes will have stopped and Gd willing I’ll become a rabbi after all these years of longing. There will undoubtedly be heartache and (another Gd-willing) celebrations, and the momentous and the mundane will all continue to mingle and blur. In the end (if there is such a thing), memory has a way of crystallizing sometimes the most unlikely moments.
All she knew was that she couldn’t let it happen again.
All she knows is that a body is a dangerous place to be.
That she, who was me—and still is, in the way that we contain past selves within us like nesting dolls.
I wrote rules like walls to keep us safe. The list grew.
I was not trying to disappear completely, or at least it didn’t start that way. I was trying to keep us alive. Before it got charted into a psychoanalytic script, or a narrative of arrested development, or even a vestige of post-traumatic stress disorder, my anorexia began as a misplaced attempt at preservation, the twisted entanglements of one body with another.
If I can’t be a body, I can study them. Thinking about the body as a collection of cells and neurons soothes me.
Yes, a body really can be a dangerous place to be.
Over the next decade, the diagnosis itself will shapeshift alongside me, taking on different bodies of its own: from anorexia to orthorexia to exercise addiction to EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified), eventually, lethargically, receding into the nebulous kingdom of recovery. It’s always struck me that it’s called recovery, because I don’t know what I am recovering. There was very little to look back upon, with regard to food and my relationship to it, in conscious memory, anchoring me to a place to return. Maybe the grilled cheese.
Recovery was, instead, an act of discovery, creation replacing the destruction. It is, still today, an ongoing act, one without end, revealing layers and layers yet to be unfolded, imploring me to dare to peer behind them, even—especially—when I would prefer to not.
Bodying all the way down, transcending the cut separating my mind from the soft flesh of me, is also an act of writing another story. Writing myself into existence.
All I want in life is to feel like a good person, because I felt like such a bad person my whole life – the worst kid in the family, always so out of control and angry. It’s been really hard to forgive, one, my parents for not knowing how to handle that correctly. And two, myself, for being like, dude, you were unmedicated, going through puberty and refused to believe you were anxious or depressed.
This industry and artistry fucking thrive on mental illness, burnout, overworking yourself, overextending yourself, not sleeping. You get bigger the more unhealthy you are. Isn’t that so fucked up?
I feel like fame is just abusive. The vibe of this – stalking, talking shit online, [people who] won’t leave you alone, yelling at you in public – is the vibe of an abusive ex-husband. That’s what it feels like. I didn’t know it would feel this bad.
When people are like, ‘Whatever you’re doing, it helped me’ – I don’t think any award or any money or whatever can be exchanged for that compliment. I don’t care about anything else, except giving space to people to be free. Because that’s what I needed so bad: freedom.
Grasshoppers devour the sunflowers
Petal by petal to raggedy yellow flags—
Squash blossoms of small suns blessed
By dewdrops flare beauty in the morning
Until an army of squash bugs land
And eat, then drag their bellies
From the carnage—
-Joy Harjo, “Eat”
call it // cauldron // earth of winter // cut into //
dough we show // survived daughters // how to dip
// their bodies // in milk // we pray // nandalala is
stealing // makhan // singing // when did I // eat //
// the forest // in this space someone’s // lungs are
being filled // with milk see our // universe //
backgrounded // yashoda aarting cows // mother of
butter smeared hands // shows us love for // a child
does she // even remember // the daughter she
pushed // out her stream of // // face east to offer
// panchamrita // offer the hyoid // feel speech
become // weightless // my mother throws // her
sacrum // cinnamon and vanilla essence // in the
pot // watch how it // // how she tilts // into
floor // drink // don’t // drink // in milk // find //
flooded // daughters // they called it // nourishment
// risk against // tarnished // woman // lala’s
laughter // translucent // a daughter’s body //
floating // my mother says // don’t // let // the
doodh pitthi // settle // it all rises // the sugar // the
milk // the palm // swallow // agni dev when you
take a bite // remember // the first time // you faced
the altar // asked do we feed // on ourselves // how
sweet it tastes // annapurna // filling your creases
with seeds // how you fertilize // into buoy //
daughters // this is how deep should you stir //
enough // to breathe // you // have not // killed me