seventy-eighth (2023-06-09)
"the moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you" ― maggie nelson, in the argonauts
photo by steph byce of me at villa la ripa winery in arezzo, italy
poem (click here for my full list of poems on the docket for 2023)
Wislawa Syzmborska, “The End and the Beginning”
this poem describes the mundane labor necessitated in post-war cleanup but it is also a referendum on grief. isn’t this experience of witnessing normality one of the most painful things about loss? to watch other people rushing to the train, or posting petty twitter beefs, or just living their lives in ignorance to the person who no longer exists is something i’ve found inordinately painful. in particular, the lines above speak to the loss of intergenerationality that hits me hard every pride month. we have lost so much history, so many stories due to the AIDS epidemic that took generations from us.
books
tampa by alissa nutting, 2013
note: this book and writeup describes sexual assault of minors
this is, as this great review puts it, a first-person “pornographic parody” of the debra lafeve case wherein a beautiful female teacher sexually preys on young teenage boys. the constant, incredibly graphic descriptions of sex distracted from more interesting questions, like does the narrator have a single interest or hobby other than her deviant sexuality? she doesn’t describe any friends (she’s married but finds her adult husband unattractive and droll) or describe any trait beyond manipulation and deceitfulness. she seems truly sociopathic in her inability to feel emotions beyond sexual desire and is singularly focused on having the maximum amount of sex possible, consequences be damned. the myopic focus on sex obscured more compelling details, like what happened to her sorority sisters? does she have any family? how does a person in the modern world live such an isolated life? i felt disgusting after reading this (and like i might now be on some kind of list) which i think is intentional, but despite clever writing, the plot was too thin to hold. (as a side note, the title was boring!)
short story
if you are chekhov-curious, this is a lovely short story to start. it’s funny, irreverent, and because it’s chekhov, every detail is meticulously chosen. i’m struck by how slow news used to spread in the pre-digital age and how prescient chekhov was in pre-dating warhol’s concept of 15 minutes of fame. chekhov’s characters: they’re just like us!
podcasts
this conversation about the 'reading mind' is a gift, on the ezra klein show, 2022
Many, many of us have, if you will, regressed to that earliest form of reading, in which we are barely skimming the surface of what we read, barely consolidating it in memory, and we are, in fact, reading less of what is there as a result.
this is an older conversation (published on my birthday last year!) with scholar marryanne wolf about how deep reading offers us a creative, intense experience of awe and ephiphany that is not possible within our constant habits of scrolling and skimming. the act of reading as a site of exploration is fascinating to me as i’m (obviously) a big reader and have always felt that close reading is an artistic act. this podcast dovetails nicely with an essay in zadie smith’s book of essays “changing my mind” which details the barthes and nabokov debate about reading as creation (barthes) vs. reading as author-driven authoritarianism (nabokov). much to think about!
thanks for reading - more to come -
bria