Can't Stop, Won't Stop Reading: March and April
People keep saying the pandemic is over. Meanwhile India just had the single highest number of deaths in a day. And also fewer than half of the people US are vaccinated. So, yeah, failures all around. I suspect part of me doesn’t want this pandemic to be over, not really, because my life has been so much better since I took this year-long leave and picked up freelancing work again. I have read SO MUCH. For my particular habits and my particular brain, reading has been the escape. And boy have I escaped hard.
“I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want” by Melissa Febos. This is so good I could quote the whole thing. Instead of that, I’ll pull out two spots. The first is about the power of no, and for as important as it is to teach myself how to say no, the culture still needs to accept that no. This whole time, with all my stickers and buttons that say “NO,” I’ve only been tackling half the problem.
“No,” I repeated, bracing myself each time. I watched the quick but transparent digestion of the word move through them. In some, it produced flickers of surprise, hurt, disappointment, anger and finally surrender as they finally uttered the phrase “Thank you for taking care of yourself.” I understood that I was enacting a resocialization beyond my own. What if we taught all boys, I wondered, to appreciate this sort of rejection as a form of care?
And then this, ugh, about trauma. I’ve spent a lot of this past year trying to figure out what trauma is exactly and whether to call my five years at my school traumatic and whether to think of myself as having to climb back out of a traumatic experience. (I definitely don’t have PTSD, but I am definitely damaged.) This rings very true:
Etymologically, the word “trauma” originates from the Greek word for “wound,” and that is typically how we use it today, to describe both physical and psychological wounds. I have often wished for a different word, one that implies profound, often inhibitive, change, but precludes the violence inherent in “trauma.” Sometimes I use the word “event,” whose etymology suggests consequences rather than wounds. As I’ve observed the more longitudinal effects of my past experiences — the recurrent dreams and tendency to detach from uncomfortable situations — I’ve become less interested in classifying what it was than in observing what it did to my psyche.
“After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again” by Emi Nietfeld. To continue on the theme of my shitty job, I relate pretty fucking hard to this whole story. I don’t know if I never want to love a job again. But I will not be tricked and bamboozled into such trusting love ever again.
The aftermath of speaking up had broken me down. It dredged up the betrayals of my past that I’d gone into tech trying to overcome. I’d made myself vulnerable to my manager and the investigators but felt I got nothing solid in return. I was constantly on edge from seeing my harasser in the hallways and at the cafes. When people came up behind my desk, I startled more and more easily, my scream echoing across the open-floor-plan office. I worried I’d get a poor performance review, ruining my upward trajectory and setting my career back even further.
This weirdo poem was weird, “Lettuce” by Nick Sturm:
Kevin is full of these things, these things come out of Kevin and form tiny bridges between his mouth and the world painted in what it feels like to devote your life to something that is mostly water. We should all be so lucky lettuce, there are no guarantees lettuce, staying up all night just to prove to one another we’re here lettuce, muffled warmth lettuce . . .
“Equinox” by Tamiko Beyer is overall perfect but also has these perfect lines about food:
One day, I hope to set a table, invite you
to draw up a chair. Greens steaming garlic.Slices of bread, still warm. Honey flecked with wax,
and a pitcher of clear water.
“i found a lover and we left the city” by Patrycja Humienik popped up on my social media so many times. I kept trying to close the link and then it would get shared again—you know how that happens sometimes—and yes, I get it, I see why people kept sharing this poem.
… but we did look
up: airglow: sky a cicatrix: purpling, paler. damage,
and the need to undo it—not to fix, but to unribbon
the past. my mama grew up in a rural place, rolling jade
hills, my name betrayed her wish to leave that lack.
I also read The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo finally. This book was ALL OVER edu Twitter and the NCTE convention my first year there. Teachers just positively creaming themselves over it, so naturally that put me off. (Yes, I see the theme here, too. I’m prickly.) But oh, man. Oh it is so good. I hate to call a YA novel “fresh,” but like that’s it. I borrowed it from the library and knew, almost immediately, that I had to buy it. I made Jeff drive me to three different bookstores in Pittsburgh before I found it on a shelf. (And probably we bought books at all the other bookstores along the way, too. Oops.)
Hope Is a Thing with Wings
Although I doubt it,
hope flies quick into
my body’s corners.
I continue to be very into the Queer Fiction Issue of McSweeney’s. (Go buy it.) My only complaint about “The Cruel and Astonishing Tale of Imogen Cabral de Gama” by Gabrielle Bellot is that it is a novel excerpt so the end is pretty abrupt and I really want to know what happens!
The night the gales of his misfortune blew, Derek was winding all the clocks of the house he lived in with his grandmother and dusting the noses of the cracked busts of Nero and Henry the Navigator in the living room. He was clad in the blue furisode kimono his grandmother made him wear on Tuesday—or, at least, whenever she thought a Tuesday might be—so she could imagine him as a girl.
The Queer Fiction issue is so good I don’t even want to read McSweeney’s 63. Except there’s a quartet of stories by Stephen Dixon, who I did get to have as a professor twenty years ago at Johns Hopkins. And the one I read the day it came about broke my heart. From “Oh My Darling”:
He just wants her to know what happened to him. Maybe he shouldn’t. She’s busy. Reading on the computer screen what she wrote and typing some more. Or maybe she knows he’s there but wants to finish the sentence she’s typing before she loses it. Tell her later. Why’s it so important she should know now? No, tell her now. She’ll see what it is the moment she looks at him. But it’s to get her to look at him that’s the problem. Try “a-hem”. “A-hem,” he says.
Last one for now, “God Save Us from the ‘Bad Days’ of White Men” by Mona Eltahawy. Eltahawy tells remarkable stories very well. Here she unpacks the ridiculousness of “sexual frustration” as a motive.
The world is full of sexually frustrated women who are are taught, and obey, that they must wait until they are married (to a man) to have sex, and yet I’m unaware of any massacres committed by those women.
God save us from the “bad days” of cis white men and the even worse excuses given for the violence they commit by and for their dicks.
That has been my daily prayer since the shooter - I will not say his name - told detectives he has a "sex addiction" and targeted three Atlanta area spas to "take out that temptation."