…being some bits from some things I have been reading, incomplete and un-representative, & always out-of-date

 

09.08.24
Suzanne Scanlon | Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen
We do not know why we do the most basic things we are called to do
We are ultimately unknowable to ourselves.

07.29.24
Anna Kornbluh | Immediacy: The Style of Too-Late Capitalism
Mediation thus becomes the ultimate object of Marxian critique: how thought is mediated, how labor mediates nature, how social rule mediates social position, how capital mediates value while pretending it i snot a medium.

06.12.24
Mari Ruti | Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings
I don’t have the luxury of sticking around people who can’t give me a straight answer. It’s easy to eroticize emotional ambivalence for the simple reason that desire is fanned by mystery. This is why the interplay of retreat and pursuit is such a common dynamic in the dance of desire. But I’ve learned that the other’s opacity doesn’t necessarily make him more fascinating. Much of the time, it makes him draining.

06.08.24
Dodie Bellamy | Bee Reaved
Sometimes I do multiple, progressively longer versions, piling paragraph upon paragraph, hoping that under all that weight startling connections will sprout. When do you close the portal? I don’t know.

06.01.24
Lucy Ives | Life Is Everywhere
But even before this, before he is gone, my father and my fiend, I began.

04.22.24
Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English | Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
If the uterus and ovaries could dominate woman’s entire body, it was only a short step to the ovarian take-over of woman’s entire personality.

04.12.23
Franz Fanon | A Dying Colonialism
It is not easy to conduct, with a minimum of errors, the struggle of a people, sorely tried by a hundred and thirty years of domination, against an enemy as determined and as ferocious as French colonialism.

03.18.24
Vanessa Schneider | My Cousin Maria Schneider (translated by Molly Ringwald)
You responded with the same line you uttered as Jeanne at the end of ‘Tango,’ after killing Paul. ‘I don’t know this man,’ you said before walking away.

03.13.24
Dionne Brand | Nomenclature
42.
Monday: I am one of one hundred
against the United States
in a demo for Nicaragua
the snow, still falling softly.

03.12.24
Saretta Morgan | Alt-Nature
Whereas origins are structured by the body’s temperature upon entering,
Which is a geographic belief to map sufficient desire,
To produce enough distance,
Or maintain the everyday fantasy of extremism in the bush,
Whereas territory could be anything, clarification on a sound, measurable trust,
Shaking the handle because there are more ways to watch someone die,
More bright, memorable faucets in the hall.

12.17.23
Keith Ridgway | ‘Shame’ (from Never Love a Gambler)
I know this to be true because of the strngth with which I know it, and because of the evidence.

10.9.2023
Claire Donato | Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts
I understand if you need to turtle for a time. Sometimes I turtle too. It’s this thing I do when I feel empty.
What does that mean?
I can’t tell.
Say it in my ear.

9.21.23
Robert Glück | About Ed
My dad triumphed over corruption and hypocrisy with the small weapon of language, a weapon that guarantees happy endings—that is, endings where truth is completely expressed.

3.14.23
Emmanuelle Guattari, tr. E.C. Belli | I, Little Asylum
She was very small. She’d lost all her teeth. Because of the war
In a class photo from the end of primary school, she looks like she’s six.
She had little square hands, very small, like those of a child.
She had Greek feet.
She had yellow skin and black hair. She told us that once upon a time, a rich young Arab man who was infatuated with her had asked her to marry him. She’d hesitated, but hadn’t wanted to leave with him in the end.
She was very thin. She was flat chested.
She always brought fresh ream and butter, just in case. Because of the war.

2.20.23
Amia Srinivasan | The Right to Sex
There is no settling in advance on a political program that is immune to co-option, or that is guaranteed to be revolutionary rather than reformist. You can only see what happens, then plot your next move. This requires being prepared—strategically and emotionally—to abandon ways of thinking and acting to which you may have become deeply attached. In that sense, nostalgia is a barrier to any truly emancipatory politics. This is as true in feminism as anything else.

2.11.23
Doris Lessing | Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
Incidentally, I see writers, generally, in every country, as a unity, almost like an organism, which has been evolved by society as a means of examining itself. This “organism” is different in different epochs and always changing. Its most recent evolution has been into space and science fiction, predictably, because humanity is “into” studying space, and has only recently (historically speaking) acquired science as an aptitude. The organism must be expected to develop, to change, as society does. The organism is not conscious of itself as an organism, a whole, though I think it will soon me. The world is becoming one, and this enables us all to see our many different societies as aspects of a whole, and the parts of those societies shared by them all. If you see writers like this—as a stratum, a layer, a strand, in every country, all so varied, but as together making up a whole—it tends to do away with the frantic competitiveness that is fostered by prizes and so forth. I think that writers everywhere are aspects of each other, aspects of a function that has been evolved by society. [1987]

12.31.22
Fernanda Melcher, tr. Sophie Hughes | Paradais
He would have liked to tell her the truth: that it wasn’t his fault, that it was all fatboy’s fault; tell her about Fraco’s sick obsession with that woman who, as it turned out, would rather die than give herself to him, but it was all Polo could do to get up off the floor, splash his face in the drum in the yard, get dressed in his faded overalls and leave the house—without any breakfast, without so much as a sip of water because his stomach was still in knots—and cycle off on Zorayda’s yellow bicycle, his eyes blurry from tiredness and from the nasty green gunk still oozing from them, along the same old road, the road his muscles knew from memory, and which, in that moment, was more arduous than ever, precisely because everything around him seemed so normal.

11.18.22
bell hooks | Teaching to Transgress
When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other.

11.9.22
Jamieson Webster | Disorganization & Sex
The movements of desire displace an implicit trend towards mastery, totality, unification and essentialism; and so desire continues to be an open site of investigation and possiblity. Or, to put it more strongly” sexual desire is the open site par excellence.

11.1.22
Sueyeun Juliette Lee | Aerial Concave Without Cloud
manage the information
produce good variations
there is no empty shadow
intention is always
gently luminous

10.22.2022
Teresa Brennan | The Transmission of Affect
Freedom from the affects means freedom for the feelings to be known to consciousness. Feelings can be sifted from affects, and better known to consciousness, through the deployment of living attention or love. But such attention encounters a formidable opposing force. Affects (via hormones and other means of projection and and reception) are carried in the blood, and with them is carried the presence of the other and the social in the system. (To find an utterly pure soul within, something untouched by human error, one would have to sustain living attention through a process of complete exsanguination.)

10.15.2022
Audre Lorde | dream of europe
from ECHOES
There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing you are not being
heard noticed only
by others not heard
for the same reason

10.12.2022
Anna Gurton-Wacher | my midwinter poem
And I remember the part in another
Of Berndadette’s poems where she and Peggy
And maybe someone else were wishing for chairs
Longing for chairs, dreaming of them
And then look outside and see someone has just thrown
Some chairs out on the street
Right in front of their apartmenbt
And what a gift from the universe!
The poets needed chairsr and the world heard them

4.24.2022
Lewis Warsh | Elixir

I’m writing from Lenox Hill, my bed near the window

Soon the light will come up over the city

The night nurse, Shelley, will bring me a Percocet, maybe two

And no doubt Dr. Newman and his team will visit and the day nurses will arrive

“Think of the most beautiful place,” the anesthesiologist says as he puts me under

And my mind goes blank

Katt’s face as I step from the shower and she dries my back and shoulders

My scrawny shoulders

4.21.22
Lao Yang, tr. Joshua Edwards & Lynn Xu | Pee Poems 

A single spoken truth
Can easily hobble history

But always someone’s fresh bullshit
Gives history a new leg to stand on

2.22.22
Julietta Singh | No Archive Will Restore You
My response to this question was not verbal but bodily. I felt a shock of nerve pain run from my lower back through to the base of my foot. I heard the piercing echo of that unbelievable recurring cry that I had made in pain. I became physically struck before all of those keen, critical young faces. I looked at my beloved student and through through my body: “Can we put aside our training in political correctness and let pain, that inarticulate beast, sound its impossible noise? Can we listen together differently?”

2.18.22
Sheila Heti | Pure Colour
She would let any shame come upon her. She would wear the costume of a leaf. She wouldn’t dress in pearls and satin. A leaf is dressed only by the snow and the rain. She would not give her opinion about anything. She would take no actions, and would remain in one place, like a leaf does, and when she died, she would fall to the ground. A leaf remains on the branch on which it’s been grown, it does not change the world around it. She would not go into the world to critique or fix it. If she would be mocked for wearing her costume, she would not try to correct the people who mocked her. She did not think that everyone should be a leaf. She didn’t think anyone should not be. She would not dress as a leaf to protest how others were living. She would not do it to be the best kind of person, or even the very worst one.

2.15.22
Cedric J. Robinson | Black Marxism
European civilization is not the product of capitalism. On the contrary, the character of capitalism can only be understood in the social and historical context of its appearance.

2.12.22
Rebekah Smith | from the White Sea
“What a nice garden you have,” is what I thought, and what I meant to say. 
Instead, I said, “I like dirt.”
[‘We Need to Cultivate’]

2.7.22
Babak Lakghomi | Floating Notes
My name is Bob, and this is what I call my life: an attic room with a yellow curtain in a narrow hallway, a spring bed on the creaking floor. Notebooks in a knapsack. Two cups of coffee per day. 

1.17.22
Etel Adnan, tr. Sarah Riggs | Time 
‘over there there is nothing but rising
paths, a naked horse, clumps
of grass, wind

the permanent eclipse is expected.
it seems far in time, but
quite close in tought

the spider waited a long time but
the fly eventually came.’

[from ‘At 2pm in the Afternoon’]

1.13.22
Mark Fisher | Capitalist Realism
‘What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide for us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.’

1.8.22
Dionne Brand | The Blue Clerk
‘You have the privilege of this avant-garde seeing, the clerk says. It is not a privilege at all, to see, the author says. I think quite the opposite, to be the only person that this seeing is available to. The only person? Let us say then one of few. I don’t think that is particularly avant-garde because people live that every day. Living that little fissure between scenes of the real.’

1.4.22
Jennifer Soong | Near, At 
‘And what of your hesitation. Life, contrary to the extremes, road-blocked intermittently by certificated starts and ends, has fourth and fifth sounds. Has infinite and no versions. Do you think the wrens are frightened when you step into the yard?’

1.1.22
Silvia Federici | Patriarchy of the Wage (‘Counterplanning from the Kitchen’)
‘Our aim is to be priceless, to price ourselves out of the market, for housework and factory work and office work to become “uneconomic.” ‘

12.27.21
Sophie Calle | The Hotel
‘For his breakfast, simply a cup of coffee. He hasn’t touched the banana. In the wardrobe, his only clothing is a sheepskin jacket. In one of the pockets, I find a diary with German writing, a language U don’t speak. The only thing that is comprehensible is the date of February 24, between 3 and 5 p.m.: “Nietzche.” “

12.26.21
Gébé, tr.Edward Gauvin | Letters to Survivors
‘In traffic jams of ten thousand identical cars, there was always, in one car a bit less like the rest, with a phone and a minibar, a maniac blacking out little squares on a map of the world. 

And when the little squares had all been blacked out, everything went boom! But all the square blackeners had made sure to take cover first. 

Don’t say “that villainous scum,” Monique. 

Yes! Say it, Mom. 

Kids! Settle down.’

12.18.21

Pola Olixaraao, tr. Adam Morris | Mona
‘ “Writing is the only desire you can fully realize by yourself, alone with your mind. That’s why there will always be writers. Our credo is that life can be a book, that it can be read and accessed by someone else. And writers are the evidence that life is a book, that it’s written. Writers try to do something with what for the rest of humanity is just air.” ‘

12.12.21
Sara Lautman | Types: Considering Queer Elderhoods
‘Famous? Be famous?
Gotta be famous first…’

12.10.21
Lewis Freedman | I Want Something Other than Time
‘Soon every possible word will have been
& will be a pun.
It feels pure to exude w/o irony
a power of total renewal,
but the sentence given
will still require a verb
& go cartoonish,
a remainder of precisely
this
produced as
that.

12.5.21
Moyna Pam Dick | I am Writing You from Afar
‘It’s true that there’s no self! The impulses form a temporary shape, an illusory freeze frame. Although nothing is frozen. Everything’s hot and flows like the molten core.

Then why am I ice sometimes?

‘The creaking door is no door. It’s one of my distant ice limbs, cracking.

I need to make myself smaller’

12.2.21
Leslie Marmon Silko | Ceremony
‘An old sensitivity had descended in her, surviving thousands of years from the oldest times, when the people shared a single clan name and they told each other who they were; they recounted the actions and words each of their clan had taken, and would take; from before they ere born and long after they died, the people shared the same consciousness. The people had known, with the simple certainty of the world they saw, how everything should be.’

12.1.21
Chantal Ackerman, tr. Corina Copp | My Mother Laughs
‘I can’t do it. I can’t wait for spring. I am in winter with dark and heavy clouds that look as if they’ll be there forever. I have the impression it’s the end but it’s not the end.

I don’t know what I’m going to do or where I’m going to live and if I’m still leaving for somewhere. But I’m going to my apartment in Paris. I have an apartment. It’s my home. That’s what they say, home.

But I don’t feel like I have a home or an elsewhere. Somewhere where you feel at home or elsewhere.

Sometimes I tell myself I’m going to the hotel, that will be a home elsewhere, I’ll be able to write there.

I reread everything I’d written and it profoundly displeased me. But what to do. I wrote it. It’s there.’

11.30.21
Gail Scott | Permanent Revolution
‘Can the translator write more than she hears? More than she has lived in the Habitus that is her own culture? And does it matter? The drift of meaning from one site to another can produce, notably where some sort of proximity is actual, where one language is not suppressed by the other, texts of incredible + complex beauty.’