Things I'm Reading

One of the most insidious things of the MAGA moment here in USistan: the cooptation of #BDSM terms by the cultural wing of the Christian right - not the ethos of BDSM, of course, since #consent and #bodily autonomy are the exact opposite of patriarchy.

The rage I feel anytime I see someone on "the apps" peddle these terms in this way. Phew. .

One of the most insidious things of the MAGA moment here in USistan: the cooptation of #BDSM terms by the cultural wing of the Christian right - not the ethos of BDSM, of course, since #consent and #bodily autonomy are the exact opposite of patriarchy.

Went to the #EdgarSymposium for the first time. I keep chewing on a comment one panelist made about how stressful he finds writing sequels because you must stagger the details of each character’s past, but include enough info for a reader to start on a later book.

🌲🌲🌲🌲 Evergreen. 🌲🌲🌲🌲 ///////. You have to learn from experience what a character in a story by Edne O’Brien states: that the reason love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give. From The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez 1/2

Working so hard to get that orange 🍊🍊🍊 Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can’t generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story.

or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right. — Truman Capote on Writing www.theparisreview.o... [No paywall] archive.ph/8DQsP?utm...

Working so hard to get that orange 🍊🍊🍊 Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can’t generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story.

An interview with Truman Capote on writing. CAPOTE When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium. INTERVIEWER

From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all. www.theparisreview.o... [No paywall] archive.ph/8DQsP?utm...

An interview with Truman Capote on writing. CAPOTE When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium. INTERVIEWER

INTERVIEWER What do you mean exactly by “control”? CAPOTE I mean maintaining a stylistic and emotional upper hand over your material.

Normal Life By Rasha Omran Translated by Phoebe Carter Because I, too, know that no one dies of love, I live my life like a normal woman. I wake up in the morning, drink my coffee, do all the things any single woman like me would do.

Then, before going to sleep, I sweep up the death that’s piled up on the floorboards throughout the day Every day I do this and every day I forget to plug the hole you dug in my soul when you left this hole leaking death like dust leaving my body. And so

They will vanish all at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead.

And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history. —Excerpt from The Years by Annie Ernaux

They will vanish all at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead.

We recited the grammar rules of correct French.

preceding it is :)] water smell of work coats, baked apples all winter long, the sound of piss in the night bucket, and the parents’ snoring. People’s deaths didn’t affect us at all. —Excerpt from The Years by Annie Ernaux

We recited the grammar rules of correct French.

It struck me that my grandparents’ efforts in life were largely dedicated to remaining invisible, to achieving a desired inconspicuousness, to hiding in the dim household light and keeping themselves apart from the wide current of history, with its extragrand narratives and its margins of