fuckatherine

Little bug in my lamp
I am going to sleep.

You can stay there—no harm, just wings hitting paper

At least someone will be around as I dream.

As the subject line tells, I suppose. I think it's comforting because I'm sonically reminded that once upon I time, I felt terrible. Really terrible. I hear this song and feel the echo of the 17-year-old emotions I once harbored. But I managed to get through it. If I told my self eight years ago where I'd be now and what I'd be doing, what I look like and who I love, she'd be a little horrified but mostly blown away. I wouldn't recognize myself, in a good way. I think. 

So yeah, it's comforting because logic follows that despite how awful I feel in this moment, in four years it will be better than I can imagine right now. It's hard for me to know because (hopefully) it'll be a future I can't even envision. 

Time does heal all things. Time will make it right. 


I'm trying to see this as a...spiritual revisitation....as opposed to a regression. Everyone has been where I have been and thought what I've thought. It will be okay because I will make it be okay. 

This word "deserve," it follows me. My specter of hesitation, burden of uncertainty. Is there something inherently wrong with me? I need someone to tell me if it's me. It doesn't matter, I'm sick of it, it's not a big deal, I want to stop thinking about it, get over it, the weather is so nice, I am always thinking about it, it doesn't matter, I don't believe you, it doesn't matter, the sun is out, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.

What do I even deserve? If I get what I "deserve" will it even be what I want?

New month—should I make some changes? For one, stop overusing this emdash. Can I speak with certainty this cycle around? Will the equinox bring me fortitude? I guess we'll see. Much to look forward to this month, I suppose. Let's pray that tomorrow's Katherine manages to strike the balance.

This past weekend was historically ridiculous. Going to do something impulsive now—never sure if it's a healthy dose of spontaneity or a well constructed umbrella for self injury. Who cares—I'm going to get my nipple (singular) pierced anyway. 

Spying on Alex. He's written "THINGS I GET TO DO THIS WEEK" in scrawling letters on the center of his sketchbook page. It makes sense that he would say that, I think. I am acutely aware that we have very different world views. He's like Lillyanne: they make me want to be more moral people. I think it's a good outlook, though. Life is laborious, sure, but I'm grateful for it. Mostly.

 Writing in a school function again. Sorry! -- and no, I haven't written that article. Too tired. But here's my response to our opening question for class today:

Which of these four words most resonates with you? Is there one that you want to learn more about? Found really interesting as you read and studied for this clasS? Or is there one that's a big part, or you want to be more of a part of your practice?

MY MIND PALACE! Personal archive……..
 

Yesterday I was talking to Philly and I mentioned how I wanted to take a writing course at Brown. He asked me if I wanted to to write fiction or non-fiction and I said magical realism. [Silence.]

“Fiction, I guess. But one always makes its way into the other, no?”

Everything I make is autobiographical to an extent because I made it, right? I’m not in the business of necessarily telling the stories of strangers. Maybe that’s wrong. But the personal archive! There is always so much to mine from and to lament about.

Wound dweller. Wallower.

I’m tired of all of these words. That article said it best but I don’t have the energy to try and re-express what she said. They’ve lost meaning! In Black Fem sophomore year we talked about how labelling can destroy meaning or how overuse can destroy meaning… the meaning is so far gone by now. The archive is literally everything. Where is the preciousness? What is special?

I knoooow it doesn’t have to be special but under the hierarchical eye can I not have something to deem mine and to give the title of outstanding?

The archive is a big part of my practice because it has to be. I know nothing more and nothing better than myself.

Summer went by with a mayfly heart. I'm knee deep in the bank of a brackish month watching its current slug around my legs, trying to remember when exactly it was that I wandered into its path. June, July gone with the flotsam and flounder. All flat and stupid-looking.

I've done hours of work yet emerged with very little tangible proof. But I am proud of the amount of reading I've done this summer! Four books and three more coming.

NIGHTBITCH / Rachel Yoder

★★★☆☆ (3.5)

I wrote a bit about Nightbitch in comparison to Chouette a while back and my opinion mostly has not changed. I still think that Yoder does a good job of illustrating how motherhood is also a death in which the label of "mother" subsumes the person predicating it. Yoder tries to give Nightbitch an out through a transformation but I can't quite pinpoint why I dislike the execution of it. Maybe it's because I read the book through a lens of presumed whiteness which I do think is somewhat warranted: how else could Nightbitch commit so many social and legal faux pas and not receive one public shaming, one blacklisting, one institutionalization? The clear obvious answer to that is that the book is fiction, duh. But just because you have dog moms running around doesn't mean racism gets to disappear from either your book or your (experience informed) writing. The byline for a Yoder interview states how the book portrays "underachieving as a radical act of feminism" which would be great if that actually happened. Nightbitch ends up going above and beyond in her artistic career and manages to do the impossible of converging her two selves without ever running into the police. 

On the other hand I thoroughly disagree with the Goodreads reviews calling Nightbitch a shock horror piece with gore for gore's sake. No critical thinking skills! Girlness is never clean. If you want shock horror go read A Little Life. 

BELOVED / Toni Morrison 

★★★★☆ (4)

Beloved would be the second Toni Morrison I've read following The Bluest Eye. I initially believed that I liked TBE more than Beloved but that taste has changed. The slow opening pace of Beloved mirrors its setting of heat baked, stagnant Ohio in which we are introduced to Sethe, Paul D, and Denver. I truly love child characters and Denver proves remarkably different from the sisters in TBE. She is both petulant child and sudden woman, mother to her mother and keeper for a dead thing that is only her sister in the worst times. Beloved is deeply psychological and devastating in how the living ghosts of slavery creep upon the presently here. Morrison skillfully navigates the fluidity of time and memory. I also kind of live in constant fear of sexual violence in narratives involving deep trauma and always pray that the introduction of a male character, friend or not, does not end in a violation of our protagonists. I am so thankful Paul D did not torment Sethe any more than she already had been. Beloved is honest in its dread and quiet in its sadness. 

AN INVENTORY OF LOSSES / Judith Schalansky

★★★★☆ (4)

At first I was put off my Schalansky's author's voice until I realized that Schalansky was not always herself in these vignettes. I really enjoyed the increasing abstraction of the book and her ability to revive a landscape from memory and antiquity. Loved the Caspian tiger chapter the most. I've always said that I love translated prose because other languages produce certain unique phrases and word groupings not often seen in American-born English. Schalansky balances dense information with poignant prose. I breezed through this book and would read a longer version. Last chapter felt fairly inconsequential; the preface honestly read more encompassing. 

SALT SLOW / Julia Armfield

★★☆☆☆ (2.5)

Ooookay I'm getting tired of writing now. Sorry. TLDR this book was simply nothing new! We've all thought about our puberties as animalistic, as girlhood as consumption, of stone-like men and of insomniac cities. The average fourteen year old girl on 2015 Tumblr has had these thoughts twice a fortnight. The prose didn't even save the stories. Too on the nose, not gory enough, Shape of Water was better. The end. 

STAY TRUE / Hua Hsu 

IN PROGRESS

From what I gathered this seems to be a biography of the author's close friend who passed, one a Taiwanese boy and the other Chinese. I honestly have not read many diasporic stories and San Francisco is a lush, beautiful, and sad place for one to take place. I think about the relationship between Taiwan and China frequently and am interested in reading about its trickledown into more intimate relationships. I'm like 5 pages in so.... we'll see how it goes.

KLARA AND THE SUN / Kazuo Ishiguro 

IN PROGRESS

I read uhhhhh the other one he wrote that is wildly famous but I can't remember the name of last summer so it seems right to read one now. Ishiguro always seems to meander a bit when he writes. There is no real threat or driving force past the feeling that something will go wrong which makes me hard for me to keep going at times. I just know that this will be sad somehow. TBD.

Iza's Ballad / Magda Szabó

UNSTARTED

I really need to read more classics and also read from Central Europe, so here we are. I don't love stories about war and honestly have not read a book with war as a heavy novel since Catch 22. I've heard really good things about this book but to be fair they came from TikTok, the same platform that glomped praise onto salt slow :-\. Will update. 

I also still have that American Pottery book to read but I'll probably end up just skimming through and noting down clay bodies and glazes of interest. Mood below in ref to Chicago! Hurrah!

This summer seems to a revival of the old giants: dolls, war crimes, the tyrants of 2015 Youtube. I generally despise the sequel and, even worse, the remake because sometimes simply no one asked! It is nice however to be able to conceptualize a generation's feelings, albeit broadly, regarding our childhoods. 

I enjoyed Barbie much more than I had expected. I got some good laughs in (the Lou Reed line lol) and basked in the flow of the movie which is truly all I think is necessary for a good viewing experience. Leaving the theater I recognized that whatever qualms I had about the movie and Greta Gerwig as a person and a director came down to the fact that I would simply never find what I was looking for in her films.

Think Francis Ha, think Little Women... Greta Gerwig makes movies about girlness through the lens of the white woman which are two aspects that I will never engage with fully separately nor together. And I cannot change that about her or her movies. It's unreasonable for me to expect she to give me what I want. That's fine! 

It's like the complaint that Troye Sivan's Rush MV is too white and too skinny. Troye Sivan... is a skinny... white... gay...man...who hangs out with...skinny white gay men! Obviously we all have a duty to be conscious and considerate of who we surround ourselves with but it simply does not surprise me that this is his friend group. And should I be expecting more than that? Not really. 

Side bar I was thoroughly shocked to realize that not everyone went through the Blue Neighborhood trilogy with rapt attention as a tween and casually followed Connor Franta's life for the ensuing five years afterwards. I WAS THERE WHEN THE WAR STARTED! Nowadays these are just words -- Zoella, Troyler, MagCon -- but back then....

I really eeked out this entry word by word... writing and reading has been so arduous lately as seen in my failure to write anything since the early month but I'm hoping to really start working on the books I checked out. I'm thinking An Inventory of Losses first, then, salt slow, then perhaps finishing Klara? Iza's Ballad intimidates me. It looks dense in an unpleasant and a Penguin Classics way. I don't even know if I'll end up reading the last one because honestly TikTok book recommendations cannot be trusted at times. Hopefully by the time I leave for Chicago I'll have read enough to post a summer book review!

 The 9-5 work day genuinely is the death of passion. I get home every night and I am so tired that the most I can muster myself to do really is lay around. At least before I could look forward to the climbing gym, but given the state of my tendons right now, I doubt I can climb the way I want to for another week or so. Why do I have to be punished for just doing what I want? Admittedly the injury is forcing me to be cautious about my limits but then again I completely forgot about my similar and equally frustrating wrist injury from pole overexertion this past spring. I never learn!

Camp has further cemented my belief that I don't want to be a teacher and I don't want kids. I know these two things likely will change in the next decade or so but I cannot imagine having to spend all of my time giving and giving and giving. So what if I don't want the selflessness of motherhood? When you are a mother you must wholly and willingly resign to the fact that your life is no longer solely yours. And obviously, in a traditional pregnancy and motherhood, this sharing is not hypothetical but rather bleakly and blatantly physical. I give you my fat, my blood, my milk; all my things big and small. 

My mom couldn't wear contacts anymore after her first pregnancy. Again, things big and small. 

I recently finished reading Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. It follows Mother, an in-hiatus artist SAHM, as she begins to transform into a dog during the nighttime -- Nightbitch. I won't spoil the ending, which I still feel uncertain towards, but Yoder manages encapsulate so many of the fears regarding mothering that I somehow have developed by the ripe age of 19. More specifically, she recognizes that there is a very unique damage that motherhood can do to one's artistic practice. I thought a lot about Nightbitch and her relationship to her son: a sometimes-terrible but perfect child who depends on her more than anyone and appears more dog than boy (although this is maybe not entirely his fault....).

Nightbitch certainly holds an unrelenting love for her son, but perhaps not an unconditional one. She more than subtly changes the boy to suit her needs. This kind of change is inorganic. The magical realist in-novel universe provides a rather lovely ending to the book where Yoder pushes for a more raw kind of love, for spontaneity, for an embrace of the nasty and the disgusting aspects of motherhood.

Does it always work like that though? Usually that leads more towards intensive therapy. 

Nightbitch reminds me of Chouette, a thematically similar book I read last year when I also happened to be working at an arts summer camp with children. In Chouette, our mother is named Tiny. Tiny is a cellist whose sudden and rather animalistic pregnancy results in an always-terrible but perfect child who depends on no one and appears more owl than girl. Chouette is a very different book in many ways: Tiny's husband is much worse than Nightbitch's and Tiny finds herself changing more and more for her child. 

I found Tiny's trajectory more believable. Her career is ruined, her marriage spoiled, her child gone. All because she did her best, I guess. In her own way.

I usually find myself pretty optimistic but motherhood is the one thing my instinct seems to refuse negotiations on. Never mind the whole non-woman thing. I don't even want to think about my body in relation to pregnancy in relation to gender. 

I highly recommend both mentioned books.

I can't wait for menopause.