Good what-ever, welcome. If you have never read this before, this is a “substack” aka a blog about the books I tried to read this week & the things that distracted me as I tried to read them: tv shows, movies, the cats in the alley way mating, etc. It’s a way to hold myself accountable and to be off social media (ha-ha ya right). I post pictures I take on my film camera (trying to live in the moment is HUMILIATING) and tiny little baby poems. Thanks for being here and thank you Bianca Rivera for the very perfect illustration of me running away from books.
This “week” I read Grievances and The Topeka School, which I will get into shortly. But first, here were my distractions.
(photo description: a hand peeking it’s way out of a bathroom)
TINY DISTRACTIONS
-A Mickey Mouse mask abandoned on the grass.
-A woman putting on chapstick in her car as her mask was around her neck.
-The way some people say “ant” and some people say “ount” (I am the former)
-The leaves on my favorite plant Whitney Houston started turning yellow.
-A sign for a flower shop that was lit up all neon & red.
- The woman on my block who practices her accordion in her car at 2 AM.
-Growing out my hair.
(photo description: red hat with a black poof and some of the city in the background)
TV DISTRACTION: the Wilds
Okay, I love this show? It’s Lost meets The Truman Show meets the Stanford Prison Experiment. A group of teenage girls from all kinds of backgrounds (am I Nancy Pelosi) are on their way to a female-empowerment retreat when their plane unexpectedly crashes on a deserted island. At the end of episode one (spoiler alert) it zooms out to a group of people watching the girls from an office on screen. The dialogue in this show is often … pretty bad because it’s like they wanted something like Euphoria but ended up somewhere in between Pretty Little Liars and Riverdale. Which is to say, it’s deep & realistic but also melodramatic and always processing in really basic ways. Also why do they say aggro so much? Do teens still say that?
Something that excited me about this was how it was a critique of …. Girl Boss culture?? The head of the experiment is this Elizabeth-Holmes type who describes herself as “Napoleon with a cunt” and she believes that the teenage girls, put to survive with just scraps and the clothes on their backs, will prove that women should rule the world. And if injury or death happens on the way to that, well, this experiment will change the world so whatever. She believes her controversial experiment will not only win her awards but take men out of office, because it’s men who are responsible for the current downfall of society. I love this take because it’s such a bad one take, lmfao. It ignores capitalism, colonialism, all of which, sure, initially driven by men but absolutely one-hundred percent trickled down to Girl Bosses like Hilaria Clinton.
There was also this criticism of “diversity.” The girls range from class, race, sexual orientation, geography?? The only way it makes sense for them to be together is in a controlled environment, for science. In this meta way, it’s kind of this criticism of TV writing. I don’t have anything else intellectual to say about it.
(photo description: three women in the bathroom getting ready)
OKAY FINALLY THE BOOKS THAT I READ
GRIEVANCES by Christina Rivera Garza
This is a good book of essays for people who like things that are kind of a cross between academia & hybrid essay. Garza talks about the spectacle of horror in Mexico, collective grief, and the way writing can be a means of survival.
I was particularly touched by the essay “I won’t let anyone say these are the best years of your life,” in which she describes teens living in Ciudad Juarez through the war between the Mexican army and the cartel. I still have a lot to learn about this war, and the wars of Central America in general (the other day I freaked out because I came to the baseless conclusion that I exist because of bananas). They live a life of constant fear and confinement, which I want to say “sounds familiar” but we are not living through this kind of war —yet. The teens realize that “age [won’t] spare them violence,” as in, even though they have all these quotidian teenage problems, like mothers yelling about unclean rooms, crushes, all that teenage shit: they could still be fucking killed. She mentions the way “bedrooms became cages,” how “above all they were not to answer to strangers.” The strangers, or friends for that matter, could be people who could harm them. And that parts sounds familiar but I do want to stress that somebody potentially coughing on you and somebody planning to hang you in the street is simply … different! But yeah, we do live in fear. Our best friends could kill us, in theory. Something else about this essay was that Garza stresses that the years weren’t beautiful, but they were “ours,” meaning that there was something about the grief and the suffering that allowed for a kind of unity, it gave us something to identify with, to know.
I think I generally enjoyed the collection but was sometimes bored by the some of the sentimentality of the essays, which, again, may be the fault of translation. I think I never want to read an essay about Trump ever again.
THE TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner
Hmmm so half-way through this my boyfriend told me that this was a story of the author’s life and it made me like the book less because sometimes meta shit by white men really grinds my gears. There’s something about the author being like, “And that book you’re reading? Well I set down to write it,” makes me roll my eyes, bruv. The first time I encountered that was as a kid when I read James and the Giant Peach by Rohl Dahl. James get out of the peach after making some friends along the way & then he writes the book that WAS IN MY HANDS ALL ALONG. Then again, this is kind of just what writers do (hellloooo Louisa May Alcott) and in a way, it’s a really honest way to write. Write what you know, etc.
picture description: expired film from 1997. that’s me on the right.
Anyway, The Topeka School is about this white teenager, Adam Gordon, growing up in the late 90s in Topeka, Kansas. He is poetically inclined and finds his outlet in extemporaneous speech & debate, which frankly, sounds psychotic and like something that would have made me feel like shit. You have to scour through hundred of news outlets every day and train yourself to think on your feet in order to convincingly argue, as a teenager, on the spot, about whether or not the US should intervene with FARC in Colombia or something. The fact that I don’t remember what they were arguing about proves I would have been one of the people freezing up and running away while crying. I’m personally offended by the concept of something like this because I have anxiety and uh… I’m shallow, idk. Anyway, you have to have a lot of brains, a lot of knowledge, and a lot of confidence, which white men looooove to show you that they have. Randomly (or not randomly) you also have to access the “hind brain,” because you’re thinking on your feet like a FREESTYLE RAPPER. I put that in caps because a big part of being white in 1997 according to this book was that you really didn’t want to be white. Actually that’s kidn of the deal now, too. Adam also participates in cyphers and it’s really embarrassing. Just join a slam poetry club & appropriate the spoken word scene, Adam!!! If only it were 15 years later…. He would have annihilated CUPSI in 2012. GROUP PIIEEEECE!!!
It sounds like I’m talking shit but I generally enjoyed this book. It’s the kind of Modern American Fiction that zeroes in tiny moments that really holds my attention. And when I looked up from the book, I found myself thinking in the writer’s voice which I love! It’s shifts from Adam’s perspective to his parents to some asshole named Darren who is responsible for disabling this girl’s speech capacity for the rest of her life when he hits her with a pool ball and it’s this big metaphor about how men quiet women (um I hope Ben Lerner watched a little poem called Like Totally Whatever By Melissa Lozada-Oliva Go OFf Girl BOts). The book is about masculinity, whiteness, and it’s really PSYCHOLOGICAL because his parents are analysts. It tries its best to contextualize the plight of White American Man: like, you can either become a Trump Supporter or you can feel really self-aware & ambivalent in Brooklyn while teaching writing and raising daughters. The latter is obviously better and kind of seems hot to me (I’m pushing 30). I enjoyed the parent’s passages the most because you’re realizing that your parents are just like fucked up little people who are trying their best not to traumatize their kid in a world that has the bricks of toxic masculinity flying off of every building ever.
Total books read this year: 4
READING SUCKS !
Here are poems:
#1
all of my friends are voices in another room,
forks clanking & full mugs of coffee,
stains on the desk, a crime show down stairs.
i’m sick of capturing this delayed moment &
tired of the way it looks at me with wounded eyes.
what if i let it go in the middle of the night,
put the pillow over the head, twisted open the jar?
goodbye, Canelo! see ya later, mr. mittens!
under my bed there is an old bra waiting for spring
#2
ok i am a weak & wet hormone-filled
uncooked chicken in a ziplock bag
ready to be lifted, fried and enjoyed.
i want to cry at a jeans commercial
for a reason i don’t understand,
the way i used to do with old paintings at the museum.
is this poetry-as-social-justice lol?
what if i’m shallow & my politics are
just “I didn’t ask to be born!”
a jeans commercial is the new painting at the museum
& when i say jeans commercial i am talking about the national anthem,
about the version i had of it in my head,
of the star showing up on on a sparkling piano that’s floating
in the air & the national anthem is not about a flag
but it’s actually the sound of a familiar car door slamming & footsteps
making their way up your front porch & hello, we are here, come inside
& there isn’t a national anything, actually, we aren’t asked
to believe in anything at all.#3
i am sorry i forget how to talk to new people
& that you have to hear once again, the hard plastic of my old stories.
i’m sorry i slipped on the argument with your mother,
& that I am neutral about the argument but I miss you
& want to tell you how the garment gives me camel toe
how the other lips of me are being made to talk, to blah-blah
about the weather, the idea of July, the melting vaccines &
i am hoping one day you can hear me.