What have I read this year so far ugh
Strange Pilgrims, I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat, Jess Rizkallah
DISTRACTIONS
-In the kitchen my abuela randomly starts telling me about all of her lovers, including a man named Victor who was a traveling guitarist and would stand outside of her window singing songs. It seems like being in love with unavailable musicians is a generational curse, and perhaps I will break it by giving birth to an unavailable musician, a complete fuck boy breaking hearts because he is too dedicated to the Vibes & other women. Omg, ENCANTO!
-We watched Encanto; everyone was bored because there wasn’t really a love story so the message was lost on us all.
-Someone I’m seeing later told me it’s because I saw it with a bunch of Guatemalans and not Colombians; whatever.
-Will was in town and we walked through the places adjacent to our old neighborhood while walking my sister’s dog Lolita. It started to rain and we took shelter underneath a building. What did we talk about? I don’t remember.
-We took a risk and rented a karaoke room in Chinatown then walked all the way to Kendall Square in the bitter cold, thinking about alternate lives where we never left Boston.
-Puloma visits me in NYC. The concert we were planning on going to got cancelled & so did the birthday party. We ate and drank where we could be safe, occasionally giving into the cold and promise of pizza inside.
-We made our way to the MET hungover & naturally I had 2-3 panic attacks along the way that erupted in one final panic attack at the surrealist exhibit because it was really crowded and everywhere I looked there was a poet’s fucked up interpretation of a nightmare in 1945. I worried my personality would suddenly shift, that one day it would be impossible to be happy because of a slippage in my brain. Later, while we were eating cursed mozzerella sticks Puloma laughed at me, saying it was funny that the surrealist exhibit made me feel like I would never be happy again.
-Interesting that I didn’t find solace in the absurd, as I am living in an absurd time where we are supposed to be thankful for 4 measly tests sent to us by the government. Instead I am finding solace in the traditional: beautiful paintings of the rich in their prime on luxurious couches, of scenes from the bible where the models for Mary are clearly beautiful men in wigs. I love the pursuit of unmistakable beauty and being dumbfounded by human ability.
DISTRACTIONS AS JESS RIZKALLAH
Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese-American writer and illustrator. Her book THE MAGIC MY BODY BECOMES was a finalist for The Believer Poetry Award and won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize as awarded by the Radius of Arab-American Writers and University of Arkansas Press.
What was your relationship to books like as a kid?
I remember the line between real life and books was blurrier, like the difference between water and air. Like how whales are mammals but they also live in the water. Real life was coming up to breathe so that I could spend more time down there. I think that’s because kids know magic is real, and books support that inherent truth that magic is real. and that truth is less buried the younger we are. I feel like everyone I’ve talked to about reading has said “reading doesn’t hit the same as it did when i was a kid” or “the books i read as a kid are still unmatched” and i think it’s because we are shorter and therefore closer to the earth aka the humming box full of magma but also magic. (duende, etc). books feel like maps when you’re a kid. you’re not like “this is only a metaphor” you’re also like “this is an explanation for the goosebumps when I can’t sleep, and for the dreams that come true around me, and why when i looked out the window that one morning i woke up before everyone in the house, every square inch of the backyard was filled with crows.” When you’re a kid, meaning is more magic than it is definition. Not to be dramatic but adulthood is being a beached whale and you either try to sprout your legs back (I read somewhere that whales had legs once and then they walked into the ocean), or you wait for the tide to claim you before you dry out, or somehow you make your way back to the water by following whatever blissed you out as a kid. And you keep getting beached because we live in a capitalist hell dimension, so you have to keep blissing out and hopefully by the time you die you’re in the water and as you whale-fall your body gets to become an ecosystem for the organisms around you as you fall into the hum, instead of smelly and decaying on the sand as people take selfys around you. okay the short answer is that books were everything 2 me.
When does reading suck and when does reading rule ?
Reading sucks when I turn it into homework. I don’t know why I do that. I loved school but I wasn’t great at school. Reading sucks when I put too much pressure on myself to do it the Right Way in the Perfect Environment with a cup of coffee and the pillows just so. But the pillows are never just so, and so I must start again tomorrow. Or when I try to schedule it like an appointment and I keep putting it off. Reading sucks when I try to read in huge chunks like how I did when I was younger and could read entire books in a day. And of course I can’t do that anymore, so I start feeling like I’m getting less smart as I age. Reading sucks when I can’t focus so I’m not understanding the books as well as my friends or peers and then I start feeling like an imposter who has tricked people into thinking I’m smart enough to be in the room. Reading rules when I tell myself to chill out, to calm down, to be in the moment, to be okay with reading three pages a day if that’s where I’m at, or three chapters a day, or hey it’s okay if I haven’t read for days or weeks because life is hard and sometimes the text I need to read is actually the world around me. Reading rules when I chase what makes me nerd the fuck out and let myself respond with enthusiasm first and intellect later, because that’s just how my brain works and just because that makes me feel childish, that doesn’t mean that’s bad? It’s just what it is. Which reminds me of Lynda Barry’s thesis in her book by the same name. What It Is. Which has become a central text in my life. Reading rules the most when I turn off all the screens around me.
What is a scene from a YA book that you feel happened to you because it’s so visceral?
There are so many scenes from T*Witches that stuck with me. (The movies are very bad and too peppy and nothing like the books, I’m a crank about this). I still think about their quilt with rose quartz sewn into it. Every time I hold a smooth stone in my pocket I still think about the way Alex would rub a quartz between her fingers whenever she was anxious. I still think about the old smoke filled trailer Alex lived in before her adoptive mom died of lung cancer. I remember that vividly because of how that fear has shaped my own life in a family of heavy smokers. I still think about the emptied theme park in Montana where Alex and Cam had to save Evan from the gang he joined. I still think about the way I felt whenever their murderous uncle was nearby, how everything got cold and creepy before he even made an appearance—which feels so true to real life moments that aren’t supernatural. There’s something in how Alex felt trying to fit into Cam’s perfect family that I still carry with me. There’s some weird loner feels that were validated there. A lot of textural intensity that is now just permanently stored in my brain. There were so many life and death moments and so many predatory men that these teen girls bested with their sisterhood and their spiritual gifts, which like, we all kind of have? In real life? I must still think about these books so much because of my spirituality, which in my adult life I’ve embraced again as a casual fact of life and our relationships to each other. These books revealed all that stuff in the world around us instead of taking us to a more fantastical dimension. The authors must have been practicing witches or something, I’m sure of it.
When do you feel extremely smart and when do you feel the opposite ?
I feel extremely smart when I sit down to write something and years of accidental and purposeful and seemingly unconnected research comes to the surface of my brain and then comes together seamlessly on the page and I get really sweaty and feel like I’m channeling something greater than me but actually that’s my brain, that’s me being smart, i am the great thing???? I feel the opposite of smart when I try to write in poetic form or when there’s too much math in any of the art I am trying to enjoy. It must be the same part of my brain that glitches whenever anyone tries to explain cryptocurrency or even the simplest of board games. i still roll my quarters please stop talking 2 me about NFTs
You are a very old woman far into the future (congrats, you made it!) and you are reading a book. What is the book?
I read somewhere that 98% of human existence is not recorded so we will never know what went down. I hope somehow, we get to know even a fraction of that unknown, and it is in a book and I am reading it. Or like, someone finds a bunch of books that were supposed to have burned in Alexandria, but surprise! We found them! And maybe some of those books know what happened before the records we currently have began. I’m fascinated by the questions with answers we won’t have til we leave these bodies behind. It would be cool to get some of those answers while I still have a body though, even when it’s old and tired and gloriously lived in. I want to wig out with other bodies. I want to laugh and yell about mysteries being solved and the esoteric becoming real, our spiritual selves casual facets of being instead of something we whisper about with our Pisces friends. Etel Adnan recently passed away allah yerhama and she was 96 years old. I wish I could ask her what book she read in her lifetime that she never would’ve guessed would be sitting on her shelf when she was my age. I bet for so many people, her books are just that. She took us to the stars, where it is endless. She’s one of those stars now as we continue to write. Damn ok the future is going to have so many cool books.
WHAT I READ!!!
I’M NOT HUNGRY BUT I COULD EAT By Christopher Gonzalez
Each story in this collection centers around a “bisexual puerto-rican cub,” except for one story where that character is gay. As somebody of Melanin who is starting to write fiction, I really appreciate this about this collection. Writing people who do,n’t exist I am inclined, for some reason, to make them “race-less,” in a Little Life way, where Jude can kind of be … whoever you want him to be. Anyway, I don’t think there needs to be another disparaging critique on that torture porn book (except I do because I can’t get enough of it) but yeah; what is cool about this book is that you are reading about a “marginalized” person doing mundane things, just suffering the way anybody else suffers as they try to find companionship in late-night benders and online hook-ups. I haven’t experienced such frank MODERNITY the way I did while reading this book and because of that I think the book will stand the test of time as this artifact of queer life in NYC in the early 20’s. I can picture it very clearly. Make it a mini-series!
Strange Pilgrms by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
Even though Encanto is literally about me and even though everything I write has horny ghosts in it, I have never read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez! What a delight reading this book from an ancestor. Garcia-Marquez loves making readers yell at the characters because they know something at they don’t. Lovers rarely end up together and desire is this spell kept to yourself and never spent on the person it’s aimed towards. All of these characters are Colombians in Europe, and the idea of like, returning to the colonizer’s land I guess hovers over each surreal scene. I loved these stories.
POEM
approaching
another age, I start to feel sorry for all of you
who will never live through this terror
because you will never feel as alive as i’ve felt
doing the stupidest shit possible, like dancing
to a saccharine top 40 hit in a club full of
boring people wearing the same tank top
or asking somebody in a stranger’s kitchen if they want to, simply, make out
or crying at a painting for a reason
i can’t understand or eating with the door shut. you’ll never
understand the return of touching, the way it trampled
all of the memories we had been squeezing & filled us with mania.
when all of this ends, because everything does,
you will be shiny & new, raw & desperate,
on the brink of committing your first mistake
that will define the way your cells will reproduce
for at least a decade & i will already be older, thank god.
i will be remembering all of this.
i will just start being able to let it go.