Dear Reader,
I just read “Bloodchild,” an Octavia Butler short story that I already knew a little about because Andrea Long Chu wrote about it at length in an essay I shared a few months ago on here… You know I’ve got to say folks, that was gnarly as hell. Perverse on a level I had not anticipated even from Chu’s description, which I see on a reassessment reading did in fact include mention of an “ovipositor” and quote the line “The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine.” So I don’t know what I was expecting, friends, I guess I was just caught off guard by what I would call the “bug BDSM” vibe. There’s a lot of talk of being caged! within the multiple clicking arms! of giant bug people!! and coerced into various altered mental states via their bug fluids!!
Anyway five stars obviously, I’m reading the whole collection asap, sign me up for that ride, etc.
Anyway that’s it this week, I gotta skedaddle, I have to meet up with my BDSM bug fiance work extra shifts this week, these kinds of insane thoughts don’t pay for themselves. In fact this is exactly the kind of newsletter that gets me a heated slew of unsubscribes!!! (Because to cap this off, I must inform you, most of the list is insanely nihilistic, grim to the point of malice. Sorry I don’t know how it happened. As the poet has it: Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m trying to remove it.)
Kisses and oviposits!!!
Dana
p.s. I wrote this last night when I was feeling a little weird (obviously) and it turns out I have covid so frankly I think this post is the first evidence of onset. Let it be studied by future long-covid brain scientists trying to understand the origins of the Great Delirium that is sure to overcome us all.
Uhh anyway probably no newsletter next week.
1. “Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark” by Vivian Gornick, The New Republic
Vivian Gornick reviews Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (Norton) and writes about Rhys’ masterwork Wide Sargasso Sea.
As the poet has it, we are born strangers and afraid in a world we never made and, he might have added, spend a large part of our lives negotiating that original aloneness. Most of us make some headway with the struggle, but some of us get nowhere with it; we remain people who are at home nowhere, with no one, feeling like strangers to ourselves and others all our lives. For such unfortunates, the aloneness is more than a penalty, it is a humiliation; humiliation is degrading; degradation induces fear and rage; fear and rage are doubly isolating. Such a destiny was the one meted out to the richly febrile writer Jean Rhys, whose gift for language and form made her stories and novels a compelling embodiment of the permanently forlorn.
2. “A Room with History” by Saidiya Hartman, The Paris Review
An excerpt from Saidiya Hartman’s afterword to a forthcoming reissue of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Vintage Books Canada).
…The book is a hybrid of poetry, memoir, theory, and history, and its recursive and nonlinear structure formally enacts the open question of the door… As Brand writes, there is no way in, no return, “no ancestry except the black water and the Door of no Return”...
…Brand’s is a historical sensibility that is submarine and troubles the notion of an unfolding chronicle or the very idea that history proper might explain the door, rather than history being what the door has produced and its instrument—the chronicle of our dispossession, a fable of cause and effect, a tale of tragedy and triumph, a Bildung of objects becoming subjects and citizens, of errant and anomalous social formations domesticated and regulated in the family romance. These notes on belonging everywhere warn of the dangers of the origin story and the passport…
3. “Such Lush Despair” by Laura Marris, Words Without Borders
Laura Marris reviews Marguerite Duras’ The Easy Life (Bloomsbury), translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes.
…If Duras’s heroines feel old before their time, it’s partly because they made the choices that determined their lives before they even realized they were choosing, which is a tragedy bravado can’t fix. “No one warned me that I would live,” thinks Francine, “If I had known that one day I would have a story, I would have chosen it, I would have lived with more care to make it beautiful and true so that I would like it. Now it’s too late.”
4. “The Glory of Cleaning Toilets” by Garth Miró, Southwest Review
Garth Miró reviews The Right to Be Lazy, an anti-work manifesto by Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, recently reissued by NYRB in a new translation from Alex Andriesse.
Even now, I wonder: what am I doing? I immediately strayed from my good lazy path of copying Ann. Inserting all sorts of my own thoughts, feeling guilty because I might not be taking the job of reviewing this book seriously enough. This is not what I should be doing with my writing, and I apologize.
If I write anything here, it should be in service of one more try at revolution. This time, we must have whole swaths of the workforce quitting and walking out and laying back, soaking up whole lifetimes in empty daydreams…
If time kills us all, then through laziness, we must kill time.
5. “Apple rolls out AI-narrated audiobooks, and it’s probably the start of a trend” by Samuel Axon, Ars Technica
We listened to an hour each of two digitally narrated titles. The calm tones were clear and mostly benign, and they could be mistaken for real human voices with a short listen.
6. “The Griffin Poetry Prize Shakeup: New Rules, New Controversy” by Amanda Perry, The Walrus
The prize’s success in becoming an institution can conceal the fact that its existence is contingent on a wealthy man who happens to like poetry.
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