Love your style of writing!! Do you have any book recs? Any authors that inspire you?
hello, and thank you for the kind compliment; i appreciate it very much. it warms my heart to know that my silly little notes might resonate with you, because they are all very personal to me.
i wouldn’t dare say i draw inspiration from the authors i’ve loved and admired, because in no world does my work reach even a fragment of the depth or quality of theirs. my writing pales; it is hardly worth being mentioned in the same breath, and calling them inspirations would feel like a grave insult. i cannot, in good faith, claim even the faintest echo of their brilliance, and even less compare the experiences they write about with mine.
i can, however, speak about my favorite authors: the writers who left an indelible mark on me. i’ll only speak of poetry here, though i have an entire litany of novels, plays, and essays that shaped my vision and understanding of the world, beginning, of course, with angels in america by tony kushner.
my absolute favorite author, by far, is sarah kane, and 4.48 psychosis is my favorite poem of all time. in terms of poetry, i’m also very partial to paul celan, henri michaux, rimbaud, baudelaire, lautréamont, and the greek and latin classics. more recently, i love franny choi, ocean vuong, hanif abdurraqib, ilya kaminsky, richard siken, kim addonizio, and margaret atwood.
i’ve already spoken at length about 4.48 psychosis, sarah kane’s last, posthumous work, written with death in mind. she poured out her brilliance like an exorcism. of course, it doesn’t change anything, except that it did change everything for me.
les chants de maldoror is arguably the most violently defiant and decadent piece of writing among them all, and reading it was a revelation: from the borderline pornographic, blatantly voyeuristic parody of the crucifixion in chant III to the retelling of judgment day in a whorehouse. it was mesmerizing. i had never brushed against such vitriol before, and i’ve never encountered anything approaching that sheer fury and agonizing restlessness since. i’ve been thinking about it for years, that all-encompassing wrath channeled into rebellion, how revolutionary it was, and how it remains so more than a century later.
beyond that… clown by henri michaux is a cornerstone, an instruction in resilience, the dialectics of creation and destruction, how change doesn't come from nothing. how to pour you must pierce, as a darling friend of mine would put it.
and i hardly dare speak of paul celan, because his work is too beautiful and too devastating, but i will say this; if you understand german, you should listen to him read todesfuge. the recording is on youtube. more than anything, that is poetry: music and breath. resistance in the face of unspeakable tragedy, life stolen from death. because language failed him in the face of the horrors he lived through, he reinvented it. more than anyone, i think he is the poet who reached the outermost limits of what can be expressed through words alone to speak of the experience of living through the holocaust. in that same vein, i remember reading charlotte delbo, robert antelme, jorge semprún, primo levi, and being horrified not only by the factual accounts, chilling enough on their own, but by the silence surrounding them. the impossibility of putting into words the sheer ruin, the failure of humanity. as georges perec writes in W, the heart of the horror lies in the intervals, the suspensions. that is where the unbearable sits.
