stuff i read & loved

this is a collection of stuff that i have read and loved. mostly on the internet, but some books, too. other stuff: ashleybethard.com

[ashleybethard]

My father’s ashes and I walked north from Washington Square Park. We saw a movie, a play, an improv show. Being back in New York by myself felt like being on another planet. I could do interesting things without feeling sad that my husband didn’t want to do them with me or selfish for wanting to do them anyway. My father’s ashes and I went dancing at a terrible club. We sat in my hotel room and cried over my declining marriage.

“I carried my dad’s ashes around New York for four days – and realized my marriage had to end,” Amanda Avutu, Washington Post. (via ashleybethard)

[ashleybethard]

Oddly, the very story-ness of my predicament—its singular interiority, its invisible but no less real causes and effects, its want of a dramatic and definitive end—seemed to be what was preventing me from getting the help that a lifetime of absorbing good-guy/bad-guy narratives had taught me to expect. Indeed, there was little more than words and pictures to point to as evidence. Threats arrived cloaked in metaphor, riddles showed up that only I could solve, treasure hunts were offered that only I could follow. On the surface, the clues delineated a run-of-the-mill obsession story, unrequited affection leading to stalking and revenge as a pair of archetypes draws nearer their sadomasochistic tipping point—he a conniving liar at the top of his game and she a wet-eared ingénue who the reader hopes will emerge as a villain, if not as her own hero. “What a terrific novel this would make,” my confidantes said. “You should write it as a fiction. Your very own Gone Girl.” But, reader, by then I ’d had my fill of fiction.

This essay is a long one. (CW: stalking, mental abuse.) But it’s so important, and so well done, and I really just don’t have any words beyond that. You should read “Harm’s Way” by Karen Hays, up now in The Georgia Review. (via ashleybethard)

[stuffireadandloved]

Soon after that, as if the new sex was a scent I wore, a strange man told me he wanted to suck my clit on the street outside of a Chipotle. We locked eyes. It took me a moment to hear him. To realize he wasn’t saying hello, or asking for directions. I felt shaky in the hands over it. He hadn’t touched me, but it felt like he had. I thought of it for days. His slow creep of a voice, his eyes on my skirt. In that moment it felt like anything could happen, that his words could sweep me over, take what they wanted. I told an older woman I admired what had happened, waiting for her horrified expression. She said, 'Be thankful they’re looking. No one looks at me anymore.'

Chelsea Bieker, “Why We Must Believe Women: My Family’s Legacy of Violence and Murder,” up at Catapult.

[stuffireadandloved]

What do you like? the men would ask. Spitting, I’d say. To even utter the word felt like the worst kind of cuss and I trained myself not to flinch or look away or offer a compensatory smile after I said it. In the dungeon’s dim rooms, I unlearned my instinct for apology. I learned to hold a gaze. I learned the pleasure of cruelty.

The inimitable Melissa Febos, in her essay “Kettle Holes,” published in Granta. (Also, shoutout to the Memoir Monday newsletter that recirculated this piece and reminded me of its beautiful existence.)

[stuffireadandloved]

The hobbyist — whom Dr. Lyko declined to identify — was struck by the large size of the crayfish and its enormous batches of eggs. A single marbled crayfish can produce hundreds of eggs at a time.   Soon the hobbyist was giving away the crayfish to his friends. And not long afterward, so-called marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores in Germany and beyond. As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce.  In 2003, scientists confirmed that the marbled crayfish were indeed making clones of themselves. They sequenced small bits of DNA from the animals, which bore a striking similarity to a group of crayfish species called Procambarus, native to North America and Central America.

“This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe,” The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2018.

[stuffireadandloved]

Pain still exists. Grief comes visiting regularly. What changed though was the relationship with Her, with grief. I stopped looking outside the window, seeing her shadow emerge under the night lamp, and run to secure the latch, shut all windows, gather weapons and hide in a corner, ready to fight her away with all my life, refusing to meet her face, look into her eyes, not ever giving her a chance to hear what she has to say. So instead this one time, I open the door, invite my grief, my pain in, ask it if it wants tea, without milk and without sugar because there is only jaggery in the house and then we, my grief and I, sit and sip warm black tea, with ginger and elaichi.

Tau Tara, “When Grief Comes Calling, Invite Her In” | WITCH

[stuffireadandloved]

The day my father died was the day I started falling in love. Love like the wet open love of a newborn. Love outside the body. Love like a metaphor for love. I am trying to understand how that day shook loose all this dangerous insatiable love. I was eighteen, six months from leaving home for good. My father stood at the top of the attic staircase; his body seized and fell and stilled and left behind such stunning grief that for weeks I tottered through the house on autopilot, a pill bottle rattling in my pocket, wide-eyed and gob smacked with love. I hit walls, turned, and shuffled off in the opposite direction until another wall intercepted my path. I was suddenly and irrevocably wracked with love.

Jessica Hendry Nelson, “Rapture of the Deep,” The Rumpus

[stuffireadandloved]

My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness. Both of these can be dangerous, and in conjunc­tion with sexuality even lethal. The first has plunged innumerable couples into disappointing, sometimes disastrous, marriages, and it is far from uncommon for the second to cause horrors such as a man choosing to murder his wife rather than see her prefer the company of another man. And even well short of such an extreme result, it can and often does cause a great deal of distress and pain.  It was fairly easy for me to learn both of these lessons because I have a prosaic personality and little natural inclination towards possessiveness, but it is far from easy for many people. Some even consider attitudes which I think poisonous to be necessary or beautiful, and it would be naïve to imagine that argument could change their minds. Probably the best one can hope for is that romanticism and possessiveness should be less often taught by what the young read, sing and see on screens.

Diana Athill, “Lessons,” Granta

[stuffireadandloved]

The ultimate burn note from Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away this week at the age of 88. 

Thank you for your seemingly endless talents, and your contribution to letters. (And the burn note, of course.)

[ashleybethard]

Virginia Woolf, from her essay “On Being Ill.” (In honor of her birthday – yesterday, January 25.)

[stuffireadandloved]

Plot is not where I begin. I begin with image and form (language and the shapes it can make), sometimes with voice. I am much more like a poet in terms of my relationship to language I think, because I am always invested in creating a poetics in everything I write. In fact, an essential process question for me with each book or story is, what poetics must I invent in order to tell this kind of story?

Lidia Yuknavitch, The Rumpus Interview

[stuffireadandloved]

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ – the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

Rebecca Solnit, “Open Door,” A Field Guide to Getting Lost (via stuffireadandloved)

[stuffireadandloved]

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it's where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, "live always at the 'edge of mystery' -- the boundary of the unknown." But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

Rebecca Solnit, "Open Door," A Field Guide to Getting Lost

[ashleybethard]

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

Rebecca Solnit, “Open Door,” A Field Gide to Getting Lost. (via ashleybethard)

[stuffireadandloved]

At times, they will make a temporary corpse out of you. At times, there will be root canals and bad organs and wilting heart veins. At times, you are going to need to be gone from yourself so you can be worked on, so the red machinery of you can run well oiled again, so you can be fixed. Understand, you are just a soft, wet robot with bone for metal.

From "Body Map: The Spine" by Sarah Rose Etter, in Fanzine

[stuffireadandloved]

If I want to find out about the recent past, I have to cut to his bones, like archaeology in reverse, the deepest layers the newest. Bones complete the story the teeth started because the body replaces old bone with new bone until late in life, meaning scientists can mine marrow for isotopes revealing whereabouts for the past decade or two. The only exception: the elderly, whose bones rebuild at slower rates; for them, scientists can only uncover clues to a slightly more distant past. The present is lost on them. Greg, just 51 when he died, was still young enough. If I could exhume him and steal a sample from his femur, I could map the regions he lived in the past decade, like a background check in bone. I could weigh the isotopes: teeth to bones, cradle to grave. But the truth is: I already know what this background check will find: He ended where I began: in Iowa, just outside Cedar Rapids. His bones and my teeth make a complete set.

Karrie Higgins, "Partial Match," published in DIAGRAM

What a lovely, chilling essay. Again with family. Shared blood, shared bones.

[stuffireadandloved]

You and I visit our father on Saturdays between the hours of one and two. We visit him alongside the other children and the other fathers. The building is low and concrete, and we visit outside. We visit him wearing blue jeans and wool sweaters and new sneakers. It is 1989. It is 1991. It is 1992, and then it is 1995. It is Livengrin Foundation for Addiction Recovery or it is The Caron Foundation or it is this rehab or that. It is by farmland and fences and old graveyards and small airports. Mothers like ours wait in the car, or else they sit beside the children and kiss their men on the mouth and stroke the children’s hair. Everyone sits at picnic tables on the lawn, and the fathers talk and smoke, and the children listen and are shy. Most of the men wear mustaches and tan work boots and flannel shirts. They look like they’ve only just put down their hammers for a quick lunch and a chat, while behind them some new house might be teetering dangerously, all stud-stripped and soft concrete. The men look interrupted, rather than finished, and maybe that’s what we find so surprising. Our father looks baffled, as I imagine that Mexican farmer looked when the Paricutin volcano appeared in his cornfield overnight. That was 1943. I’m reading about it in school. These things happen, they tell us. One day you wake up and find a giant stinking hole where your life used to be.

Jessica Hendry Nelson, "A Letter to Eric," via The Rumpus