Little november list

Recently collected wisdoms for staying warm

Image: Rita et Hubert, Alice Neel (1954).¹

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Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“… the mother told the little girl, ‘You’ll have your milk from your cup of stars tonight when we get home. But just for now, just to be a very good little girl, will you take a little milk from this glass?’

Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”²

June Jordan, “Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love”

“There is no chance that we will fall apart

There is no chance

There are no parts.”³

Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People

“We cannot know each other without being incon­ve­nient to each other. We cannot be in any relation without being incon­ve­nient to each other. This is to say: to know and be known requires experiencing and exerting pressure to be acknowledged and taken in, as Stanley Cavell has argued so forcefully. Acknowledgement requires a disturbance of attention and bound­aries. Sustained acknowledgement requires self-­reorganization.”⁴

Grace Byron, “Perfect Little Baby”

“How can we expect to revolt if we do not deliver soup for one another when we’re sick? No bitterness, mine or yours, will build a bridge.

Despair is easy. It whistles through the weeds, blending all sights and sounds into gray slush. At times, loneliness overwhelms us. Projects seem insurmountable. It can seem idealistic to believe in a better world, to imagine attending to the daily rhythms of life under the grim canopy of fascism. Bread and roses seem like luxuries.”

“Women’s work is small. Women’s work needs to get done. Not in an overt Gaia-Earth Mother-Thirteenth-Moon way. I mean in terms of the kinds of care anyone can do but which is always gendered as feminine. Listening. Waiting. Patience. Empathy even for those one does not like or agree with.”

“Perhaps it is important to note winning may not mean getting a president we agree with. Zoe Leonard’s iconic I want a president (1992) is a protest, not a desire for a true leader. To have what Leonard really wants, the United States must give up its arms, land, and military. Octavia Butler quotes resurface that remind us there is no single answer or magic bullet. We must all become the answers. Victory may need to be reframed.”⁵

Eileen Myles, “Light Warrior”

“I have waited all my life for permission. I feel it growing in my breast. A war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light.”⁶

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“I believe in living.

I believe in birth.

I believe in the sweat of love

and in the fire of truth.

And i believe that a lost ship,

steered by tired, seasick sailors,

can still be guided home

to port.”⁷

Arundhati Roy, “Come September”

“The American Way of Life is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America… Perhaps things will get worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”⁸

1. I chose this painting for no particular reason except that I like all of its details—a drooping cigarette, a lace underskirt, a wrinkle in the sweater. It also feels warm, patient, and steady. It makes me think about what Simone Weil says about the confluence of love and attention. You can read more about Neel’s extraordinary career here, and her activist histories here.

2. Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House, 1959. In my (ugly, cheap) edition, this is on page 27.

3. Jordan, June. “Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love.” In The Essential June Jordan. Penguin Modern Classics, 2021. I like the title of this volume because I agree—Jordan is essential! This is also the poem in its tiny but massive entirety. We could read it as being straightforwardly about, as the title suggests, “long distance love,” but I’ve been reading it with an eye toward our responsibility to one another in the wake of the U.S. election and rising fascism worldwide, as an insistence that we will not abandon one another because we are bound up and always must be.

4. Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Duke University Press, 2022. I think it is funny how when I pasted this block of text from the PDF of the book, “inconvenient” kept appearing as “incon­ ve­ nient"” and so I needed to go through and correct it a few times in the quote. Inconvenience, indeed!

5. Byron, Grace. “Perfect Little Baby.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/perfect-little-baby/. I think this is the best essay I have read this year. I think it is everything I want to say and feel and think and do. Note that these are chunks from the essay, not one continuous block quote. Also, Byron’s re-reading of Zoe Leonard’s poem is similar to a reading of it that I recently gave in a lecture last week, which I intend to repurpose into a newsletter. So more to come on this, if you are interested. But please do read Grace Byron’s piece in full.

6. Myles, Eileen. “Light Warrior.” In Chelsea Girls: A Novel. Ecco, 1994/2015. I interviewed Myles in 2020 and I think that they really did not like me (I think it was because I wanted it too much). Too bad, because the interview came out well and also I think this book is so great. I have been musing a lot about their campaign as a write-in candidate for President in 1992; I might say more about this in the aforementioned newsletter about Zoe Leonard.

7. Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. 1988. I’m starting to read this now as a strong contender for the second chapter of my dissertation. Shakur’s verse intersperses her narrative accounts of the false arrest and imprisonment that led to her exile from the U.S. Both form and content are breathless and devastating, but also so, so, so full of life.

8. Roy, Arundhati. “Come September.” In My Seditious Heart. Haymarket Books, 2019. The essay also contains this absolute banger: “Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” !!!!!!!!