odettecarotte
Odette Carotte
Fangirling Proust. Quote-blogging what I'm reading over breakfast. 37!
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I really thought this said "Feyd" instead of "Freud" and now, as usual, I am in FeydPaul land
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dang
“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims
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Quote from Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
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One crow sorrow
Two crows mirth
Three crows a wedding
Four crows a birth
Five crows silver
Six crows gold
And seven is a secret that must never be told
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What Wayne Koestenbaum calls ‘philosophically smeared literature about the body’
Her body was electric, her soul filled with ecstasy.
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'As far as Nelson is concerned, the issue is one of expectation and conventionality. “For people who don’t necessarily read what [her friend the artist and poet] Wayne Koestenbaum calls ‘philosophically smeared literature about the body’ – which is what I generally perceive myself as having been involved with for the past 30-plus years – this may come as a shock or a revelation, or I may seem brave. But this wasn’t something new to me.”
As she’s keen to remind me, there’s a whole canon of this work out there, and they’re the writers and artists who’ve shaped her thinking. Like Love is bookended by interviews with two of the most important: the aforementioned Koestenbaum, and the poet Eileen Myles. But it’s also a subject on which Nelson touches in an essay about the work of the French writer Hervé Guibert, a pioneer of autofiction who wrote about the ravages of Aids. “People read him,” she says, “and they say, ‘Wow! You really wrote to shock the bourgeoisie!’ No – he’s telling you about a culture that’s his life. You think it’s this other thing because that’s the only way you can see it.”'
--Lucy Scholes interview with Maggie Nelson
I'm rereading The Argonauts in preparation for moving in with the love of my life.
Looking up reviews of the book, I'm disappointed to see people with septum rings say that Nelson is trying to shock the readers by starting her book with a scene of anal sex. This isn't a cheap attention grab; it's clearly Nelson's way of making sense of the world.
To me, her descriptions of sex, shit, blood and colostrum are matter of fact.
Love the phrase "philosophically smeared literature about the body." I'm very taken with Northrop Frye's notion of "anatomical fiction" and this is part of that lineage.
Pics of me wearing various extravagant outfits for the fun of it
One of my FAVORITE parts of Femme culture is playing dress up. I love that our gatherings are places where we can wear our most silly, risky, extravagant outfits, safe in the expectation that we'll be seen and appreciated but not harassed. I want the ability to wear a carefully constructed, aesthetically BOMB slutty outfit and have queers coo "your tits look amazing!" and perhaps also notice how my choice of perfume enhances the vibe. And I want to appreciate and ask questions about what they're wearing in turn.
Wearing clothing is a social exercise! This is my desired relation.
My clothing has a lot of meaning to me. Unfortunately strangers who are straight men erase the complexity into "see boobs, must dominate so other men will know I have power." Instead of appreciating, they immediately take ACTION, a stupid wolf whistle, the same action they'd do for any creature with curves.
I want my body to be a matter of fact, that other people can engage with, not a singular call to action.
There's something similar to me in Maggie's self-exposé. IMHO she's writing to and for a queer community so we can all better know our full selves. There is so much deep and complex social and philosophical meaning to what people do with our bodies. We should be opening these actions up, and asking more questions. It disappoints me when readers ignore the complexity and defensively assert that they're being manipulated into giving the author "attention."
#maggie nelson#wayne koestenbaum#eileen myles#hervé guibert#AIDS#queer theory#autofiction#anatomical fiction#northrop frye#femme#moi
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you'll just be minding ur business and then suddenly the air smells like an august evening in 2005
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Texts with my Dad: Dean Moriarty, Proust, property, Irish sweaters
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The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognize in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
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Developmentally, Freud (1925, 1932) and many later analysts (e.g., Halleck, 1967; Hollender, 1971; Marmor, 1953) suggested a dual fixation in hysteria, at oral and oedipal issues. An oversimplified account of this formulation follows: A sensitive and hungry little girl needs particularly responsive maternal care in infancy. She becomes disappointed with her mother, who fails to make her feel adequately safe, sated, and prized. As she approaches her oedipal phase, she achieves separation from the mother by devaluing her. She turns her intense love toward Father, a most exciting object, especially because her unmet oral needs combine with later genital concerns to magnify oedipal dynamics. But how can she make a normal resolution of the oedipal conflict by identifying with and competing with her mother? She still needs her, and she has also devalued her.
Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, 2nd edition
Picture from Bonnie Burstow, remember when this was doing rounds on Twitter on Mother's Day?
#nancy mcwilliams#psychoanalytic diagnosis#gender#heteronormative family structure#hysteria#hysterical personality#bonnie burstow#mother's day
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"What would Jacques Lacan say about my fear of topping? I wonder. Or another psychoanalyst -- I'm not picky, any vapid degradation will do."
Florence Ashley, Gender/Fucking
👑💖👑
#florence ashley#gender/fucking#jacques lacan#lacan#psychoanalysis as degredation play#so real#this book is gold
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Mercedes de Acosta's Here Lies the Heart https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.150414/page/n321/mode/2up
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I think Anne Carson and I need the same kind of therapy
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
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Delmore Schwartz
by Stanley Moss, 1967
He heard God coughing in the next apartment,
his life a hospital, he moved from bed to bed
with us and Baudelaire, except he always had
Finnegans Wake tucked in his pajamas,
which must mean, sure as chance,
the human race is God’s phlegm. Penitent,
I say a prayer in God’s throat:
“Mister, whose larynx we congest,
spit us into the Atlantic or Hudson…
let us be dropped into the mouth of the first fish
that survived by eating its young—
drink hot tea and honey Your mother brings You
till You are rid of Your catarrh, well again.
Let us swim back to our handiwork.”
Far from the world of Howth Castle, Delmore died
in a bed-bugged hotel, unclaimed for three days.
A week before, by chance, I saw him
at a drugstore counter, doubled over a coffee,
he moaned, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,
deceitful enemy kisses.”
He held my hand too tight, too long.
Melancholy Eros flew to my shoulder,
spoke in Greek, Yiddish, and English:
“Wear his sandals, his dirty underwear,
his coat of many colors that did not keep him warm.”
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The perfume of her is caught on the linens. She is around, even when she is not around.
— Carmen Maria Machado, from “Eight Bites,” Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (Graywolf Press, 2017)
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