Links
🔖🌐 Read Bring Back Personal Blogging by Monique Judge (The Verge).
🔖📝 Read My Commitment to Wellness as a Lifelong Writer by Yolande House — Breathing Space Creative
I’ve learned that honouring my needs each and every day is a part of what loving myself looks like. When I finally learned how to love myself, I learned it’s not a goal with an end. Rather, it’s a process of committing and being true to myself each and every day, even when (and especially when) it’s hard.
🔖📚 Read BookTok encourages reading as an aesthetic and no one is safe from its gaze by Elena Cavender (Mashable).
Insightful piece about how limiting our reading to a particular aesthetic connects with our attention being commodified.
🔖📓 Read Automated transcription and some risks of machine interpretation.
Dr. Daniel Turner does a great job illuminating how large language models work and how we need to think about indigeneity and colonialism when choosing our transcription method.
🔖📚 Read Roman Polanski, David Bowie, and a New Solution to the Problem of Art Made by Monstrous Men by Laura Miller (Slate).
The magnitude of an artist’s personal transgressions sometimes matters less than the nature of the attachment it disrupts.
Response to Charlie Jane Anders's "What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures"
🔖📝📚📺🍿 Read What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures by Charlie Jane Anders (Happy Dancing newsletter).
Anders talks about the way a universal translator gives us shortcuts to understanding other cultures that don’t really show how hard it is to actually understand another culture.
She offers a lot of examples of this and asks,
How is it that Han Solo understands Chewbacca, but doesn’t speak Wookiee himself? And vice versa?
It’s been a long time since I was getting my Master of Arts in teaching and had to take a course on how Language Acquisition happens (almost 20 years), but I recall that we tend to understand much more of a language than we can speak, and I’ve certainly found that to be true recently.
For W’s Fulbright, we spent two months in the Netherlands, and had learned some very basic Dutch using Duolingo before heading over there. I often didn’t understand what people were saying, but I always understood more of what they were saying than I could ever speak myself.
Our first week there, some young people overheard my son saying his favorite Dutch word, “kat,” on the bus. They asked us about our being Americans and then one of them wanted to know if we were full of “kattenkwaad.” We didn’t know this word, and the person who asked didn’t know English well enough to explain it, but his friend tried.
I asked if it meant behaving like a cat, and he indicated not exactly. He tried to explain by example: pushing the stop button on the bus, then not getting off when the bus stopped.
“Oh, like, pranks!” I said.
“Yes, like pranks.”
“Mischievous,” my sister suggested. He wasn’t sure about that one.
Weeks later, I found this book in the shop a short walk from our house:
Google translates this title as “First Aid for Mischief: The Survival Guide for Cat Parents.”
I don’t think it captures the sense entirely, based on our bus conversation, but it’s hard to be sure.
🔖🎨 Read On growing alongside your artistic practice (The Creative Independent).
Mother-artist Bailey Elder talks about growing as an artist and being a mother. Elder is starting a blog to interview other artistic mothers!
🔖 Read Durham Officials Push for Affordable Housing in Southpoint Redevelopment.
Pleased with my city’s Planning Commission members.
🔖📝 Read When You Aren’t Sure Whether Your Writing Is ‘Important’ by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).
You just need to find one person who understands and appreciates what you’re trying to do and why, and then you look for the next person…
🔖📝 Read Kids Will Still Read Banned Books by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).
Chung doesn’t minimize the harm of book banning, but discusses how it’s impossible (and a bad idea) to try to control kids' reading.
🔖📝 Read How Can You Write About Pain Without Retraumatizing Yourself? by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).
🔖📝 Read On Pitching and Rejection by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).
pitching is not just about figuring out what editors or publications may be interested in—figuring out what you are most interested in is vital.
🔖 Read Lois Before Clark: In Defense of the Superhero Girlfriend.
Dreamed I decided to get obsessed with Lois Lane, decided this meant I should actually get obsessed with her, knew this essay by Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield was the place to start.
🔖📝 Read “I Hate the Idea of Healing” A Conversation with Maggie Smith
One thing that mothering has taught me is that I can’t be precious about where I work. When I work, I cannot demand uninterrupted space and time…If I got completely derailed every time somebody needed me, I’d never do anything.
🔖📚 Read Ladies of Leisure.
This one bummed me out. I think it sells Dept. of Speculation short.
🔖📚📝Read Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work? by Kim Brooks (The Cut)
That’s one of the major things parenting is teaching me, the balance between letting go in writing and practicing craft, the balance between being ferocious with my imagination and rigorous in my practice. Shape and chaos. Learning to shape chaos.
🔖📚 Read The books that help define motherhood – for mums everywhere to read
Is it ever possible to reclaim yourself without endangering your child?
I don’t know. Because for me it’s been more about reconstructing myself rather than reclaiming myself.
🔖📚 Read Art or Babies.
you can make your art without being an art monster: You can do it as… an art mother.
🔖📚 Read Why are we only talking about ‘mom books’ by white women? by Angela Garbes (The Cut).
I love Angela Garbes’s writing. This is another old one.
🔖📚 Read The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood by Lily Gurton-Wachter (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Another old bookmark.
How will having a baby disrupt my sense of who I am, of my body, my understanding of life and death, my relation to the world and to my sense of independence, my experience of fear and hope and time, and the structure of my experience altogether? Dr. Spock is silent on these topics.
By the time a new mother has the time (or free hands) to write again, the most extreme experience is beginning to fade from her memory.
🔖📚 In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle by Parul Sehgal (The New York Times).
Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.
🔖📚 Read Maggie Nelson: Inflections Forever New by Ariel Lewiton (Guernica).
We’re all human beings with bodily needs living within a system. We don’t need to prove that we’re not a part of the fabric of the culture in order to want to change it.
🔖📚 Read Why All the Books About Motherhood? by Laura Elkin (The Paris Review).
Another bookmark I’ve been sitting on for years.
These new books recast motherhood not as the reactionary choice, the choice made because it’s what’s socially expected, but as something hard won, intellectually demanding, a form of creative labor. Not something that takes you away from your work but something that is now both frame and canvas for it.
🔖📚 Read We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs by Nancy Reddy (Electric Literature).
I bookmarked this 4 years ago & am only reading it now. Reddy points out admitting you’re struggling carries a different risk for moms of Color.
🔖📝📚 Read The parent trap: can you be a good writer and a good parent? by Lara Feigel (The Guardian)
Feigel writes about motherly ambivalence.