I want to both combat you and to submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain it engenders I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity, I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.

Anaïs Nin, “Henry and June” (1932)

✳ deceptive corporeal sweetness ✳ naming ✳ magic 

m: i’m gonna write a whole fuckin manifesto on the topic: “liz kinnamon, when to resist and when not to resist,” and then you open up the book and the page says go fuck yourself and a bomb goes off in your face

(and from the same night)

“did someone buy this for you as a gift?” (pointing to a plastic-covered etching of napoleon.) yeah. “i knew it, that’s so sweet. you kind of look like napoleon. leos have a strong mouth area.”

“you really know how to love someone.”

✳ mythologies 

… With all of this said, what do we make of this Audre Lorde quote?: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”  It is both thrilling and affirming, I think, to sit with the possibilities of redefining self-care as though it were going on the political offensive. This may especially be the case in a context where the dominant meaning of “care” either has become industrialized in such a way that it consolidates (instead of contests) one’s’alienation from her conditions of existence, or from the means necessary to inform herself about, determine, and pursue the course of care and wellbeing that she needs.

But what I think is especially important about this now regularly cited quotation is what comes before the first comma, what comes before, that is, the moment when self-care finds its euphemistic, sunny resolution as “political warfare”: the disavowal of self-care as “self indulgence.”  What, after all, is wrong with self-indulgence, with stealing time to enjoy the self, to pursue ways of being and living that are not necessarily productive? Lorde’s rewriting of self-care as political warfare seems to me to be symptomatic of a philosophy of movement building that has an unacknowledged investment in surveilling the behavior of its members (and demanding that they surveil themselves), a philosophy that is so deeply committed to the idea that everything is political that it cannot see the ways it enforces that definition through the implicit demand that its members justify all their behavior on its terms.  Everything is political, in other words, can be a particularly disciplinary and disciplining definition of the political because of the way that it privileges a kind of ruthless scrutiny, assessment, and justification of one’s behaviors on the basis of whether or not they generate political value.  At the same time, it tends to regard the political less as a contestation over social transformation than as the sum total of “good” or “bad” political behaviors.  

At worst, everything is political can privilege a kind of left version of austerity logic, one that calls implicitly for the abstention from behaviors that don’t serve the Higher Purpose of generating and assessing individual behavior in the form of political value.  It can only handle self-indulgence and extravagance when those things can be given a justifiable political form, when they can be commended or valorized, in other words, for how radical they are.  It can only handle self-indulgence and extravagance, in other words, when they cease to be self-indulgent or extravagant at all, and claim, on the flip, to be productive and progressive.

• • • lowendtheory: On Audre Lorde’s Legacy and the “Self” of Self-Care, Part 2 of 3

Fantasy dogwhistles, that’s what it does. It has little to do with plots, and everything to do with shaping the dynamic attachment of subjects to worlds and worlds to their mediations. Even if I am actively fantasizing, and in my fantasies I am talking, fantasy is very quiet. It is not what I thinkis making me get up and walk around the room. It is a structure of adhesion, sticky but not binding, very quiet, nothing more quiet–yet this is what I mean by noise–and with it I feel the limits of my senses, sovereignty, conceptualizing force.

All of which are grazing the world and sensing where action is and isn’t. But a scenario, that’s something different.  A scenario is the opposite of a scene, or more precisely, a scene turned into its opposite. In Taylor’s work a scenario is a scene that you imagine actively, a game of “What If?” If you play that game and spool out the consequences, it might actually change your relations to the objects you’ve moved with in the game.

— The Game (2): Supervalent Thought

✳ lauren berlant 

the parts of texas new mexico and arizona that have 
only mountains, clay colors and lilac and not even a gas station for hours 
are “not a place to live but to visit”
mostly bc they’d have 2 reconsider their attitudes
they’d have to behave majestically 
_______

idk how to be so thoroughly hard boiled or some shit, there are people who are so wholly bought out, who enforce capitalism/professionalism like natural law without self-trickery 

_________

i talked shit about foodies
bc i think foodies are the footsoldiers of neoliberalism and they just looked back, blinking
i sed the restaurant is like the apotheosis of alienated labor & they were like
“uh huh”
and:
“i mean, you’re in it right now, too, so”
aka
you’re mired in it so you’re just saying this bc yr miserable doing it
… 
YEAH.
why would we not listen to the ppl actually doing the work
ppl will tell themselves anything to be able to continue doing the things they do

____

the goal of work, of existence under these conditions of life, is to make your psychic and emotional life completely opaque — to obscure it so that as such, one may go on, remain productive. we train and train this way — this takes training the way it takes maintained repression and violence to beat down every eruption of resistance — we learn not to bring our personal life to work, and then we look up one day, we pay sum hundreds for a meditation retreat only to learn our insides are completely indecipherable
___

for me it’s only love if its excessive

____

“you are an individual like no one i’ve ever met”

____

every man in texas looks like george bush
(“all men are cops”)
____

dust covered clothes are some of the most beautiful things in the world
____

a country built on self-storage 
______

“honor as surplus dignity—honor not something everyone can have
it must be constantly maintained, thus the connection throughout history between
violence & honor” (david graeber)
___

having a personality makes your whole academic career suspect 
“i have a separate facebook for my personality”
____

as young as i can remember i’d pack a bag and say i was running away—i’d go sit under a tree or something with my bookbag and wait until i got very lonely, and feel abandoned. unsurprisingly i’d go to a friend’s or back home. i don’t know whether the air at home was too hostile or too stultifying or whether i just wanted to wander, which is what i do and don’t want, now
_______

“i am a sensualist, my heart purrs”

_______

someone on the airplane is reading a book w/ last name author ‘turtledove’
____

weak-willed people will hurt you the most
bc they will say yes to whatever is front of them
they can’t say no 
they want at any cost to be liked
they can’t sit through discomfort
so nothing they say is actually worth a damn

one thing i’ve never had sympathy for is the kind of woman who will betray you for some dude’s approval
the kind of girl that will lap up any attention a male gives her
who will throw you under the bus to get affirmation
who doesn’t prioritize friendship

 ____

white dudes have serious limits

_____

n, do i repel ppl
“maybe just the ones sum kind of deep boneknowledge knows you should repel? i dunno. most people i know who know you love you, including me.” 
____

it’s just about liking the ways someone’s egotistical