#ya girl quoting richard siken

[kissxmedeadly]

«Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.»

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

first reading update of 2022!

after just barely reaching my goal of reading 69 books last year with a desperate day of airport reading, I'm off to a strong start with 8 books read in January - and lads, there isn't a dud in the bunch.

Monster of the Week (Michael Sands, 2015) - Strixhaven must have done something to me; I guess I read ttrpg manuals cover to cover now? Monster of the Week is a fun and breezy read, offering a super-customizable system to let your friends get up to all sorts of spooky shenanigans. for bonus reading (or listening, I guess) I recommend checking out the Critshow, an actual play show that I started listening to the same day I started reading the book. for folks who learn better by doing than by reading instructions it can be super helpful to listen to the game in action before you try to run it yourself, and the good good lads over at the Critshow really made me fall in love with the potential of MotW's "advancement through failure" mechanics.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Ocean Vuong, 2019) - much like Richard Siken and Mitski, Vuong is one of those artists that you see quoted all the time on tumblr in the context of various emotional compilation posts juxtaposing them with countless other vaguely sad things. also like Siken and Mitski, Vuong actually lives up to the hype and then some.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, 2020) - an exquisitely long name for an exquisite little book, in which Nezhukumatathil brings attention to some of her favorite plants and animals with short, clever essays. written in poetic prose, Nezhukumatathil extolls the virtue of everything from the smiling axolotl to the surprisingly resilient flamingo to the reeking corpse flower, weaving in her own struggles with being perpetually Othered as a brown woman in America with glittering praises of Earth's astonishing biodiversity.

A Snake Falls to Earth (Darcie Little Badger, 2021) - every time I think I'm pretty much done with YA fantasy I'm proven wrong in the most spectacular fashion. Little Badger weaves a tale of two worlds - that of teenage Nina, a Lipan girl in a world very much like ours being rocked by climate change, and of a snake-person named Oli who lives in a parallel world populated by animal spirits. Nina wants to unlock secrets left behind in a language her family has forgotten; Oli seeks a cure for an ailing friend. both protagonists delight on their own - I'll admit I was extremely partial to Oli's alternating chapters - but really shine when the narrative inevitably brings them crashing together.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 2012) - and again with the YA! I reread Ari and Dante in a single day in anticipation of finally getting my hands on the sequel, and I'm so glad I did. Alire Sáenz's plain but poignant prose goes down like a warm soup or a mug of hot chocolate, always a gentle comfort. I don't want to get too hyperbolic, but I really think this might be one of THE best books about young queer people out there.

Light From Uncommon Stars (Ryka Aoki, 2021) - this book blurbs itself as "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet meets Good Omens," but that doesn't begin to do it justice. this novel displays an absolutely fearless disregard for the constraints of genre, spinning the store of a trans violinist who's run away from home, a legendary violin instructor who makes her students famous in exchange for selling their souls to hell, and an alien mother who's family have fled an intergalactic danger to hide out in an unassuming California doughnut shop. their stories tangle together in soft, surprising ways, and it's taking every ounce of willpower I have not to completely spoil how unbelievably kickass the ending is. did I mention the violin instructor and the alien mom are dating?

Hurts So Good: The Science and Pleasure of Pain on Purpose (Leigh Cowart, 2021) - an introspective and empathetic account that Cowart, who is both a science journalist and sexual masochist, was perhaps uniquely qualified to write. their investigation takes them to such unlikely places as a pepper-eating contest where the champion vomits immediately after victory and a marathon than requires competitors to go several days without rest to Cowart's own childhood suffering the physical torture of dancing ballet. Cowart makes a compelling argument that nearly everyone engages in at least a little intentionally-inflicted pain to, paradoxically, make themselves feel better, and dives into the science of why while also wondering about where, exactly, the line between acceptable and unacceptable self-harm is to be drawn.

Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World (Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 2021) - that crazy son of a bitch, he's done it again! I will be honest with you, beloved readers: this much-awaited sequel isn't quite as good as the original, and nor was it ever going to be. but Alire Sáenz tackles Ari Mendoza's coming of age by taking a much wider scope than he did in the first book, introducing issues ranging from the ongoing AIDS crisis (these books do take place in the late 80s, after all), grief, and racism. Ari also gets to have some great personal coming of age moments - I was particularly moved by Alire Sáenz's determination to expand Ari's group of friends, letting our poor moody boy realize at last that there are people in the world who are happy to love him, if he'll only let them in. it's significantly longer than the first installment, and I do think a little more editing and trimming might have benefitted this book, but at the end of the day I still spent most of the last 100ish pages crying, so who am I to complain?

now - for the pressing matter of the bingo sheet.

I'm off to a pretty strong start! without reusing any titles for more than one space, I still have nonfic (Cowart), a sequel (Alire Sáenz), a debut author (Vuong), an essay collection (Nezhukamatathil), SFF (Aoki), YA or middle reader (Little Badger) and a book that I reread (Alire Sáenz again). at this rate, I could have a bingo by February!

... or maybe I'll shift the game to see if I can get a bingo each month? that might be fun. much to consider. however I end up doing it, if you'd like to play along with your own bingo sheet you can download them in different colors here!

[tailoredjade]

books recs <3

Literary fiction

Giovanni's Room

the kind of book that’s best if you go in blind. just know that baldwin remains a classic for a reason. his writing makes me want to gnaw on my own wrist (affectionate). his use of motifs makes me want to pull out a cork-board and pin up snippets of pages just to connect them with bits of red thread. devastating, raw, heart wrenching, tragic, other adjectives of the sort

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

gilda is a deeply mentally-ill atheist lesbian who’s ends up getting hired as a receptionist in a catholic church when in search for free therapy. subsequent shenanigans ensue and by shenanigans i mean she’s just … spirals. this novel is sharp, funny, deeply relatable (isn’t that reveling), and at it’s core utterly human

Fantasy

A Marvelous Light

ok hear me out: for fans of our flag means death, i found the perfect edwardian fantasy romance for you. god this book is such a delight. robin gets the thrust into magical society after he mistakenly gets declared a liaison. obviously he falls in love with his magical counterpart, who’s prickly and obsessed with libraries. it’s quite possible that i am a tad in love with him. super interesting magic system + lush setting (also the author is a host of an absolute banging podcast called ‘be the serpent’)

The Poppy War (and subsequent installments)

where do i ever begin. the world building is brilliant and rooted within chinese history. it’s gritty and dark and so bloody smart. rin is the epitome of the post that’s like ‘i’m a girlboss, i’m a war criminal, i’m the next virgin mary, i will defeat god’ (paraphrased clearly). i simultaneously love her and want to shake her vigorously by the shoulders. she is my little meow meow. oh right plot. to clarify, rin is poor orphan who manages to gets into sinegard, an  prestigious military school, and there she discovers her connection to shamanism. discusses the harsh realities of war and explores the depth of relationship formed because of it

The Midnight Lie

YA fantasy that has surprisingly complex conversations about class, compulsive heterosexuality, exploitation, and toxic relationships. still tbh the relationship is what kept me reading. every interaction between nirrim and sid had me giggling, twirling my hair, looking way abashedly, the works. the lines “Nirrim, I can’t be good to you. / Then be bad.” make me want to scream into a pillow like an early 2000s disney movie. i’m so tired of love interests in romcoms being describe as swoon-worthy when they’re just some guy. sid on the other hand; she’s this delightful butch who kisses girls’ palms and compares them to indigo flowers and — jfc moving on.

Non-Fiction

In the Dream House

memoir recounting an abusive relationship framed through vignettes of narrative tropes/literary devices. so fucking devastating and haunting. dream house as: queer villain, ambiguity, choose your own adventure, and death wish; all really suck with me. really think everyone should get this a read if you’re in the right place for it

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

brilliant collection abt racism, sexism, class, homophobia, and the ways they overlap “Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.“

Poetry

Crush

if you haven’t yet read a richard siken quote yet while scrolling through this hell-site i commend you because how. is there really anything else to say. wishbone is a particular favorite of mine but every single word in this collection makes me feral

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

the only time i will ever be willing to frolic is after reading an oliver poem. i come out of the experience feeling rejuvenated? compassionate? with the understanding that yes rocks do, in fact, have feelings, why wouldn’t they?

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

big fan of this specific translation. should be considered the lesbian master doc. that’s probably problematic. well anyways. the bit when she describes very literally fainting after hearing a woman’s laugh from across the room. slay! she’s just like me fr

[sunsandships]

the age gap issue, and how i’ve made my peace with it

or: a meandering word dump as i try to sort out my feelings on CMBYN

disclaimer: these are unedited thoughts. i welcome discussion & people engaging with my thoughts. age gap specific thoughts are towards the end; the beginning is just,, literal word vomit. pls handle gently.

to begin with, both the novel and the movie hit me like a freight train; sort of like that part in Inception where they’re on the first level of the dream in that ugly taxicab and the train just literally slams into them from outta nowhere. descriptors like lush or intimate are probably way overused with respect to CMBYN but they are truly what spring to mind. what struck me, and stuck with me, as i read the novel then watched the movie (in that order) was how difficult it was for me to do in one sitting.

for context: i’m the type of person who usually blazes through a novel, no matter how long, in one sitting. and movies, of course, i usually watch in one sitting as well. but i also have a recorded history of sucking at handling second-hand embarrassment. my freshman year college roommates will testify to my ridiculous behavior when trying to watch She’s The Man. i had to cross the room. at one point, i think i rolled on the floor a little in mortification. when it comes to novels, i usually skim past the section that’s causing me second-hand embarrassment, or just flip forward the page entirely.

call me by your name is not a long book. it took me nearly a week to finish reading. i just couldn’t handle too much of it in one sitting -- i would read somewhere between 5 to 30 pages, and something would be too much, and i would have to go do something else for a few hours. it took me three evenings to finish the movie. and i couldn’t even watch the movie in the daytime; the ambience just felt too wrong. but even in the darkness of my bedroom, with no one else in the world to judge me for what i was watching or feeling while watching it, i couldn’t finish the movie in one go either. i paused in strategic places, and had to return to it the next day.

it’s wrong to call what caused these pauses second hand embarrassment. nothing particularly embarrassing happens, except perhaps elio’s straightforwardly fervent attraction and sexual awakening. yet the fact that i needed to take these pauses remind me of the times i’ve had to pause in a movie or skip forward in a book due to mortifyingly visceral second hand embarrassment. and i think that’s the connecting factor, the reason it took me so long to finish both book and novel, despite loving both. something about the narrative is just so gut-wrenchingly real. the novel reminded me of reading Richard Siken’s Crush for the first time as an angst-ridden middle schooler. when, for no reason i could pinpoint, the prose just kind of socked me in the stomach and makes me feel things like a physical ache in my sternum. CMBYN was something similar; less of a punch in the gut, more of a long, slow burn. like the twinge of muscles after you’ve overexerted yourself exercising the day before. and the movie -- god, the movie -- is shot so beautifully; the elegant piano in the sunlit itallian villa, the sounds of summer in the background, the cerulean sea, the ripe peaches like the world’s best and worst metaphor at the same time. and again, the words that spring to the lips when talking about CMBYN -- lush, sensual, intimate. 

and there, that’s another key word -- intimate. the novel and movie both feel a little like voyeurism, like the whole thing was a real, private experience between two real people and you’re spying in on them through an omnipotent camera operator, seeing something not meant to be seen, much less by you.

and maybe that’s why i fell head first into yet another hyperfixation; it’s been a long long time since i read something that made me unflinchingly feel that much. maybe because primarily i’ve been reading trope-laden fanfictions, self-indulgent fics that i can know what to expect of. the equivalent of eating literary fast food for years and then suddenly tasting fresh fruit -- am i cheeky enough to say a peach?

but now, and wow it’s taken me a long time to get to the main point, having stewed in my love of the prose and the movie’s cinematography and the frankly gorgeous acting (and persons) of A.H. and T. C., a little niggling doubt in my hindbrain -- what about the age gap? after all, that was the main reason i’d put off reading the book for so long, when i’d first started seeing buzz around CMBYN months and months ago. especially with all the recent sexual abuse allegations floating around, i was hesitant, weary.

to quote oliver, i know myself. i know my kinks, which yes, sometimes include age gaps; i know intimately that what makes it a kink for me is the inherent power dynamic of an age gap. and i think 99% of my kinks trace back to there being that power dynamic. the other 1% is fear. so, y’know -- it’s not that the age gap, by itself, weirded me out. ya girl ain’t about to kink shame herself. but the difference for me was, in the weird cesspool of fandom, it goes without saying that kinks that push the edge of social norms (heck, kinks that go way beyond the edge) are definitely fictional. fantasy. in the realm of things you can explore with fictional characters. unhealthy power dynamics are just that -- unhealthy. played with in the context of kinky fic, yeah. but definitively not glorified, not romantic, not real.

and by god, CMBYN is all of those - glorified, romantic, achingly real. so why, why when i read the novel and watch the movie, did my concern fade into the background? had fic desensitized me? was my moral compass loose? and of course, much ado has been made about the age of consent being so much lower in italy (14, holy smokes), and the absolute ego of applying U.S.-centric morality to everything, so is it really a non-issue?

maybe the first thing is to place the novel in its own context -- the author is not a teenage boy. the author is a college professor of comparative literature. the author is a married man. the author is even a straight married man, in fact. and yeah, despite setting the novel in the head of a seventeen year old, it’s also framed as older!elio looking back nostalgically. so wow, does the narration not sound like a seventeen year old boy. and oliver, poor oliver, does not get his perspective in. everything is framed by older-elio-recalling-younger-elio’s thoughts. and when you’re reading it, you’re caught up in the narration, the feel of the words, the story, and you’re not thinking about the age gap at all, not really, unless the narrative itself calls your attention to it, and by then you’re in it for the long haul, and suspension of disbelief has kicked in, and it just kind of,,, stops bothering you.

and the movie, wow. the casting. T.C. can definitely pass as younger-than-twenty. maybe not seventeen, precisely, but young-ish. still a teen. meanwhile, A.H. is definitely older than twenty-four. he’s thirty-one and at best passes for late-twenties. so hoo boy, did the movie accentuate that age gap. by the time i watched the movie though, i was already a goner for the book. so i didn’t focus on it too much, or at all. it doesn’t hurt that T.C. and A.H. are both gorgeous by themselves, and that together their chemistry is amazing, and that their acting is just,,, subtle and superbly mind-blowing at the same time.

and so wham bam, i finish the movie. i plunge into hyperfixation pretty quickly. and then suddenly, deep in the CMBYN tag, i read a well-written, non-aggressive review of the novel which does a pretty neat take on why it’s an issue the novel is written by a much older man fantasizing about the sex life of a seventeen year old with a older man. when you put it like that, it’s pretty,,, squicky. 

so, the age gap problem. time to face it head on, me.

the age gap presented breaks no laws. canonically, elio’s parents are even aware of what’s developing and approve (and perhaps even encourage? setting them up in a bougie hotel for the overnight Rome trip, hello??). but after i separated a little from the initial euphoria of just existing at the same time as the gorgeousness of CMBYN and thought about it a little more, it just,,, felt weird, in a intrinsic level, the same intrinsic level that felt all the positive feels possible for CMBYN when i was immersed in it and had full suspension of disbelief happening. 

why does it feel weird? well me, right now, i’m twenty. and i feel so, so much older than i was when i was seventeen. i would not date someone that is seventeen. i would pretty much find it impossible, i think, to find a emotional or intellectual connection with someone that is seventeen. so much happens in those in-between years, and that’s with just the difference of high school vs. college. elio and oliver are looking at the extra gap of high school - college - grad school. it’s not a trivial age gap. and just because it doesn’t break any laws doesn’t make it a non-issue, i think.

back to that power dynamic; the way the age skew totally definitely allows the older person to take advantage, to abuse. is that what’s happening here? certainly, i had issues with the sex scene (hello, lube? hello, condoms? hello, prep?? i do not believe you can engage in anal, penetrative intercourse without needing to talk through it, yet one of the major things after the sex is elio retreats into himself, into shame over the act itself. i’m not in the camp that the sex was non-consensual; elio was clearly there for it. but i don’t think it was written or handled well, much less realistically -- the author is, unfortunate, a Straight) but i don’t think, on the whole of it, any advantage-taking is happening. oliver doesn’t hold any authority over elio, and elio’s infatuation/desire for oliver is full-blown with no encouragement (or, a less-nice word: manipulation) from oliver.

they don’t pursue a long-term relationship. there’s no mention that they might even try to extend the relationship beyond the summer. when oliver leaves, elio lets him go. canonically, elio takes that whole experience, wraps it in bubble wrap, and puts it on a pedestal. and yeah, years later, when they are both much much older, they reconnect and still feel things but also both have clearly done fine in their individual lives and elio is a drama queen ok. he’s nostalgic. he’s still feeling things. but would he have totally buried all feelings if, at the time of their fling, he’d been twenty instead of seventeen?

though on the flip side, why does elio need to be seventeen at all? would it change the story at all if he was twenty? twenty-two, even? just freshly graduated college, summering with his parents one last summer? maybe there’s something to be said about elio being on the cusp of manhood, or whatever. that it needs to be his first love, not just a love. but hey, i’m twenty, and i haven’t been in any type of relationship, much less love. so clearly, within the realm of possibility. here, i think, is a much deeper critique than the age gap in and of itself. something along the lines of Andre Aciman, and his authorial choices as a Older Straight White Male. i’m not really qualified to touch that, though; i’m really here to just digest my own feelings about the age gap, and why ultimately i’m at peace with it, and why i think i’ve made my peace with being at peace with it.

because, no, i don’t really buy that a seventeen year old and a twenty-four year old can fall in true true love without knowing much about each other beyond bonding on a shallow intellectual level over classical literature and music and idyllic bike rides and swimming. certainly, i would be much happier buying the love part of the equation if elio was twenty, or twenty-one, or twenty-two. but nothing about the relationship is manipulative, or nonconsensual, or coerced. and due to the narrative style, in my head, elio isn’t even quite seventeen - more of a amorphous precocious early twenties, maybe. 

maybe also because, at the heart of it, i don’t think CMBYN is a love story. i think it’s a story about desire, and the inevitability of time eroding pretty much everything, and enjoying and holding onto things when they’re in your grasp. and so while i think the age gap makes love a little out of my realm of understanding, it certainly puts no barrier on desire.