I had a silly but distressing incident this week- I saw a mouse in my apartment. Household pests are a trigger for me— like, I barely ever even use the word trigger, but there’s no other word that could conjure what happens to me when this stuff happens. Thankfully, I had friends to talk me off the ledge about it (thank you Shireen, Syd, Kierra) and newly-prescribed hydroxizine to help me sleep. And now I have what can only be called Home Alone for Mice in my cabinets, so it’s only a matter of time till I catch the thing. But in the dysregulation I returned to the numbing behaviors that I hate, scrolling and re-watching a will-they-won’t-they sitcom. So, I didn’t read as much as I could have. But here’s what I did read!
Also just a reminder for NY pals to go vote and leave your ballot blank if you haven’t done so already. Early voting is open and election day is Tuesday.
Books
I finally finished Late Fascism by Alberto Toscano! The penultimate chapter is called “Cathedrals of Erotic Misery” about gender, which I loved and which reminded me a lot of the tradwifes and anti-feminist women I see on TikTok (or meme accounts making fun of the TikToks). The book was hard! I had to look up a word on every page. But here are some things I learned.
It doesn’t make sense to just compare today’s circumstances to interwar fascism in Europe. Fascism changes. And those fascisms of Europe were predicated by settler colonialism, slavery, and what he calls “intra-European racial capitalism (or internal colonialism).”
When we think of fascists we often think of singular leaders of a totalitarian state- Moussolini, Hitler. But fascism promotes an anti-state state where impunity is delegated- to the settler, cop, vigilante white man. “Whether in the guise of decentralizes and deputized power or psychological wages, the fascist— as the phantasmic synthesis of the settler and the soldier (or the cop)— needs to imagine him or herself as an active shareholder in the monopoly of violence as well as an enterprising petty sovereign.” This is why some people LIKE fascism.
The phrase ‘scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds’ is true because fascism is baked into liberalism. Fascism is “differently applied and named across axes of race, gender, and sexuality. As we learn from the writings of incarcerated revolutionaries of color in the United States, political orders widely deemed liberal-democratic can harbour institutions that operate of regimes of domination and terror for ample sectors of their population, in something like a racial dual state.”
Facism is often “preventative counter-violence.” Fascists don’t have to respond to actual threats to capitalism— they can make them up and preventatively respond to them. Like, they can imagine a whole trans war against normative gender and then enact violence on trans people.
Fascism is obsessed with borders. “As the cycles of capitalism driving both mass migration and repression converge with the climate crisis’ and a racial-civilisational crisis is spliced with scenarios of scarcity and collapse, the extreme and authoritarian right will map its politics of time— and especially its obsession with loss of privilege and purity— onto the space of territory.” We see this from Democrats— Adams, Biden— as often as we do Republicans.
There’s a lot of psychoanalytic stuff that was harder to understand, but onr takeaway is that psychoanalytic theories of fascism argue that the fascist leader embodies the contradictory desires of being invincible and inferior. They have to be a “great little man.”
My favorite quote from the book: “An ideal for the left might be to become what its enemies think it already is, namely a strategically ingenious and systematic endeavour to undermine white, Western, Christian, capitalist, and patriarchal civilisation across all institutions of society.”
I took a break from Late Fascism midweek to read Worry by Alexandra Tanner. I heard her read last month at the Limousine series and thought she was hilarious, so when her debut debuted I wanted to read it right away. I’m sooort of gonna spoil it but not really, but scroll past if you want. It was billed as “Frances Ha meets No One is Talking About This” and “Seinfeldian.” NOITAT is one of my favorite books so I was like ok let’s go! Worry is about Jules/28/Brooklyn, an MFA grad who scrolls instead of writes, and her queer little sister Poppy who moves in with her. Jules is addicted to hate-stalking antisemitic tradwife antivaxxer prepper anti-feminist mommybloggers, whom I can confidently call fascists after reading Late Fascism. Poppy seems to be allergic to the world and covered in hives. Each sister is trying and failing to find boundaries between them, they constantly argue and say the most wounding shit to each other while maintaining the fiercest bond. They adopt a dog named Amy Klobuchar. Something upsetting happens to Amy Klobuchar, and I think it’s brave for a writer to write a scene where something upsetting happens to a dog in this cultural climate.
There’s this one scene early on that I keep thinking about where the sisters are at Target arguing over getting a SodaStream, which is BDS. Poppy is eating Babybel cheese. Jules says:
“I am literally not going to deny myself something I need right now because I don’t think Israel should be bombing the shit out of everyone. Everyone bombs the shit out of everyone. Who owns Babybel? Is Babybel fascist?”
“I’ve googled this. They’re fine. Also, you have this new thing I’m noticing,” Poppy says, moving her hands at me like a mime in a box, “where you don’t think anything means anything.
“Because nothing does mean anything.”“When did this start?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you talked to someone about this?”
“No.”
Dialogue and internal narration in Worry are ridiculous and completely on point, which is my biggest gripe with most millennial-lives-in-Brooklyn novels. Worry is hilarious. Worry is worrying. NOITAT and Worry are both novels about being online, but in NOITAT, the narrator is forced offline into the space of the sublime. In Worry, it’s Poppy, not Jules, who evolves out of the screen. This is where I understood the Seinfeldian comparison- the best comedies are tragedies where the protagonist(s) never really change. Jules remains trapped in an algorithmic prison of her own anxieties. We last see her right before COVID hits and I wish we had an epilogue just for what quarantine would do to her.
I read this interview that Tanner did for NPR. NPR asks what she hopes 20-somethings come away with from the book. She says “You're going to strive, you're going to suffer. It's all going to be OK. You're going to make it even if you only make it with a percentage of yourself that is far less than you thought you would carry on to the other side of it.” ummm this is not what I got from the book, but it’s a good message.
I also read this LARB review of it and realized at the end that the critic is a friendly acquaintance. If you want to borrow Worry lmk.
Essays/substacks
The newest thot pudding on Easter, solar flares, Gaza, and everything at once.
A bar I keep thinking about: “I, despite my own resentments and resistances, had never lost anything by allowing the metaphors and precepts of any religion or ideology, including the ones I had been born into, into my mind to consider more deeply.”
The “Chaos and Despair” of Our Food Culture, an interview with Emma Specter on Mental Hellth. “We all want to eat ‘better’ but we live in a capitalist country where we have to rely on things for convenience and where not every meal is going to be prepared by Alice Waters. Our disordered food system—disordered eating is part and parcel of that. We live in a culture that drives us insane around food and then shames people into silence when they want to talk about their relationship to food or their bodies.”
“All Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills Defeated in Georgia: Is Trans Panic Losing Steam, Or Pausing?” by Erin Reed.
Tavi Gevinson guesting on Akousa T. Adasi’s Consumption Report, which made me want to watch Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.
Arabelle Sicardi on beauty school and the horrible prices paid for fake nails.
Short stories- all out of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2023
There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista by Isabel Cañas
Beginnings by Kristina Ten
Sparrows by Susan Palwick
Music
Cowboy Carter obviously!!!! My favorite tracks right now are BLACKBIIRD (RIP The Beatles lmao I will never be listening to the original song ever again), SWEET HONEY BUCKIN’, II MOST WANTED, 16 CARRIAGES still. I was surprised by the changes to JOLENE but it makes sense, and I loved learning that Dolly went on record saying she wanted Bey to cover it years ago. And it all flows so well, like I do not want to listen to it out of order, the interludes are so fun. Beyoncé is truly the hardest worker, the most talented. How does she have this drive to constantly be working at such a high level?
HARDC0RE DR3AMZ by Rico Nasty & Boize Noise, three really catchy fun Rico songs! I love that the most vulnerable one is the one called Vvgina. I really love her. I feel like we would get along well.
I haven’t listened to all of Tyla’s album but I did hear her song with Becky G!
Young Miko has a new single! and WILLOW too! Big week for gen Z.
My mom just texted me to tell me Shakira has a new album so I gotta listen to that.
Poems
“the moon is far away and yet it sways the tides,” “Solastalgia,” and “to my community” by Di Jayawickrema in Atmospheric. “We all hate borders and love boundaries. I know you see the contradiction.” omfggg.
Resolution #1,003 by June Jordan, inserted here last as an affirmation for the week ahead.
Unfortunately I am usually at least one person’s fool, usually many people’s, and always capitalism’s.
Till next week! <3 ALF.