ESSAY READING LIST

ALTNERATIVLEY TITLED: unloading my bookmark bar and sorting it into arbitrary cataorgies. This is a list of my favorite essays I've read online. All of them should be paywall free,
since they're linked through 12ft latter (12ft.io)
background made by hill house

ON LITERATURE

The "Unhinged Bisexual Woman" Novel: Where everything is a joke, love is for suckers, and gay liberation is a bore

"Big Swiss and Milk Fed feature highly unstable protagonists and credulity-straining plots that have been described by reviewers as “madcap,” “strange,” “off kilter,” “eccentric,” “deranged,” “graphic,” “obscene,” “a riot,” and “a romp.” In the logic of these stories, sexual desire for a woman is not a queer expression of romantic or erotic or, god forbid, political meaning, but rather evidence of the female protagonist’s emotional incoherence. Queer sex here is just another zany life choice, like living in a house full of bees or being obsessed with frozen yogurt. It is no wonder then that both books have been highly successful with devotees of the hashtag “unhinged women,” which has over 35 million views and counting on TikTok and includes titles such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eileen, Mona Awad’s Bunny, Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, and Lisa Taddeo’s Animal, among many others.

This genre, which I’ll call Unhinged Bisexual Woman Fiction, is characterized by a kind of mean, dry, deadpan first-person voice that communicates to the reader that the protagonist views herself as exempt from the embarrassing task of being a human being. Her voice, which is the opposite of caring or earnest, implies that everything is material for a joke, love is for suckers, and politics, including gay liberation, is a bore."

The Case Against the Trauma Plot

"The experience of uncertainty and partial knowledge is one of the great, unheralded pleasures of fiction. Why does Hedda Gabler haunt us? Who does Jean Brodie think she is? What does Sula Peace want? Sula’s early life is thick with incidents, any one of which could plausibly provide the wound around which personality, as understood by the trauma plot, might scab—witnessing a small boy drown, witnessing her mother burn to death. But she is not their sum; from her first proper appearance in the novel, with an act of sudden, spectacular violence of her own, she has an open destiny. Where the trauma plot presents us with locks and keys, Morrison does not even bother to tell us what happens to Sula in the decade she disappears from town, and from the novel. Sula doesn’t exist for our approval or judgment, and, in her self-possession, is instead rewarded with something better: our rapt fascination with her style, her silences and refusals."

an investigation into the trauma plot + why it doesn't work.

ON FEMINISM

Who's Afraid of Amber Heard?

"It’s exceptionally clear to me that ever since the advent of the mainstream MeToo movement, the public (even women, even some so-called feminists) has been foaming at the mouth for a neat, uncomplicated example of an evil woman publicly conspiring to bring a good man down. The problem, of course, is that an instance of that is hard to actually find, and so — to paraphrase Voltaire — it became necessary to invent one."

ON CULTURE

No Good Alone
If God is Dead Your Time is Everything
Everyone Needs to Grow Up
The Repulsive Crust

ON SCIENCE

The Scientific Virtues

"Anyone who practices these virtues is a scientist, even if they work night shifts at the 7-11 and learned everything they know about statistics from twitter. Anyone who betrays these virtues is no scientist at all, even if they’ve got tenure at Princeton and have a list of publications long enough to run from Cambridge to New Haven."

An Invitation to a Secret Society

ON WRITING

HOW TO KEEP A WRITERS NOTEBOOK
WHY ACTIVISM LEADS TO SO MUCH BAD WRITING

"It seems natural for creative people to speak out at a time of crisis. We look to them for words and images that provide clarity and inspiration and consolation—for truth. But in practice this expectation turns out to be perverse. Instead of bringing their special talents—imagination, an ability to sustain competing thoughts and articulate them with nuance, a knowledge of complex history, a sense of tragedy and common humanity—to a subject like Israel and Palestine, writers and artists are more likely to abandon their qualifications at the threshold of a political controversy. Upon entering, they begin speaking in a characteristic tone of outraged conscience. They indulge in rhetorical excesses and resort to euphemisms and omissions that amount to outright lies. They use the passive voice and abstract language to gloss over the killing of children on one side or the other. They ignore any facts that taint their purity of belief. They squarely refuse to face the trade-offs and dirty compromises that politics requires. They avoid the devilish question that a sense of responsibility should require them to ask: What would I do if I had real power? This question always has a dissatisfying, even tragic, answer—so it disappears in the glare of moral certainty."

ON SELF

How To Avoid Half Heartedness
On Self-Respect

"To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves."

Are You a Baby? A Litmus Test

ON TECHNOLOGY

What's the one thing we all hate but can't stop doing?

"Forgive me father for I have scrolled."

My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

"Website as room, Website as shelf, Website as plant, Website as garden, Website as puddle, Website as thrown rock that’s now falling deep into the ocean"