022: the jessification of consumption report
Jess Kasiama on time’s wounds and a softer approach to writing
On any given day, I will send Jess Kasiama about 3-5 links to articles and tweets and memes that relate to some conversation or other we’ve had. Jess and I work together so almost every week I get about five and a half hours of exciting and funny conversation that makes me feel elevated. Anyone who knows me knows I love a reference and Jess is just as good at lobbing them back to me (we thought about including a Serena and Venus joke here but I couldn’t get it to work). She is, so far, the only person I know who remembers the days when Matt Hitt and Marcel Castenmiller ruled the Internet and our hearts. Which means I’m rightfully obsessed with her. She wrote about her writing life, softness, and time.
When Akosua reached out to me about writing a guest post for the Consumption Report, I couldn’t say no. After all, we are the proud co-parents to a gently worn copy of David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything [ed. note: neither of us have ever opened it to read a page] and a yearly New Yorker digital subscription. Anything for family, am I right? Sure, I was a little nervous but I also value any opportunity to write and meander. So here I am, nestled into the corner of my bed on my day off from the bookstore, listening to Speak Now and ready to produce!
The only issue is that, as of late, I have been struggling to confidently form full sentences that I believe in. Call it post-COVID brain, call it my resentment towards the unromantic energy of this seemingly never-ending winter but my notes app is filled with sentence fragments, grocery lists, and drafts to emails and text messages I have yet to respond to. For a long time, I have paralleled the incompleteness of my writing attempts with my insecurity around identifying my body as a subject while also feeling incapable of precisely defining what it is I am doing in the world. Insert clip of Wendy Williams shouting out the girls with (social) anxiety. This feeling grows and grows, like a monster underneath my childhood bed. As a result, I have subconsciously committed my life to confronting this feeling while also consciously committing my life to writing. This is probably why I have always thought of my practice as more multidisciplinary. I don’t feel very satisfied with leaving things on the page. You heard it here first — one day, I will make the experimental horror film of my dreams with Lucas Hedges as my muse. Just kidding…unless…
Anyway, my whole thing is, I have had so much trouble finishing sentences and projects in the same way that I have trouble finishing books, conversations and meals. Enter Drifts by Kate Zambreno.
One of my favorite activities is listening to podcast interviews of writers, even if I am not familiar with their work. Problematic BUT oftentimes I enjoy the writer more than I enjoy the writing. This isn’t exactly the case with Zambreno, it is simply a testament to the fact that I was pulled to her work through her persona and how she spoke about writing. I think there’s a small part of me that looks to contemporary writers as the professors of my inner world. Shoutout to the idea of the novel as a syllabus. I DIGRESS. I first listened to Zambreno on LARB Radio Hour. Her interest in the late Hervé Guibert and the material conditions of a writer’s life set something off in me.
I guess becoming an adult, for me, is realizing that a writing life feels more important than a writing career and so I am in the work of figuring out how to live that life as opposed to trying to mirror the influx of ideas of success that surround me in this field. After listening to the LARB Radio Hour episode, I knew I had to purchase Drifts. I am still making my way through it but it is a lyrical novel about the writing of an overdue novel that also touches on creative obsession, isolation, and reading/writing. My preoccupation with unfinished things/incompleteness helped ease me into the idea of a fragmentary novel. This line from Alexandra Schwartz’s New Yorker review offered a glimmer of hope: “For a self-portraitist like Zambreno, the fragment is a way to explore the inability to sustain a unified self.” Maybe I am not as far gone as I think, maybe I am on a clear path with all these questions and uncertainties about what is finished and what is unfinished.
I guessssssssssssssss I am really thinking about how to use my time so that I can maximize feelings of joy and pleasure. We’re talking about the erotic here, folks. Things are changing as we enter into springtime — our bodies are thawing, as RAFTM1 Hannah framed it the other night, we are remembering ourselves and those around us in a new way. We are returning to a more liquid state and thinking about time again. I feel like this is an important place to be in as a collective. VAGABONDS! author Eloghosa Osunde said it best in this interview with Coveteur: “There's so many different ideas of time, and I think that whatever idea a society believes about time, it affects how they move. I find that when you shift away from the idea that time can be exhausted or that time happens in one direction, you touch parts of life that you would never have seen." For reference, Osunde has defined time as stacked and nonlinear. Chef’s kiss. Read more here.
One of my favorite experiences of Time was seeing 24 Frames, an Abbas Kiarostami film, for the first time in theaters with my friends Sameen and Nick. I loved Close-Up but this experimental work of 24 short films inspired by still images, paintings and photographs sounded like a real snoozer. And in a way, it was. Why lie for Substack? I fell asleep for a few frames but woke up rejuvenated and on the other side of something, like a baby animal in a dark room with other baby animals whose hearts were pure and open to the world. Kiaorstami said it himself: “I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater...but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.” Delivered back into the soft light and quietness of the theater, I remember turning to my friends as we ate our snacks, feeling so full and satisfied. Complete. This was a transformative experience, shifting the way that I approach movies and my movie-going experiences.
Another thing I think about when I think about time is respectability. A customer came into the bookstore one quiet morning and he talked about the dishonesty of respectability. Not to be that girl but there is something there. It was a TED Talk, for sure, but don’t worry, he was making points. The key here is my relationship to surveillance. It’s in the way that I rush to lock up at work, in fear of being coded or narrated in a compromising way. This fear of being completed by false narratives shapes the way I live, never fully engaging in my own desire, always avoiding being seen.
Soooooo, how do I plan on changing my relationship to time? Is this a thing that even needs to happen? I am not sure. I have been obsessing over the idea of actively rewriting one’s own life, à la the late bell hooks. The big idea that I have landed on is making space for discovery. Making space to rub against things, to have friction and disagreement, to resist and figure out what the body truly wants to say yes to with regards to how I spend my time. Here are other tentative guidelines of my great rewriting of time:
Write what you believe and keep going.
Ask questions. A good question satisfies the Scorpionic hunger within me to look underneath things. I like the idea of sifting through the muck. Maybe this is a little too We're Not Really Strangers but question asking really is a love language. Here’s a question I loved from Sheila Heti’s talk at the Reference Library: “What myths did you grow up with?” Ask a friend!
My friend Miao sent me this tweet that recalls Nicole Sealey saying: "I don't want to write all the time. I want to have time to be in love, and to see friends for dinner." Summer is approaching and I have been coveting the SKIMS Black Soft Lounge Maxi Dress. Bring on the dinner reservations.
You can send Jess love notes @flisspo or in the comments of this post.
Reader and Friend to Me. Coined by Rachel Tashjian.
so so so good!
💘