Make It Scream, Make It Burn by
Leslie Jamison
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
This is a very interesting set of essays. The subjects could be interesting enough on their own--a solitary whale, a museum of items left by ex's, people who become avatars in a sim-life computer game. But then she takes it a step further and questions why "we" are intrigued by these things, what the meaning is. She even takes it further by explaining what she thought she would find, or write about, and how her perceptions shifted. She is a good writer and her observations are insightful and even profound at times. All of the essays are not created equally, but I did enjoy "Maximum Exposure" and "Layover Story". Weirdly, I didn't enjoy the more personal essays as much. A good book to make you think.
Maybe desire and demand are just the same song played at different frequencies.
52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as a metaphor for loneliness, but metaphor itself as salve for loneliness. Metaphor always connects two disparate points; it suggests that no pathos exists in isolation, no plight exists apart from the plights of others.
that nothing we lived was unique, that we were always—in some sense—living again.
The etiquette of our era demands that we pretend we are still unknown to each other, though she will know I probably googled her, and I will know she probably googled me.
You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one; when you would claw one Peaches out of the way, and then another, and then a third, just for a shot at some shell of respite.
Although many users see Second Life as offering an equal playing field, free from the strictures of class and race, its preponderance of slender white bodies, most of them outfitted with the props of the leisure class, simply reinscribes the same skewed ideals that sustain the unequal playing field in the first place.
His point wasn’t just about physicality—the ways our experiences are bound to our bodies—but about surprise and disruption.
Also true: every paradise is made possible by blindness.
Conspicuous forms of distortion, however, only force us to confront the truth that all photos are inevitably mediated, inevitably constructed, inevitably distancing. Once the bodies arrive in the dooryard, they aren’t bodies anymore: they’ve been run through chemical solutions; they’ve been flattened, framed, and fitted.
There is no way to photograph the soldier’s body—moved or unmoved—that will communicate the whole truth of his life, and of his death.
A trim curatorial label can’t tell us what we’re seeking from images of the dead. We want to remember things that never happened to us. We want to sense grief we never felt.
Does that kind of brutal monotony banish consciousness?
These diary entries are a reminder that the documentarian was also, always, a woman drying her socks on the windowsill and getting eaten alive by the “night shift” of mosquitoes, a woman who got irritated and tired, who drank cold beers alone when she was exhausted by the relentless communion she craved, who was heartbroken by a lover’s betrayal back in California or by her father’s death in Texas—who brought those griefs with her. They soften the diary pages like humidity.
Annie’s failure to remove herself entirely doesn’t obstruct what she documents, it widens the scope of what she’s documenting: not just her subjects but the emotional complexity of photographing them. She confesses her own residue. She owns the taint of artistry.
The language of photography conjures aggression and theft: You shoot a picture. You take a photograph. You capture an image or a moment. It is as if life—or the world, or other people, or time itself—has to be forcibly plundered, or stolen.
Each time she returned, she brought back prints for everyone in the family, giving them back to themselves.
The Portuguese word saudade is infamously untranslatable, but I’ve always loved how it describes something more mysterious than sheer nostalgia. It’s a longing not for what you’ve lost but for what you’ve never had.
the second definition of the word saudade. In this meaning, saudade doesn’t describe longing for any particular object, but longing for that very state of yearning.
Thank you for staying married and not needing your marriage to be a white room in which you’re always entertained.
Its glaring neon landscapes were an articulation of collective longing. It acknowledged how much of our lives we spend looking toward illusory, impossible horizons. It suggested that this longing was not delusion, but one of our central truths. It constituted us.
In a city that advertised twenty-four-hour-a-day pleasure, the next best thing to immortality, every closing time was a little death.
Marriage is what happens when the mirage shimmers away to reveal plain asphalt straight ahead.
“stepmother’s blessing” is another name for a hangnail, as if to suggest something that hurts because it isn’t properly attached, something that presents itself as a substitutive love but ends up bringing pain instead.
The exhibits were all vocabulary words drawn from private shared languages that I would never entirely understand—the beaten-up pot, the plastic bin—or relics from two-person civilizations that no longer existed.
Objects make private histories public, but they also grant the past a certain integrity. Whenever memory conjures the past, it ends up papering over it: replacing the lost partner with memories and reconstructions, myths and justifications. But an object can’t be distorted in these ways. It’s still just a box of popcorn or a toaster, a hoodie that got drenched with sudden rain one night in 1997.
A guitar slide can hold the blues—“ his, mine by way of his”—or a museum can hold the blues, insisting we need to make room for them.
Yearning for things was slightly less embarrassing if I denied myself access to them, so I grew comfortable in states of longing without satisfaction.
It took me five or six months to show. Before that, people would say: “You don’t look pregnant at all!” They meant it as a compliment. The female body is always praised for staying within its boundaries, for making even its sanctioned expansion impossible to detect.
The word longing itself traces its origins back to pregnancy. An 1899 dictionary defines it as “one of the peculiar and often whimsical desires experienced by pregnant women.”
Eating was fully permitted now that I was doing it for someone else.
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
