Coming & Telling & Crying
This is Tumblr, so obviously all of you have already heard about Meaghan and Melissa’s wonderful project Coming & Crying, and have already donated money or plan to do that in the following 30 hours (because 30 hours are all that are left to help this happen. DO IT DO IT).
It is late people, and to be quite honest I don’t feel like making too much of a slick story out of this, I just needed to say: these girls are hot.
That is to say, hot in the way that when we were kids, we’d hide stuff in the living room and let someone search while we yelled: ‘warmer! warmer! oh no, cold cold cold cold! yeaah warmer! warmer, warmer.. hot hot hot!’ and in this metaphor Meaghan and Melissa are the birthday girls looking for their present and the present is The Truth About Life and How We Should Live It, and I am one of the kids who’s yelling ‘HOT HOT’, and, if you are touched and amazed by the following quotes, you probably are as well.
Meagan: ‘A lot of our philosophy re: the book is grounded in the belief that storytelling eradicates shame and fosters compassion (to risk sounding utterly newnice), and that we dare each other on, so to speak, support each other, so that things have historically been not-so-easy to talk about, don’t hold so much discursive power, and can be seen more as they are— tough, wonderful, funny, sweet, scared— etc.’
Matthew Gallaway: ‘To read others’ words and stories, I think, is one of the best ways we can not only develop our own language, but also to understand why we should recognize the fundamental humanity of another person or group of people; in Rorty’s view, the novel has been one of the great means by which our society has learned both to empathize with those who in the past would have been considered ‘outsiders’ (or even less than human) for whatever reason (gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity the most obvious), but also to understand humanity’s capacity for cruelty to one another (Nabokov and Orwell are two examples of this kind of writer). So in short, yes, I think reading (and respecting) the work of others (whether it’s a novel or an essay or a lolcat tumblr post) is absolutely essential in terms of ‘opening’ myself up to the viewpoint of others, and perhaps — as a second step — to incorporate their story/vocabulary into my own.’
(Read more interviews&background here.)
Now this is what I talk about when I say: I need to write this and that book. This is why I have been sharing my life online all these years, with very extreme highs (or, as some people say, lows) such as when I uploaded a list of all the people I have ever crushed on, marked with ‘kiss’ ‘sex’ ‘love’ and ‘duration’ (last week) or when I described in full detail a dream in which I had sex with my ex-boyfriend for the first time (six years ago). This is why I write when I’m upset, alone, happy or bored - and this is why I write not for myself, but for you, and why I hope that you read it: because I want to read what you have to say, anytime.
