Volume 2, No. 21: Bodies of Language + Dill & Blue Cheese Biscuits

Greetings, book and treat people! I took last week off. I planted a whole bunch of flowers in my garden, took my first many swims of the season, and read a lot of books. I’m trying to ease back into work by slowing down and making space for the things that bring me joy: early morning tea, snapdragons, swimming in cold water, ice cream.

What is a body of language? What does it mean to hold language in a body? What happens to a body when it loses language? What happens to bodies denied language? I love books about language, and I love books about bodies. These three could not be more different form each other. They all approach language, bodies, and the messy intersections between them in surprising, unexpected ways.

The Books

Backlist: The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (Nonfiction, 1980)

This is a slim book (69 pages), comprised of excerpts from Lorde’s journals, a speech she gave in 1977, and two essays about her experience with breast cancer: '‘Breast Cancer: A Black Lesbian Feminist Experience’ and ‘Breast Cancer: Power Vs. Prosthesis’. I’m tempted to simply share a few of the many passages I underlined. I was struck by how deeply I felt Lorde’s words, her presence, even though my life experience, and particularly my relationship with my body, is so vastly different from hers. Even though this book was published in 1980 and some things about the world have changed. I am often moved, challenged, comforted, and inspired by writers whose lives do and do not intersect with mine in any number of ways. But there is something specific and remarkable about the way Lorde uses language that cuts through all the noise and mess and into the center of what hurts, fuels, angers.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

What I cherish about this book, as with all of Lorde's work, is the way she models how to use language in service to her whole self, her radical vision. She uses words to make herself bigger, to resist smallness, compartmentalization, one dimensionality. She is a writer whose language I feel in my body, whose language seems to live in her body. Again and again I come back to her sureness.

This is a book about Lorde's experience with breast cancer and its aftermath, about illness and transformation and healing and patriarchy, about her relationship with her body, about anger. She shares so many insights that are still relevant today, especially regarding medical racism, queer erasure in health care, normative beauty standards, the state-sanctioned control of women's bodies, queer bodies, Black bodies, and the language we use to talk about cancer. But even more than her particular wisdom, it's Lorde's wholeness that will stay with me. She brings all of herself, leaves nothing behind. In this her teaching goes on forever.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself, a Black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?

Going through my notes about the book, I read again this line, which stopped me cold when I came across it: “We must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the dead.”

I’ve been thinking about this passage, too:

Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo.

I think about this in relation to toxic positivity, my feelings about queer suffering in books, the uses of hope, the fear of transformation and change that we seem to hold so closely, as a society, as individuals.

I’m holding this teaching close as well:

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

I share these passages (and I could share many more) because they hold the power of this book for me. Lorde, speaking across time and space and into the present, offering care, offering possibility, offering new ways of thinking and untangling.

Frontlist: Deaf Utopia by Nyle DiMarco, with Robert Siebert (Memoir)

Nyle DiMarco is a Deaf model and actor and also a reality TV star, something I did not know when I picked up this book because I pay very little attention to pop culture. It made me realize how much I love reading celebrity memoirs about celebrities I don’t know, because I come to the book without any prior knowledge or judgments.

This is joyful, infuriating, funny, and celebratory memoir about Deaf culture, ASL, family, queerness, reality TV, and the absolutely infuriating realities of ableism and audism. DiMarco comes from a multigenerational Deaf family—he and his brothers are the third generation. His family is all over this book—it’s full of stories about the joys and heartbreaks and quirks and challenges of being part of a big Deaf family.

He writes what it was like growing up in a house where everyone used ASL, and then being told he wasn’t allowed to use ASL in school. He shares stories of the ableism his parents and grandparents faced in hospitals, when they were not provided ASL interpreters, and left to puzzle through conversations about their own health that they couldn’t fully understand. He writes about his father’s addiction, violence, and abuse. He also shares his father’s history—unlike his mom, his dad had hearing parents and did not learn ASL as a kid. DiMarco reflects on the ways this violent language deprivation reverberated through his dad’s entire life, and how that inherited trauma shaped his and his siblings’ childhoods.

The most vivid family stories, though, are the joyful ones. DiMarco’s innate sense of Deaf pride overflows onto the page. I love how loudly celebratory this book is. DiMarco doesn’t gloss over the hard stuff—his anger is incandescent, and yours will be too, after reading about all the ways this world is set up to fail Deaf kids—but the underlying emotion, the thing that fuels the narrative, is Deaf joy and language joy—the delight DiMarco takes in ASL is infectious.

He explains in the author’s note that he wrote this book in his first language, ASL, in a series of videos he shared with his friend Robert Siebert. Siebert then translated those videos into English, and together he and DiMarco edited them into the final version of the book.

Turning my stories from ASL into written English was a singular challenge. Bobby and I not only had to translate my stories from one language to another; we also had to condense the visual-spatial nature of the source language, ASL, into the linear, dimensional symbols of the output language, written English. As always happens during the process of linguistic translation, many elements of the source language got lost in the output language. The beauty, power, magic, of ASL is reduced on these written pages.

Throughout the memoir, DiMarco recounts a lot of ASL conversations in ASL gloss, a kind of written approximation of ASL in English. He explains that ASL gloss is merely a stand-in for the actual language, and that he included so much gloss partly to keep the reader’s attention on the fact that most of the people in the memoir are Deaf and having conversations in ASL, not English. As far as I’m concerned, he succeeds beautifully in this. I learned a lot about a language I don’t know, but more importantly, no matter what DiMarco was writing about—his first girlfriend, fighting with his brothers, modeling, exploring his queer identity, traveling, high school parties, family dinners—I, as a hearing person, was steeped in the Deaf world.

It’s a fairly traditional memoir, in that it progresses linearly, and stays focused on DiMarco’s life (although he does include tidbits of Deaf history here and there). His tone is friendly and open and very easy to read. I breezed through it in a few days.

Upcoming: Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn (Memoir, Graywolf, June 7th)

Since I started keeping a commonplace book, I’ve been paying attention to which books I mark up the most. It doesn’t necessarily correlate to how much I love a book—I just finished one of my favorite novels ever (review to come eventually!) and I only marked one passage.

I collected a whopping fifteen passages from this book, some of them paragraphs and paragraphs long. I loved it, yes. But I’m also struggling to articulate what it’s about. It’s about writing. Tattoos. Gender. Art. Being trans. Water, water, water. Losing language, being bereft of language. Where language lives, and what it means to live without it. Masculinity. Trauma. Fish. Lots and lots of fish, lots of weird historical stories about fish. Philosophy. Illness. Memory. Bodies.

Most explicitly, it’s about language. In 2014, Horn injured their back while weightlifting. This injury lingered, and they ended up spending six months in bed. At the same time, they lost their ability to speak, read, and write. This loss—the experience of losing modes of seeing, being, and experiencing so central to their identity—permeates the whole book. It’s about reclaiming language, and looking for language in unexpected paces: the body, the ink of a tattooist, the ocean, a relationship, memory.

So, it’s about all of these things, and yet when I think about my experience of reading it, it’s not the individual ideas (though fascinating) that stand out to me, but the feelings they evoked. Horn’s prose is so rich and layered. I wanted to bathe in their paragraphs. Again and again I found myself completely taken aback by a particular line, rereading and rereading as if to swallow it. It almost dosen’t matter what this book is about. Reading it reminded me why I love language, and that sometimes loving language dosen’t have to mean anything. I love this book for its word-beauty, for its rhythm and music, for the deep hush that came over me every time I picked it up: back into the deep, I thought to myself each time I reached for it. That’s what reading it felt like: venturing back into the depths to uncover the treasures and terrors of words. Words are one of the tools we use to find meaning in our experiences. Horn invites us into the process.

The book itself is a wonderful mess of structure, the kind of inventive, slippery nonfiction I love best. It’s split into many sections, some of which concern a specific event or idea, and some of which are more abstract. Many of these sections are traditionally formatted; others are formatted as lists. These lists begin with the Roman numeral I, and continue through the whole book, though they’re broken up with other writing. They consist of bits of thought, excerpts from other books, musings, pieces of mythology, retellings of old stories, quotes. Sometimes they seem related to each other—a story unfolds through multiple items on the list. Sometimes each entry feels singular, the connections between them mysterious, murky, unseen.

A few favorite passages, to give you a sense of this extraordinary piece of writing:

I often think of the body as land—tectonic, silting—a thing of peat and loam. Of memories as mulching, slowly fossilizing within limbs.

To know a body—its limbs, muscle, sinew—as layer upon layer of living, as warmth, sheet rain, as occasional flood. Fertile. Cankerous. Knotted mass of root and tuber, of mineral salt—the grind and split of slow internal movement.

How water—crashing, stilling, water carrying a body exhausted—how it engenders a rare generosity.

I’d like to think “reading” could be seeing, hearing, smelling, could be sensing the slip of a body through this world. That language might allow for strange syntax, ruptured sentence. That it might capture the friction between a body and its grasp on being understood.

These nuggets of beauty only scratch the surface. I collected many, many more in my commonplace book. For the full experience, you can pre-order this gem, which is out next week.

The Bake

This recipe is adapted from a Smitten Kitchen biscuit recipe I started making years ago and have now made in so many ways that I’ve forgotten what went into the original (it’s blue cheese and scallions, if you’re curious). I’ve made these with cheddar and thyme, feta and chives, gruyere and scallions, goat cheese and parsley. They are delicious with any herb and cheese combo you can think of. And because they are drop biscuits—no rolling!—they are just about the easiest thing to make on a weekend morning.

Dill & Blue Cheese Biscuits

Makes 8-12 biscuits, deepening on size

Ingredients:

• 270 grams (2 1/4 cups) all-purpose flour

• 2 1/2 tsp baking powder

• 3/4 tsp baking soda

• 2 tsp sugar (or honey, or leave it out)

• 1 tsp salt

• 6 Tbs (3/4 stick or 85 grams) unsalted butter, cubbed

• 1 1/2 cups crumbled blue cheese (or any other cheese)

• 3 Tbs chopped fresh dill (or any other herb, or 3-4 finely chopped scallions, or a bunch of finely chopped chives…)

• 1 cup buttermilk (or use 1 cup milk mixed with 1 Tbs lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 450. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Add the cubbed butter and mix with your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the cheese and dill, followed by the buttermilk. Mix with a wooden spoon until it comes together into a rough dough.

Drop equal portions onto the prepared baking sheet, about two inches apart. Don’t worry how they look or if they’re round. Drop biscuits don’t need to be uniform! Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown. They’re best eaten right away. You can also freeze the unbaked biscuits.

The Bowl and The Beat

The Bowl: Spring Asparagus Panzanella

Asparagus is here! I got my first greenhouse cherry tomatoes over the weekend! Fresh herbs are starting to be abundant again! I’ve been craving fresh and bright and green, so that’s what this is.

Chop a bunch of asparagus into inch-sized pieces. Put them on a tray with a drizzle of olive oil. Cube a loaf of bread (something crusty is nice, and it’s fine if it’s on the stale side). Toss the cubes with olive oil, salt and pepper, and spread on another tray. Roast the asparagus at 450 for 3-4 minutes. Seriously, it only needs a few minutes! Don’t be tempted to cook it longer. The bread will take a bit more time—you want it to get golden and crispy.

Thinly slice some radishes. Chop up whatever fresh herbs you have—I had cilantro. Dill, parsley, mint, and basil would all be nice. Add the veggies to a bowl along with the asparagus and toasted bread. Add some goat cheese and lemon zest and mix well. I dressed this with my go-to vinaigrette: olive oil, mustard, sherry vinegar, and lemon choice.

The Beat: Probably Ruby by Lisa Bird-Wilson, read by Dakota Ray Hebert

I’m enjoying this a lot. Ruby is an Indigenous woman adopted by a white couple; the book is a series of interconnected stories about her and the people in her life. It jumps around in time, from the mid 2000s to the 1970s and even earlier. We get to see Ruby’s birth parents and adoptive parents at various stages in their lives, her grandparents, her various lovers and ex-lovers, her friends. It’s mostly told from Ruby’s POV (except for the sections that take place before she was born), but each section focuses on a specific relationship. I love the non-linear storytelling. It feels chaotic but real.

The Bookshelf

A Picture

I started so many new books this week: Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang, Body Work by Melissa Febos, We Both Laughed in Pleasure by Lou Sullivan, In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand, The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, The Wake Up by Michelle MiJung Kim and Queer Love in Color by Jamal Jordan. I’m planning to take my time with a lot of these.

Around the Internet

If you’re looking for a Pride reading list, I made you this: Your Curated Queer TBR for Pride & Beyond. For Audiofile, I wrote about some of my favorite audiobooks that play with the idea of ghosts. And my review of Yerba Buena is up on BookPage (see below—I adore this book).

Now Out

Hurray! Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour is finally, finally here! I read it last fall and I have been exceedingly impatient for it to be out in the world ever since. I love it so much I’ve already reread it. It is a truly extraordinary book. Also out this week is Lydia Conklin’s weird and wonderful story collection Rainbow Rainbow. Go forth and find yourself copies!

Bonus Recs Featuring Bodies of Language

World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil feels like its very own body of language, a wonderful and peculiar blend of poetry, science, and art. Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett is a fantasy novel in which language literally creates the world. On the same theme, Amatka by Karin Tidbeck is a strange, dark, inventive dystopian novel set in a world where language shapes reality. I didn’t love it (though I wholeheartedly recommend it), because I didn’t quite understand it. But I find myself thinking about it all the time anyway.

The Boost

Jami Attenberg, whose memoir I loved, hosts the #1000WordsofSummer as part of her Craft Talk newsletter. For two weeks in June, participants commit to writing 1000 words a day. Each day, she sends out a letter of encouragement. This year it starts on June 4. I have finally started working on my fiction again, so I’m going to participate! I know some of you are writers, and maybe you want to give it a try, too.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I went to the river almost every day last week. It’s pure magic.

And that’s it until next week. Catch you then!