Jess Cotton
@jesslcotton
Mixed Feelings // thoughts on post-war culture, loneliness, feminism and psychoanalysis @englishunicam // words in Jacobin, NLR, the Nation, Harper's, LARB etc
Images out of Gaza today are the worst I've ever seen. Children piled on a hospital floor, bloody, injured, dying, dead. A toddler with her intestines outside her body while another screams in terror, reaching out for safety. I can't express this feeling. The rage, the shame.
It’s worse than “Gaza is being starved and destroyed and no one cares.” It’s that hundreds of millions *do* care and are powerless to stop it. We need a world where that can never happen, where the masses actually have political power.
“We made love a little while ago & my husband said it was better than both Picasso and Judy Garland. But I guess that’s just bragging not relevant.” —Alice Notley
the concept of knowing there is currently a labubu on karl marx's grave
Taken with the Chinese student letters at Marx’s grave. There are a few.
"Every day I watch patients deteriorate and die, not from their injuries, but because they are too malnourished to survive surgery. The surgical repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, then they die." theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
“The more I looked at Podolski’s work, the stupider it seemed to try to attach to it a lineage or a canon, even a radical one. Stupider, even, to try to explain it, given its aims to doff semantic systems.”—Emily LaBarge on Sophie Podolski @GoldsmithsCCA 4columns.org/labarge-emily/…
from "Undefeated Despair" by John Berger criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/undefeated_des…
From David Macey’s biography of Fanon, who would be 100 today. The passage is about this photo. Happy birthday FF
these four
what’s your favourite read of the year so far? #booktwt
“If challenged to choose a label for myself I’d call myself a technical writer.” — Gerald Murnane (from “The Still-Breathing Author,” in Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One)
They are slaughtering dozens of starving Palestinians every single day. Skeletal children are dying in their parents’ arms. Almost every major politician in the US has voted for this to continue. We have to shut everything down. We have to jam up the machinery in any way we can
“Vulnerability, like sympathy, is a knife.” @emotrophywife considers Lorde’s “Virgin” and the gauntlet we lay for our pop stars. lareviewofbooks.org/article/dont-l…
"Cherries in the firmament or three gold coffins lined up'. I think of her in her apartment in the 10th arrondissement just writing and writing, relentless to the end." -- Luke Roberts' beautiful piece on Alice Notley newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…
How is poetry like psychoanalysis? I had a fascinating conversation with Daniel Katz (@DanielKatz6) about Jack Spicer and his poem “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.” open.spotify.com/episode/78hExe…
one of the best essayists we've got newyorker.com/news/essay/zoh…
James Elder, @UNICEF spokesperson, on what he saw in Gaza