Kindle Notes & Highlights
you treat appropriation as a solely negative practice, you ignore one of its accidental benefits,
it enlarges, rather than shrinks, our sense of connection by requiring us to interrogate the historically enmeshed relationships we have, and don’t have, with one another.
If you approach appropriation with any ethical seriousness, X, you will have to think deeply about aesthetics, history, and difference; you will reevaluate the literary and humanistic values you claim to hold, on the page and in the publishing industry, and you will have to consider the role that money and commercialism play in art.
Advice
dismantling the structure does not ensure or require that a better one will take its place,
The bodies at the head of this new structure may look different, but the effects will likely be the same.
part of the pleasure in losing myself is risk: the risk of getting something wrong, or—when it comes to memoir—maybe getting something too unpleasantly right;
Memoir!!
Writing has surprised me into insights I couldn’t have articulated except through intense creative play.
Over the course of your life, you will be many different people, and many different writers, not all of whom you’ll admire.
you will, unconsciously, reflect and refract the prejudices that shaped you.
in what ways do your own metaphors replicate or disrupt hierarchies you are already familiar with?
Understanding that some may see any act of literary appropriation as the continuing practice of colonialism, what value and message do you see attached to your creative project?
