Susannah Champlin
https://www.goodreads.com/sdcham
“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
― On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“The best way to instill social values is to eroticize them...We can decode social priorities through looking at what's most commonly eroticized: male power and female submission, male violence and female pain. The most generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance, and artificiality: traits that leave male power intact and strengthened, by draining women's energy and wasting our time. Women are definitionally powerless in any of these situations, and certainly women have subverted and diversified sexual archetypes to far more aesthetically interesting ends. But still, it's worth paying attention to whatever cultural products draw straightforwardly on sex to gain position, even and especially if women are driving that concept.”
― Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
― Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
“Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.”
― Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
― Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.”
― Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
― Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“Artmaking has been, at least since bohemia and modernism appeared in 19th century Paris, largely an urban enterprise: the closer to museums, publishers, audiences, patrons, politicians, other enemies, and each other, the better for artists and for art. For if cities have been essential to artists, artists have been essential to cities...Being an artist was one way of being a participant in the debate about meaning and value, and the closer to the center of things is the more one can participate. This is part of what makes urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentrification threatens to yank out some strands together, diminishing urbanism itself. Perhaps the new urbanism will result in old cities that function like suburbs as those who were suburbia's blandly privileged take them over.”
― Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
― Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
Susannah’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Susannah’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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