#paul lisicky

hi my reader friends lithub has a new syllabi section that has some great (u guessed it!) syllabi from much beloved writers like ocean vuong and ross gay here's the full list that i have already added half of to my tbr:

I want to touch you while there’s still time to touch you.

In the era of AIDS, clothes are enormous. They function as armor, or drag. They bestow power, but also swallow up whoever pulls them over their heads. Maybe the greatest taboo involves drawing attention to the body, as so many are losing theirs, waking up to find their wrists thinner, chests marked with spots and scale.

Am I angry? It doesn’t occur to me that I might be one of those people who turn their anger inward, against themselves, to make it look like another emotion—inertia or loneliness so I don’t have to think of myself as an angry person. But why am I opposed to the anger in myself? Why can’t I make a home in it? Is it just that anger lives in absolutes, slams the door on nuance? Is it only that anger doesn’t always feel so good, like running six miles without any of the endorphins? Maybe it’s just that anger wears me down, and when I’m in a fury I don’t have the distance to think through a problem and then I’m back again in the house of my childhood, listening to my raging father, and I see how weak it makes him, hear how it turns him into an idiot, no captain of himself, and then he’s using it against my brothers and me. There we all are, in the middle of the night, installing a new kitchen at the shore house at three thirty in the morning, and everyone except for him is pretending to find it funny, Aren’t we the craziest family, because it’s easier to laugh at madness than to say, No, this is wrong to us, we should be in bed now, sleeping. We should be taking care of ourselves, replenishing, brushing our teeth now, drinking water. We could resume first thing in the morning. But anger filled every glass in our house. We drank so deep of it we were convinced it was sacrament.

There’s a spectacular feeling that comes from being seen as desirable, especially when I’d never thought of myself as being desirable before. It has a rightness that I experience deep in my body. It shapes the way I stand, the way I speak, the way I assess a situation without equivocation. It’s energizing, this feeling. Boats go golden in late light, clouds rush forward, as if in the wake of a tropical storm. A relief: now I’m just like other people. I don’t need to eat, don’t need to sleep. And yet I feel distracted and achy, too, as if I’ve just come down with a mild ongoing flu. My mind cannot even be still long enough to fix a confused sentence, and I’m in part relieved when I have an excuse (dishes to wash! I have to pee!) to leap up from my desk. If this is love, I’m not sure I want it. Love is too many lines of coke, your mouth dry, the center of your head aching and ice-cold, and every nerve in you alive, so alive.

For all my insecurities, I’m very likely to pull away from someone once I sense I’m less valuable to that person than I once was. You don’t want me that much anymore? Well, I’ll show you just what you lost, son of a bitch. How do you feel about yourself now?

I will be among, in a way I haven’t been before. It’s a new thing to be among: all my life I’d thought my only choice was to be extraordinary, as if to compensate for some lack. There is freedom in failure; I know that—how could I think otherwise after living with the body’s collective breakdown? Maybe it’s art enough to try to build a life against that breakdown. Maybe that’s enough.