In school, I was taught, even by somewhat racist teachers, that the Ku Klux Klan was a minority of Whites and that the KKK took its activities too far. They liked their ideologies quiet, as whiteness does.

What they don’t remember is that the Klan and other white supremacists groups (mainly Skinheads) increased in sophistication by infiltrating the police force, a phenomenon that has plagued the public with concern for decades.

No one is writing about this, and I don’t mean that in a

someone-who-just-found-out-about-something-and-assumes-they’re-the-first-to-to-have-seen-it kind of way.

I looked it up.

It was a fairly consistent headline in the nineties and early aughts. The topic cropped up again in 2016 during early Trump 1.0 panic, and then once again in 20201, during our pseudo-alternative reality. At one point, even iHeartRadio had a podcast about white supremacist institutional infiltration. The world was livid for a few seconds.

Radio silence on the issue in 6 years until now, as I am writing this. And the epidemic has never been worse as the country has effectively given average American vigilantes a medium: ICE. Recruiters are seeking out cisgender, heterosexual young men at gun shows, martial arts centers, and rodeos2.

Radio silence on the issue in 6 years until now, as I am writing this.

Modern white supremacy

This was always their plan. See, white supremacists think really, really, big. And that is frankly something they have going for them. They have all but succeeded in infecting every leader in the Western world (and other leaders aligned with/puppeted by them) with their ideology, trickling the rotten habits of xenophobia, anti-blackness, theocracy, and queerphobia down to average individuals, ensuring none of us have a day of peace.

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Probaby my own fault, considering I was drunk about half of 2021.

Well, this book found me, and by “found me” I mean I allegedly slipped it under the arm holding my coat on my way out of the Nerd Party I mean Brooklyn Book Crawl Afterparty at the Center for Fiction because I had a feeling five years ago that the place was weird and never went in. This is when I was street canvassing, tolerating whatever weather, getting underpaid to flag people down and sell them on Climate Justice outside of a Whole Foods. It felt just as ridiculous then as it does writing it now. I had to go to Center for Fiction to get a stamp confirming I did, in fact, step foot in there, and once again to take my chances at winning some Nerd Wear I mean bookstore merch (I won a tote!). In both of those instances I was treated like a Hard-R-N-Word. Three different people. So I was gifted three different books. What can I say, I’m a Saturnian, and crazy enough to compartmentalize guilt.

This one felt fitting for the occasion.

A manifesto by the forever genius, inventive, intentional and kind Michaela Coel. I know I am echoing so many other artists and cultural deviants when I say that her work has made me feel seen in ways I never thought possible since That’s So Raven was airing. Chewing Gum feels even more resonant for me than Issa Rae’s Awkward Black Girl series because Tracy is a true Freak Bitch. Being able to rab about your problems is still cool, and that’s on Black American Cultural Supremacy (an essay for another day). Okay they both rap through their thoughts a lot actually. But my last point still stands.

I’ll say this—Tracy is a Freak Bitch in public. There is no alter ego that she reserves for home, and I think that could be explained by Issa and Michaela’s respective sun sign placements: Capricorn1 and Libra2, but astrology just happens to be the way I make things make sense to me.

To watch Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You at the same time would be burning a candle at two ends. That’s how heavy her work is. It’s classically rich, and will reverberate into the hearts of many Misfits after her.

The book is just barely 100 pages (it’s based on a lecture she gave at Mctaggart in 2018), I highly recommend watching and listening to share the words, because I am othe practice and belief that words are best met performed.

As is exemplified in all of her work, Coel is an expert at cutting herself open onto the page.

The manifesto was a reminder of the importance of refusal, and how, especially multi-marginalized individuals, have a duty to themselves to use that shield to keep ourselves and each other safe.

I appreciated Coel’s repeated use of the word nigger3. My understanding of the healing process is that it cannot happen if the dirt isn’t trudged up and reckoned with. There’s a lot of shit to sift through before we can get anywhere near the ideals we dream of. There is work to make something real, and we as makers know that better than anyone.

And if there’s one thing Coel does, it’s work. It' pains me the amount of times Coel has worked herself to complete dysfunction. Or, rather, the dysfunction the assignments she was given led her to.

Her reflections offer a keen look into the literary and entertainment worlds, what first gets cut when budgets shrink, and how it mostly affects the writer. '

Coel’s understanding of a life without commercial viability reminds those of us who share that experience that respect is possible, owning your IP (forever) is possible, telling stories as a “job” is possible. I will always reiterate that there is nothing without artists, politicians (sorry to say), and sex workers. They all hold a a shared fiery energy that I believe to come directly from the core of the Earth and the Sun.

Whether you watch her talk or commemorate it with the printed version, anyone who reads this newsletter is sure to find some solace in her humorous, sage, and timely (yes, still) words.

Next time,

-J

News? Let’s call it News:

1. On Meaninglessness as God was named a Semi-Finalist in Lefty Blondie Press’ Editor’s Choice Broadside Series, but the editors renamed it “Comfort.”, so there’s that1. Still pretty cool though!

2. I am reading at School for Poetic Computation’s Computer Poetry event this Saturday, April 19th. The event is from 6:30 to 9 PM at Secret Riso Club and it is free. All attendees get a free riso-printed chapbook of the night’s texts to take home!

3. I am reading at Brooklyn Poets’ YAWP for the first time tomorrow, April 14th at 6:30. Come by, especially if you are also a writer and into workshopping.

4. The Spring edition of Kitchen Table Quarterly is out, and a piece I thoroughly enjoyed/advocated for is in it. Read My Mother, Marilyn, and Me by Jessica Clivio when you get the chance.

5. The panel talks I took part in this February are up, in which me and my colleagues discuss lived experience and it’s validity in research contexts. I have saved them in this Dropbox folder for ease, titled “MTS Opening/Closing”.

6. I am a public figure according to Google.com??? (Libra full moon in my 10th house doing its job)

Now, let’s reminisce…

God, I love reporting. The first time I ever reported something I was five. My kindergarten teacher used to send out one student every morning to check the weather. It was one of the first times I can remember someone letting me do something on my own. The day that was my turn, I stood on my toes to open the big, gray school door. My cheeks melted snow. I ran back inside eager to share the news with my classmates. Once I did, my teacher took all us Southern children out to marvel for a bit. I love knowledge sharing. I love being the mouthpiece. I believe in blogs as a form of guerrilla journalism, but I do also agree with what Ziwe posted the other day:

So, as always, take this with a grain of salt.

Thank you to reader , who called my last post something I hadn’t even thought to: reporting. I gave up on the idea of journalism school so long ago, I never considered it might still be something I am good at. So, I am making a new series: Culture Fatigue. As usual, to continue to work out my style and what this type of writing/thought means to me. To stir up some thoughts as well.

To start out easy2, here’s a critique of two white artists.

April 9th 2025, approx. 7:15 PM @ Triple Canopy 264 Canal Street New York, New York

“Assisted Nonfiction” with Julia Weist and Jill Magid

The full recording of this event is in the “What I Read This Week” section.

This just in: White women didn’t invent everything.

On Monday afternoon, I open up an email from Triple Canopy, an arts magazine, to the following text:

“How does the language of critics, institutions, and audiences define (and constrain) the work of artists? For Assisted Nonfiction, Jill Magid and Julia Weist will seek to define their own work as artists, considering the value of legibility alongside the strategy of ambiguity. In doing so, they will explore the language applied to their own work and to the practices of fellow artists whose activities may not immediately register as art.”

I figure I should take more opportunities to commune with this so-called culture I claim to critique.

The next day, I am taking in Manhattan’s early evening beauty until I reach the glossy black threshold of the address. A tall, well-dressed person with five-o-clock shadow and smart glasses confirms this is the place. I walk into the elevator with two other people. We fumble around with elevator buttons until we find ourselves on the third floor of the building.

Clarity comes around the situation I have perched myself in as the room begins to fill. Professional and Scholar class individuals take their seats, buy drinks, take in the space. I sit there, quietly, with an eight-dollar beer and a book, waiting to see what this whole thing is about.

My friend, Yanni, who I invited to join me, calls and says “I’m outside of the hottest club in New York right now!”, letting me know the tall doorman isn’t letting them up, even if there is someone saving a seat for them. (Note: 45 minutes later, during the talk, staff rolled up chairs so several late white people [idk what else to call them] entered the space) So, now I am fucking annoyed and uncomfortable and drinking, fast.

buy me a coffee

I am waiting for the restroom as I realize it’s 7:06 and think to myself: aren’t white people supposed to be on time? We’re starting off on an unimpressive note.

The description in the email formed in my mind as an event showcasing two artists whose work resists definition and bends boundaries as they run into them. Instead, I witnessed two artists attempt to pass off their casual work with The State as something more than what it is, and we’ll get into that later. It is as uncreative as it is legitimately dangerous. Julia Weist is the creator of this piece:

Which went viral several years ago. Weist saw the word in a rare book in the rare books room of the New York Public Library and noticed that it had never been used on the internet (5:20). A supposed statement on the attention economy, and some of the whitest shit I have ever seen. Everything going on in 2015, and you had this to offer our world.

The artist opens up by introducing herself, and letting the audience know that the New York Department of State is investigating her art practice and “the [department] has never met anyone that is as excited to get investigated by them as me”, a statement to which the audience chuckled. Projected behind her is an email (00:36), presented to the audience as proof that her investigation is still in operation. Weist says the confusion is the heart of why they (the two artists) are there to talk tonight.

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It also means thinking concretely about the present and that’s just a lot to take in okay? But if I write something it also comes out as it goes in— like a shit— that’s what my creativity feels like thats why i write this once a week and shit three times a day #regular. Or like food I guess I should have said like food. But you should already know that shit is food I know I’m the one writing but read in between the lines you know what figurative language is and if you don’t…….are you taking me literally right now? Any answer is correct.

Here’s some thing I wrote on Wednesday evening:

This passage just started spilling out of me after i saw this picture I saved on pinterest a year and a half ago that I found in in an email from a pitch that got accepted but couldn’t get published because the magazine suddenly had to close.

this is the first non-erotic fiction/fantasy I’ve ever written down. I can’t do drugs the same anymore, so it’s just this.

I was fantasizing about what if desirability, spirituality, and wellness commodification made the most fucked up bastard baby of a society? Maybe it is cringe. And I do feel some shame for not coming out of the gate with a completely brand new, original world free from anything I currently experience, but I reckon writing fiction, like making or doing anything worth repeating, takes more than one try maybe probably (hate that). Also most interesting things produced by my head are fucked up and I am over waiting for the flowers to come, I’ll just sniff the ones outside, or maybe the ones in your hair.

For some masochistic reason I have a subscription to Poets & Writers Magazine. I think mostly because I want to peer into the publishing world and see what normies are reading without completely fucking my algorithm.

In it’s most recent issue, an author named Sloane Crosley (what a publishable name) is donned on the cover, a white woman crossing her arms in a way that I am sure is meant to look strong but not too girl-boss-y to intimidate any men who may be in the audience and want to fuck her. She’s been praised by the likes of David Sedaris1 and MSNBC. She wears a pair of smart, square glasses with eyes that beam intensely through the top rim of the lenses. Her eyes say ”god i am so fucking rich you wish you were me”. They have that smug intensity that lets you know that she knows she’s wordy and fuckable, which I might be able to appreciate if this weren’t a thin, educated white woman from White Plains, New York; an area with a median household income of $106,000 a year as of 2021 (I am not giving you a source bitch just go look). I am crying because you got to have a big house and be near to new york. I love my grandmother’s (and hopefully one day my) Harlem duplex but I imagine what it would be like to live off the Metro North fairly regularly. To own moist, dark, brown new york soil and eat from it.

I googled Crosley and her eyes say this in all of her photos. A literature website crowns her “the most chic writer in nyc” or some shit like that. Since when do we care about writers being chic? Will I have to be “chic”? I am riddled with uncertainty and the weight in my face has dropped. I am scowling and trying not to cry. Zora Neale Hurston died penniless with a scarred reputation and was buried in an unmarked grave, how’s that for chic.

As I read her profile, the article’s author makes reference to a broad series of books, films, and people that I haven’t the vaguest familiarity with, and I become intimidated. I start freaking out because who the fuck am I why don’t I know anything but also who the fuck is this lady and why do people get to know who she is when I am funnier and hotter and more interesting. I read that her first book came out in 2008. Hm. I was growing tits in 2008, but also it’s when I found my voice. I am convinced me and this woman’s pens could have gone toe-for-toe when I was aged 9.

In her profile, Crosley details the burglary that occurred in her lower manhattan apartment and I feel no sympathy, I may even feel glee. I read one of her essays from 2009 and about 3 paragraphs in I could tell this is written for someone who’s threshold for making themselves feel bad for human things is very high. Or low? I don’t know exactly how to write what I mean but you know what I mean. Right? She’s just so normal. Everything about her makes me feel unsafe. Her eyes say she would call the police on me.

There’s something I utterly despise about the way consistently-published authors write. Like, they’re too sure that their words will reach other people. I refuse to believe that this many people’s inner voice sounds this stale. This is why I am grateful I didn’t finish school. I can only imagine how sterile my thoughts might sound if I subjected myself to a master’s program (don’t take this personally I am sure your writing is grand, especially because you’re reading this). Regularly published writers clearly know the formula, and I hate to hate on someone getting their coin but I do think it’s bad for art. The voice of these people is clearly not one of someone interesting (read: crazy and well-lived) enough for me to read. If I was more boring and followed the heavily-trodden path, or maybe more medicated, would I be a “respected” voice by now? If I had submitted to the paddle of academia beating me into that bland shape, would I be on the cover of something? Would other artists know who I was?

Do I care?

I wish I could say I was above ambition, but I have, somehow amongst the carnage, ruptured the boil of hope that’s grown in my chest, and now it fluids thump through my muscles into my fingers. I could very easily keep my words to myself, but I have developed an understanding that the world of writing needs more people like me, mostly because I can’t find many people with voices like mine to read. I find myself parsing between the lines of academia-laden language and overused analogies to find the heart of what the author really aims to say. Or constantly editing their words to make it more interesting to read. Making the words dance.

The next section of the magazine is an interview with a different author with the last name Seuss. It’s titled “Cobbled Genius”. The premise of the interview is supposed to highlight the sort of artistic training that can only be gained through life experience and not formal literature education. I thought this article might cleanse my palate, but then the author attributes most of her success to an academic who took a chance on her very young (middle-school young) and I noted that the most relevant aspects of her career do, in fact, happen in classrooms. This made me very discouraged. I am feeling discouraged this week. Nothing happened except watching people who are mediocre get praise and be in magazines and live in million dollar apartments in Manhattan and rural Michigan homes. It’s all very personal2. To add insult to injury, if I want to do anything with my writing I will be forced to watch mediocre white women get things they don’t deserve and not kill anyone in the process (ha ha!).

You may be thinking: “how self-centered can this person be to assume two authors of whom they had no awareness are below them in terms of skill and authenticity?”. I would respond my saying I think my lack of context actually gives me the upper hand here. “Stupid People Rights” as Ziwe would say. When I look at someone’s entire line of work and I am mostly unimpressed… I begin to question what these magazines and grants and award ceremonies are actually looking for. I get to see how their work holds up over time. I wonder what makes magazines reject my very visceral stories while another white girl gets the entire country to sympathize with her. I can only think I would never get that famous with the same portfolio because of who I am and who the public tends to sympathize with aka what sells. This depresses me. I did not ask for any of this.

Sometimes I worry a book of my essays would just make a publisher say “you probably need help and also you deserved everything that happened to you”. I worry even more that I get published and the public says the same thing. This is why I am teaching myself to write fiction.

Similarly masochistically, I have been re-reading So Sad Today by Melissa Broder. This book did a lot to help me find my voice as an early adult in my first year of undergrad. After being force fed “classics” my whole life, this was some of the first contemporary literature I’d been exposed to. The book contains many raw aspects of reality that absolutely require out-loud reckoning. Punchy and easy to read, but not without intense feeling and honesty. But it’s still a fucking white woman’s book. I find myself relating and then I remember all the times a white woman has gone out of her way to make my life as miserable as she had it in her power to. I can’t put that past this author.

In the essay Google Hangout with My Higher Self, Broder enters the metaphysical chat and says she “feels like the plants, babies, trees, the ocean, and the moon hate her”. Of course, her higher self tries to cheer her up but all I can think is maybe it’s because you’re you and *insert history of white women here*. If I was the moon I would hate Melissa Broder and I wouldn’t care if she killed herself about it3. Me and this woman do not have middle ground.

Today, there is a full moon in my 10th house. This is the house of ambition, technique, the way you work with large, often distant groups of people, how you spend great spans of your time. I am feeling a flood I felt the first time I ever dreamt of doing anything. The fear that my aspirations will disappoint me, and the confusion that comes from navigating any career/way of making money/living a human life without the dilapidated road map we’ve been prescribed for time immemorial. Berating potential colleagues probably isn’t the best way to attempt a start but I’ve never known a cancellation to truly hinder a career, so I am provoking famous people like a toddler banging a hornets nest with a stick4. I am infamous in a few places for being extremely apt at hating and why abandon what I do best?

I keep finding myself knowing I am special but I am still and empty whole of want for being accepted by something bigger.

I am discomforted when talking to people who obviously had emotionally safe backgrounds. It makes me wonder who I would be if someone bothered to tell me I could be whoever I want. I hate the calm in their eyes and demeanor. I hate when the white mom says that in the white movies, because everyone only told me anything I ever did was wrong. Like, this blog is not for you if your mommy loves you.

And that’s what I hate about Sloane Crosley and Diane Suess and Melissa Broder; their mommies love them in the way that it’s probably been a lot longer since they themselves or their ancestors had to pack up everything and forget everything and then also play pretend as if they had no problems to speak of. All just to be way too loud about the problems they do have. I hate them because they get to not remember and also because they get to be so confidently fucking average. They keep getting published. Writing is their day job.

This hate is not to meant in sanity and I don’t care if you know “well actually” that these women went through something horrible. I know they did, it’s what they write about. The difference is they get to scream it on mainstream media platforms and make lots of money and not be sent to the hospital about it. Their pain is a spectacle people pay to see, my pain, black and brown pain, is just the collateral of reality.

Sylvia Plath, I hate you too, your creativity was only good for killing yourself. And you too, Mary Oliver. I’ll never forgive the middle-aged Midtown Atlanta otter that tried so hard to you-pill me. But you’re right, I do not have to be good. I spit on Pulitzer Prizes5.

I really resent moments when my ambition pokes it’s little head out because there is no major accolade in this system in this society that would not require me to gut major core facets of my being. The machine demands blood. I am grotesque and depraved in ways this blog has not yet touched (like I haven’t even posted any erotica yet), and the horizon for me does not exactly scream famous writer so I am questioning why I do this? Usually, by the time I get to this question is when I give up on something, but I know I am just in a mood and the momentum I have overtakes any existential feelings of purpose. There is no purpose, I am just full of words and it helps a smidge if someone can hear me think them. But I do kind of hope one of these bitches sees this and sues me, or something. I need the publicity.

In one of Diane Seuss’ poems, it reads: “but we cannot even rub two words together. Not enough to let loose a spark. Not enough to light fire in a thimble, and this is the hell of it”.

Yes, the burning, white hell of the celebrated mediocrity of the white woman in her vulnerability is a shit stain on the laced thong of the whole of art. Let’s all clap, shall we?

What I Read This Week:

For fear of activating some insecurity, I never want you to think I finish the books I put here. That is rare and I am a firm believer in skimming and skipping around books. Anyway, here are photos of my bookshelf. Most of these I haven’t even started. Also, I will be in Brooklyn later this week, say hi. Put me in your open mic :)

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Preface: This essay needs to be paired with this song

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I was going to get super technical in this but then I realized none of you care after I started hearing my old music teacher’s voice creep into my brain. Going to focus on how much i enjoyed myself instead of tearing everything to shreds, a concept!

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