Welcome to Pop Torture by me, Donna, where we torture pop culture for sport. From Wordpress to Medium to Substack, I’ve been across the map, made my fair share of mistakes. Here’s to hoping this one will stick. This newsletter is a supplement to my bookstagram @donnasreadinglist and Goodreads where I share book reviews, quotes, and cute pics of myself reading or doing reading-adjacent things.
I want to use this newsletter for literary criticism specifically, but also expand that to include TV (when I get the time to watch it), and just general musings about the torturous nature of discourse (I know “torture” is aggressive but it like, rhymes with “culture” so it works, no? Maybe I should rethink this. If you have suggestions, DM me).
I think Pop Torture will be fun because there’s this dialogue I love from The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner:
‘The power and emptiness of words. And yet they rule us nonetheless. Are the sole horizon. Language as the house of being. The home of being, excuse me.’
‘You know what I think of language? That it’s a fake horizon and there’s something else, a real truthful thing, but language is keeping us from it. And I think we should torture language to stop fucking around and tell it to us. We should torture language to tell the truth.’
And so, here we are. Allow us to torture something as meaningless as words and demand some semblance of truth from them.
If you want to see some of my previous writing, like when I wrote about the power of best friendship in PEN15 or gay Iranians on The L Word check them out here.
In the meantime, tell your cats, baristas, teddy bears, therapists and anyone else you talk to on a regular basis now!