Fleeting shapes without contour

"À propos, sometimes when we address a woman," continued the buttoned-up Walter Frommer, "we might gain the impression that she replies sensibly and thinks as we do. But that is an illusion. They imitate" — he placed special emphasis on the word imitate —  "our way of communicating, and one cannot deny that some of them are very good at it."

A bunch of ailing (and pompous and wildly irrational) men take the cure: mill about, drink, and philosophize like they're the centre of the universe. Is it Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain or The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, by Olga Tokarczuk? Why not both? Here, Tokarczuk imitates Mann (and she's very good at it), imbuing her telling with feminism, forest folk, and that old-timey feel.

There was something wrong with these mothers; it was if they did a terribly dangerous job, risking their lives in their boudoirs and bedrooms, tangled in lace, leading a lethal existence among the bedclothes and the copper pans, among the towels, powders and stacks of menus for every day of the year. In Mieczysław Wojnicz's family world, the women had vague, short, dangerous lives, and then they died, remaining in people's memories as fleeting shapes without contour. They were reduced to a remote, unclear impulse placed in the universe only temporarily, for the sole purpose of its biological consequences.

The misogynistic views on women expressed by these pompous male characters are debasing and ridiculously outdated, but according to the Author's Note, they are all paraphrased from texts by these authors: Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Cluny, William S. Burroughs, Cato, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, Emile Durkheim, Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud, H. Rider Haggard, Hesiod, Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence, Cesare Lombroso, W. Somerset Maugham, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ovid, Plato, Ezra Pound, Jean Racine, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Shakespeare, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Semonides of Amorgos, Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Wagner, Frank Wedekind, John Webster, Otto Weininger and William Butler Yeats.

(I'm including the full list because it's shocking and true.)

As in the windows of a huge room, in his mind's eye he could see the shapes his future would take. There were so many possibilities that he felt strength gathering within him, but he could not find the words; all that entered his head was the German phrase "Ich will", but this was something greater that went beyond the usual "Ich". He felt plural, multiple, multifaceted, compound and complicated like a coral reef, like a mushroom spawn whose actual existence is located underground.

Is this a horror novel? In several ways, yes. There is a creeping dread, when a hand feels blindly through the moss, when mushrooms are foraged and consumed. Night noises, a strange attic, a dark forest, and some very distasteful meals. There are mysterious deaths. Mob mentality. Whom can one trust? Are these men who they say they are? There is the horror men feel at the witchery of women, and the horror that men actually thought this way. 

See also
Review
Excerpt: Woman, Frog, and Devil 

The slow and leisurely rot of a day

The imaginary anthropologist remained with me after I finished university. I would summon her to narrate the simplest interactions when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives. What would she write down in her pad if asked to study Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane?

Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.

The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş, concerns itself with two people having a relationship in a language that is not either of their own, in the city they each independently chose to exile themselves to. 

Where?, I wonder, and I make assumptions. At some point it becomes clear that their shared tongue is not English. I make a game of guessing the language and city; for a minute I imagine them living in a neighbourhood just north of me. (But it's not Montreal, it turns out; rather, Paris, and I realize I haven't been in a very long time, and I want to go.)

It makes me nostalgic, remembering what it is to make a life for oneself, by oneself, away from one's family, and then together with someone else, and the life you make with the people you choose to be your family. 

We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be.

He found them at flea markets and on the street, always with an idea of ways he would put them to use, though he never did. His true passion was collection, the accumulation of expired things, their foggy poetry.

It makes me more generally nostalgic for youth, for having to make do, for carefully choosing one's indulgences. For deciding what kind of person one wants to be, living in that neighbourhood, having those things, knowing these people.

After a day of hanging out in the park:

I love a good day of rotting, Ravi said,
That's what I wanted to film. The slow and leisurely rot of a day.

Those are the best days. "I knew little beyond the fact that I wanted to film daily life." (Remarkably, I am soon thereafter reading Pond, which is nothing but daily life. If there is a theme to my reading this year it might be this, the mundane.)

It's a little bit about living outside of oneself, like all writers do, while looking on usually kindly, and at least honestly. The Anthropologists charmed me.

We sensed smugness in the foreigners' repeated disclaimer that they were doing work on themselves, as if the psyche were a house for remodeling, its parts identifiable as rooms and walls and beams, its leaks and fissures possible to fix. And it seemed there was always a limit to how genuinely we would be able to know them, because the constant calibration of their own well-being wouldn't allow true intimacy.

I discovered this novel when it showed up on Barack Obama's list of 2024 favourites, and I read it in February 2025.

Excerpts 
Future Selves (published as a short story) 
Daily Life 
Anthropology  

Review
Everyday Magic (Massachusetts Review): "preserves time and room to make art out of daily life, not just survive it."

Also:

Her dedication to the “infraordinary” has evocations of Lauren Elkin’s No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and of writer and teacher George Perec who, in Attention to What? (1973), urges us to found our own anthropology by questioning “our teaspoons”.

(Note to self: Elkin again. Look this up.)

Things mattering and then not mattering

It seems easier on balance not to read the news. Some do and some don't, but it's easier not to. When they look at the planet it's hard to see a place for or trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it's as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with. They might listen to the news and feel instantly tired or impatient. The stories a litany of accusation, angst, anger, slander, scandal that speaks a language both too simple and too complex, a kind of talking in tongues, when compared to the single clear, ringing noted that seems to emit from the hanging planet they now see each morning whey open their eyes. The earth shrugs it off with its every rotation.

I finished reading Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, a couple of weeks ago. I'd picked it up just after, I think, it was awarded the 2024 Booker Prize, but before it was longlisted for the Tournament of Books. 

I started reading it in December while enjoying days at the spa, my copy has the steam-curled pages to prove it. I loved its meditative quality, I drifted on that for a while.

At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in — a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places — from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they're trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceilings and the ceilings which are floors. From the handholds which are footholds which chafe the toes. From the spacesuits, which wait in the airlocks somewhat macabre. Everything that speaks of being is space — which is everything — ambushes them with happiness, and it isn't so much that they don't want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded — grown so big, so distended and full, that it's caved in on itself.

(I could use that kind of ambush.)

But then, you know, I stopped caring. Not gonna lie, it was kinda boring. I couldn't remember what, if anything, had happened. I wasn't really sure who the characters were or why they mattered — their backstories were irrelevant, none of them had character. 

Do you know what I'll look forward to getting back to, when the time comes? he says. Things I don't need, that's what. Pointlessness. Some pointless ornament on a shelf.

I'm all about pointlessness, plotlessness, slow reading, slow living, stasis. And this novel offers moments of awe. But the world keeps turning. We gaze at the beautiful painting, then move on.

Harvey renders Sagan's Cosmic Character in a grippingly poetic way; one wonders what does human history matter against the cosmos. Not a bit. Except when you're in it, it's everything. 

A projection and a centrifuge

Such that I began to write a book about the real, breathing body of Ravicka, which I couldn't reach by walking toward it and couldn't reach by attending to it, as I might attend to any other subject in my books. I couldn't reach this Ravicka, which was two-dimensional, a projection and a centrifuge. I couldn't reach Ravicka, because it lay in a book and I had placed it there and put inside it the Ravicka I could reach, the Ravicka of our days and our coffee. I wrote the real Ravicka into a book and put inside it the only Ravicka I had. Yet, inside that Ravicka, the one in which I wrote my books (and L. and Z. wrote their books), was that of the first, and though it was placed in a book and had a fiction growing out of it, it was real and breathing: it contained fictions but it breathed and remembered us and held out the possibility of future architecture, where, even though our buildings were in motion and the terrain was constantly reshaping itself, were were part of a conversation. You looked into the book to say these things but the language you needed was outside in the physical city, in that theatre that would not show itself.

Somehow (how? what was I looking for that day? was it possibly to do with The Taiga Syndrome? I wish I could connect the dots, trace the line from the book or author and the keywords I used to search), I fell on a then-freshly-published article (and this tab, along with 112 others, has been open ever since), "The New Patron Saints of Lesbian Fiction" (which namechecks Lauren Elkin — is that how I got here?), which captivated me with its nondefinition of a type of book, my go-to genre: plotless fiction. 

How the fuck had I never heard of Renee Gladman before?

That very afternoon I head to the library to research Havana, and in a slight detour, I find Gladman, and based on the book's size and cover image I choose to bring home with me Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, as if maybe I am crossing some metaphorical bridge, I've always loved bridges; the first of the Ravicka books is not available, and I hope it is not essential to my understanding of this, the third (why would I even think that?).

I am obsessed with this book, I don't understand it at all, like it's all white space and I don't have enough distance to see what's revealed in relief. It's very spatial, I keep thinking of Mieville's The City and the City, like it's a topography overlaying something else (also the paths mapped out in Auster's City of Glass, how many books of late have me hankering nostalgically for a mysterious quest), maybe it's an invisible city a la Calvino, a fiction atop a reality. (I misspell reality as reliaty, as if it's something you can rely on.) 

As a country this was our crisis: getting other people to see what we were seeing.

Weeks later I return the Havana books and decide to recheck the stock of Gladman and find nothing Ravicka-related, whereas my memory has a clear visual on the Houses of Ravicka, which I remember deciding against, because houses versus bridge. I check the online catalogue, and it shows as available. (Mysteriously, yet another Ravicka book is listed but "not available" — not checked out and due to be returned, just not there, I speculate it was never returned.) My intuition leads me to the French shelves. And there it is. One English novel nestled among French translations of Gladman's other work. I leave it there. I'll know where to find it. Only when I return a few days later, it's been correctly reshelved.

It's about writing a book, and the title of the book and the first sentence of the book, and all the words and what the words mean, it's a book about architecture, and the physicality of writing the book — the position of the writer, the space within which the writer is enclosed. And then people are leaving, an exodus, for creative reasons or political ones, they're burning down their houses, but they're not burning. Maybe the houses are metaphorical. Or the burning is.

(I don't know how to write about books anymore, do I want to write about books anymore?, books are mysterious things to write about, what do I hope to prove, not to summarize or convince, maybe distill and understand, sometimes just to remember. I could write about art but I don't know how to write about art, I'd need to learn the language of art, and the language of writing about art, much like I don't know the language of writing about books, look at me writing about writing and about not writing and about not knowing how to write.)

What is the crisis?

There is breathing and not-breathing, the books are bodies, and sometimes the buildings are bodies, and Ravicka is a breathing body, but also the bodies are bodies, and they are lines, like the buildings are numbers, but along with the leaving (disappearing, maybe being disappeared) there is also love and longing, something clandestine, I think.

We were holding space and making space through stillness, looking for structures to reflect what we were seeing, which was nothing.

I want all the Ravicka books so I can tear out their pages and lay them out like a map, and then eat them.

Reviews 
The Rupture 
Music & Literature 

Excerpt
Six enclosures 

The world is a scintillant and fascinating place

Anticipation, when it occurs, often makes me animated and expansive, as if I am perhaps reviving and honing my senses in preparation for the awaited object: yes indeed, the world is a scintillant and fascinating place when a half-remembered mystery leans within reach.

(Her Japanese tapestries. My custom armchair. A former lover. An old book.)

I mostly read Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, at the spa, fitting I think because it's so meditative, nothing happens and nothing happens at the spa and it's a good place to contemplate minutiae. I'm not sure how I heard about this book, even though I try to keep track; it may have been in relation, somehow, to the Tournament of Books, possibly mentioned among the many excellent longlisted novels that failed to be shortlisted over the years, or it may have been some forum discussion somewhere regarding books about nothing, which I may have come across while googling something concerning some other book about nothing that I'm reading now (like, say, Orbital, or Ana Patova) or that I have read in the past several months (so many books where nothing happens). Even though I'm reading an ebook borrowed from the library, it thrills me to know Pond has been published as a Fitzcarraldo edition, gawd I love French flaps.

Be careful though, be very careful with flaked almonds; they are not at all suitable for morose of faint-hearted types and shouldn't be flung about like confetti because almonds are not in the least like confetti. On the contrary, flaked almonds aught not to touch one another and should be organised in simple patterns, as on the side of a pavlova, and then they are quite pretty and perfectly innocuous. But shake out a palmful of flaked almonds and you'll see they closely resemble fingernails that have come away from a a hand which has just seen the light of day.

There's a thing I read, and I thought it was in Pond, about a feeling that's like the feeling of having a neighbourhood cat that you see regularly and then you don't for some time, but you know it's there — a kind of comfort in and familiarity with the rhythm of a place — until one day you wonder if it's ok, I haven't see Simone all winter because it's winter but the time before that it had been a while and I was so relieved to finally see her patrolling her usual stretch of sidewalk, I'd wondered if she'd moved away or some other fate befell her. I think the worry was entirely my own, and not in the passage I was looking for, the worry came to me because it reminded me of Simone (Rosie has never warmed to her, Simone is very friendly, a bit of a slut really, with the sweetest little mew). Of course when I went looking for this passage I couldn't find it, just this bit about the cat that walks up and down the drive with you, but I can't think what other thing I've been reading that would evoke this tangential thought.

I won't be able to write emails like that again you see — that's to say I won't be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting — using language in a way I'd not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I'd never before attempted to linguistically lay bare. It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I'd like my brains to be fucked right out.

It is fitting that this library ebook should expire today, on the last day covered by my spa passport. The passport was unknowingly the smartest recent purchase I made (excepting the custom armchair [the perfect reading nook at last!] since my formerly favourite chaise longue just didn't fit this corner of the room, and this corner was just crying out for a place to sit with a book and a cat; and maybe the porcelain clay), a Christmas gift to myself, I've been going to the spa two or three times a week since, just to relax, I need help relaxing, I didn't know I was going to be laid off, lucky thing too because I've been able to go to the spa any time of day. I'd never really appreciated the sauna until I went to Norway where I'd exit the sauna to plunge into the North Sea, and this was loosely replicated again this past fall in Denmark. My local is a weird little spa, not sure whom I'd recommend it to, it's in an unsuspecting block building, an industrial commercial zone, but I can walk to it from my house in six minutes, which means I can go after dinner or when I roll out of bed in the morning, which is priceless, even if it doesn't have a view over a river and I have to walk past the tracks through the dodgy backstreet with the loading dock for the grocery store to get there. Inside is quite cleverly designed, you have no sense of the traffic that lies just a few metres beyond the slatted wood. In fact I'll bring Pond with me today so I can search one last time for that passage about the cat (maybe it's a dog, and I'm not suggesting that just because the narrator remembers a cat instead of a dog in a book she'd read, the dog was named Lynx after all, I think she's harsh on herself for misremembering, I think that was a perfectly fine detail to stand out, it's more tangible than actions and behaviours, it's only natural for the brain to fill in memories around a keystone, whereas in my case, I'm not frustrated with focusing on the "wrong" detail but that I can't find the source of it at all, this passage I remember may even be about a person, it's just that it reminded me of Simone, who happens to be a cat. Was it another book entirely? But I associate it with this one, and also I feel like I felt this feeling of association while at the spa, because this is the book I've spent most of my time with, albeit relaxed and unfocused time, an environment that nurtures looseness (of muscle, mind), a loosening of hangups (and associations), the brain fog shifts into brain fuzziness (altogether softer, kinder, warmer). Or is it possible I hadn't read anything at all to prompt this "remembered feeling"? My mind simply wandered to thoughts of home and the nieghbourhood and I thought of Simone, and in a bit of reverse trickery my brain associated this sequence to a passage I'd read rather than freely admit my thoughts went to Simone (not even my own cat!) of their own accord.

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream.

One of the best things about reading Pond was that it led me to discover Claire-Louise Bennett's essay A Formal Feeling: Inside the world of Louise Bourgeois, which is stunning to me, stunningly weird as a review of a book or an exhibition or an experience, by which I mean beautiful, and it makes me think, for once, about how other people approach Louise Bourgeois and how art makes other people feel something completely different than what I feel, and sometimes it seems lesser and less valid, but sometimes it is more and deeper and I think my own thoughts are quite small by comparison. I think more reviews should be written that way.

I'm going to check out Checkout 19 now.

I think I liked sitting there actually; I think I felt as if I'd just come home from school on a Thursday. Nobody was taking any notice of me yet there was a lovely comforting sensation that beneficent things were being done for me somewhere. I think, as human experiences go, that is one of my favourite ones.

Excerpts
From Morning, Noon & Night 

Reviews 
Fiction That Will Make You Feel Pleasantly Insane (The New Yorker) 
Hmmmm, Stylish (London Review of Books) 

Understand the edges

You can't stay married to someone for ever just because they climb out of your attic one afternoon.

Or can you? How else do we make these decisions? The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio, was fun. So many husbands!

I probably would not have discovered or picked up this book were it not on the Tournament of Books longlist (it did not make the cut to final competition). The Husbands veers toward introspective rom-com.

She doesn't always like the new versions of herself, but they help her understand the edges of who she might be.

I love that our protagonist gets caught up in practicalities, googles her predicament when she can, and moves forward thoughtfully, when the science-fictiony multiverse premise could easily have taken an action thriller turn (à la Blake Crouch's Dark Matter), which genre I'm quite done with (whether on page or screen, I've lost all interest in extended chase and combat sequences, shoot-em-ups, and explosions).

[I don't have much to say about this novel (in fact, in general, I find I get hung up on writing about the wrong books here), but it did get me thinking more about editioning (inspired by how the husbands are swapped into her life, the subtle ripple effects of making those substitutions, as well as how any story's theme can be played out on range from quiet to bombastic). In terms of casting sculptures, I am working out whether I am producing the same sculpture in different ways. When do they become different sculptures? My sculptures are "separated at birth" as they emerge from the same mould. How do I talk about them, practically — a series, a sequence, versions, editions, variations?] 

Author interview.

Check out the Husband Generator:

An architect, though! What a perfect job for a husband. Ambitious yet concrete, artistic yet practical, glamorous yet without an industry-wide drug problem.

No one understands their own decisions

The truth is no one knows when they are making their biggest or most significant decisions. No one understands their own decisions. The woman danced with him; this was what the man from the coast had told me, in a café surrounded by windows that opened to the ocean.

I remember the salt. I remember the linen curtains that gave shape to the ocean wind. Someone said that when we open windows wide, the salt helps us remember who we are. Or how.

[Conversely, some of the seemingly big decisions of our lives end up being inconsequential. Many decisions have been made for me, some less trivial than others. Changing my employment, then terminating my employment, not my decision. But leaving this island for another... because the salt of the ocean wind may help me remember who I am... this is mine.]

The desire between one thing and another. The desire of bodies and, at the same time, the desire to narrate bodies.

Reading The Taiga Syndrome, by Cristina Rivera Garza, is like walking through a dream, or rewatching Last Year at Marienbad, or rereading a book of fairy tales, the dark kind, where all the pages have been reassembled in the wrong order. Like Paul Auster's City of Glass, if New York were a forest, and Auster were a woman and had more depth.

I had no ideas who the others were. But my morbid fascination thrilled me. Who can resist observing the original body? A body without a social context?

A woman is contracted by a man to track down his second wife who had left or disappeared or been led astray, but I cannot shake the feeling that she may be tailing a woman who may or may not be herself, a past self she is struggling to find her way to.

Their last communication came from a telegram office in a border town about two hundred kilometers away. The telegram, addressed to the man who had hired me to investigate the case, said briefly and somewhat obliquely that they were never coming back: "WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?"

I took the case because I have always had an all-consuming weakness for forms of writing no longer in use: radiograms, stenography, telegrams. As soon as I placed my hands on the faded paper, I began to dream. The tips of my fingers skimmed the creases of the paper; the stale smell or age. Something hidden. Who would set out on such a journey? That couple, of course. Our of everyone, only those two. From wat place, so far away in space, so far away in time, had this fistful of capital letters been sent? And what were the two of them hoping for? What had they let into their lives?

Hoping to find a way out? They had let in the end, and the beginning of what comes after the end, clearly. 

[My friends and I had joked that my employment should have been terminated by telegram. It was a last-minute "townhall" meeting, silent while we waited for the number of attendees to climb, then grimly silent as we realized the number wasn't expected to climb much more. "If you're on this call, today is your last day." But a telegram! In all caps. IF YOU'RE RECEIVING THIS TELEGRAM, YOUR EMPLOYMENT HAS BEEN TERMINATED. Or more ominously, TODAY IS YOUR LAST DAY. But what is the end of employment compared to the end of love, the end of a life you thought you were living in love? It's trivial. Coincidentally, a few days ago, I came across a telegram while going through my mother's papers, a telegram from Poland on the occasion of my father's death in 1977, "words of compassion" (rather, "condolences"). Or "today is your last day." In all caps. Maybe every telegram sends the same message: "WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?"]

Let me note, I love how prominently "body" features. Elbows. Spit. Cartilage. Vomit.

The picture showed that the skull, a cave of bones, looked strong enough to offer refuge. There, a body or the image of a body could curl up comfortably.

I wish I could sculpt these images, these noises:

I remember the movement of jaws, constant and dreadful. Opening and closing. Chewing. Swallowing. I remember how the voracity of my own chewing made me close my eyes. Sometimes pleasure is like that. Above all, I remember the sound of lips, gnawing and talking at the same time, and the grease shining on those lips. And how my food slid down my esophagus, slowly, before falling into the cruel mechanism of my stomach. All those liquids. All that acid. I remember the noise of gold chains around forearms and wrists. How the metal sparkled at that time of day. What time? What day?

There's a playlist. Presented as a chapter, or maybe an appendix to the narrator's report, I rather wish I'd known about it before the end.

In other readers of this short novel is evoked Anna Kavan's Ice, Tarkovsky's Stalker. It's Borgesian and Lynchian. It performs weird things with language. It tells the truth.

But what's it about? Walking into the forest. Following a trail of breadcrumbs into the forest. Going through the forest. Maybe this is how you find yourself when love leaves you.

But what, really, is the end of falling out of love?

[. . .]

"Even falling out of love finally ends." Had I really told him that? My voice softer. Placating someone is also a spiritual exercise. Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity.

See also
LARB: The Intense Atmospheres of Language: Cristina Rivera Garza’s "The Taiga Syndrome"

Stuck in this cage of anxieties

Here were the contents of his wandering consciousness: Was this a new bedspread? Was this abstract painting the same in every room of the hotel? How did the artist feel about a great, big deal to mass-produce his ugly painting for the Radisson corporation? Did it make him feel more like an artist or less? If it was in every room here, did it also mean it was in every Radisson? Did they ever clean this room? Had anyone ever died in it? How many other people had fucked amid these pleasant neutrals? How long had he been here already? Was he always here? Did he always exist in this room?

And: Was his career over?

And: Was his wife going to leave him?

And: Why, at forty-two, was he still stuck in this cage of anxieties that he was hoping, by now, would have begun to mellow?

There were too many words forming images in his head. There were too many concerns. My god, how many drugs do you have to take to become the canine part of yourself: wordless, directionless, worry-free — to submit to just feeling, just instinct, just the very moment?

Long-Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, is funny. It's also tragic. It's about a kidnapping, but it's not really about the kidnapping. It's about all the money, but it's not really about the money. Reviews tend toward the lacklustre, focusing on the unlikability of the book's characters, their whiny dramas of privilege and entitlement.

Inspired by a real-life kidnapping of a wealthy Long Island businessman, the novel imagines the trauma and fallout experienced by the victim, his mother, his wife, his two young sons, his as-yet unborn daughter, and pretty much everyone in their wake.

"This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don't let it in." 

The novel's current day is a few decades after the kidnapping. The perspective shifts from one child to another: middle child Beamer, failed Hollywood writer on a quest for the ultimate blackout; eldest Nathan, land use lawyer, "drunk on the promise of a life of low-risk, nonconfrontational tedium"; and genius Jenny, who thinks of "wealth as a crippling starting position."

You should know also that it's a Jewish family. Long Island Compromise is very much about inherited trauma, the trauma of the Holocaust and the immigrant experience, and the burden of survivor's guilt. It describes what it is to grow up with money (but like, a lot of money) when your parents grew up without money, and what it is to grow up with a father who's barely there and with a mother who's too much there, and what it is to grow up when the main character of your own life story is somebody else. It's about keeping secrets, keeping tradition, keeping up appearances, keeping your mouth shut.

The compromise, we learn, is what happens when horny teenage Jewish boys seduce willing but "good" Catholic girls: anal sex. When Beamer suggests it as a title for his father's memoir, it's a metaphor for technicalities, how to get away with not playing by the rules (cuz rules, it seems, are for chumps).

I'd been looking forward to this novel with some trepidation, Brodesser-Akner's previous novel having triggered in me some kind of breakdown involving buckets of tears and necessitating talk therapy. I expected wit, insight, feminism, pop culture, and some nasty truths. By that measure, Long Island Compromise read as a serviceable distraction from my recent overwhelm, wherein I have felt tried and tired in a very ordinary way.

He began to see all of time as happening simultaneously, or close to it. He began to see that he could be at work, or at Nathan's baseball fame, but he could also be locked in that basement. He sat at a Passover seder and saw that this thing that had happened to the Jews, their slavery in Egypt, seemed so ancient, but it wasn't. It was like yesterday. All the periods of time you thought were so long ago were so much closer than you thought they were, just a breath away. Moses was parting the Red Sea and Zelig was stowing away on that ship and Ruth was giving birth to Nathan and Carl was being chained to a pipe all at the same exact time. How can you get over anything if it all is just constantly happening?

He remembered Ruth telling him about post-traumatic stress disorder, back when she still thought things could be different. He laughed at that: post-trauma! anyone who named it that didn't really understand it. There is not post. There's only trauma. Over and over. Time moves on, but you stay there forever. No wonder there was no treatment. How do you treat what now called your life?

Review.  
Excerpt.

Some catastrophes have their own architecture

I'm fed up with sincerity. All I want is to be a complete asshole. To be negative about everything. To hate people. To feel contempt for them. To pretend they're to blame for all my problems. I'm reminded of something I heard at a meeting: "A relapse is something you construct." Some catastrophes have their own architecture.

Dear Dickhead, by Virginie Despentes, is a catastrophe: poor characterization and muddled philosophizing make for a boring novel that brings nothing new to #MeToo feminism. Also, everyone is a complete asshole.

An established, middle-aged author (Oscar), who is also a recovering alcoholic and party guy, is accused of past sexual transgressions by his young publicist (Zoe), who as a result of his behaviour felt compelled to leave her career in publishing and is now a social media influencer. For some obscure reason he takes up a correspondence with a childhood acquaintance, his older sister's best friend (Rebecca), who grew up to be a famous, drop-dead-gorgeous film star now facing ageism (but it doesn't really help that she's a junkie and a selfish bitch). 

As an epistolary novel, it's a complete failure. Featuring email exchanges between Oscar and Rebecca, and then missives (blog posts?) from Zoe, their voices are indistinguishable — they all embody a similar kind of anger, victimhood, entitlement, righteousness, moral ambiguity. A good character doesn't have to likeable; I appreciate a provocative stance, but they should show some distinct personality if they hope to leave a mark.  

Rebecca is rightfully skeptical of Oscar's past behaviour and current motivations.

I don't believe that every victim's word is sacrosanct. Obviously, women sometimes lie. Either because they have no principles or because they think it's fair game. But the number of pathological liars among victims is infinitesimal, whereas the percentage of rapists among the male population speaks volumes about the state of male heterosexuality. Yet I suspect you're far more shocked by the possibility of an unfounded accusation than you are by the fact that some of your friends are rapists. On this basis — how can I put this delicately? — even with a supersize dose of compassion, it's hard to feel sorry for you.

While there is a resolution of sorts of the main plot point, there is not much character growth to speak of, beyond Oscar's and Rebecca's progress in beating addiction, and an inkling of an awareness that the world is bigger than themselves — they still have a very long way to go. 

Heroin is to crack what great literature is to Twitter — a whole different story. I say that because it sounds good. Deep down, real junkies take drugs because they know they're worthless. Whether you're shooting dope or smoking crack, what you're really doing is reminding yourself that you're shit. When you become a junkie, you're saying to the world, you really think you're saying to the world, you really think you're better than me? You're deluded. Shooting up and fucking up is our way of telling other people how much we despise them. Their pathetic efforts to stand on their own two feet. I'd rather die than do yoga.

I don't understand the praise for this book. There are cuss words and sex and drugs — does this pass as transgressive? It bored me. I often couldn't tell who was speaking, to ascertain whose past (or gender, or profession) was formative in shaping the arguments put forth. Their logic was convoluted. Clearly Despentes has (more) things to say about sexism and feminism and #MeToo and ageism and the effects of Covid isolation and refugees in France, but these epistolary explosions don't merit the label of "novel" — a book of incendiary essays would've had bigger impact.

My generation of women are famous for our ability to put up with shit. We were told, "No feminism, it turns men off," and we said, "Don't worry, Daddy, I won't bother anyone with my little problems." But all around me, I saw women being broken. That it all happened in a dignified silence didn't help anyone.

Excerpt.

Trying to balance it all

What are you looking for? she had asked me.

I think about it. A place for these dreams that I don't know what to do with?

This weekend I read an entire novel in my phone, not something I thought I would ever do. But I got an alert from the library that my loan was expiring soon, and I’d completely forgotten that I'd waited for it and checked it out, but clearly I hadn’t bothered to download it to my reader, and I figured that by the time I went through the tedious process of connecting and deauthorizing and reauthorizing and turning around three times while reciting backwards the final chapter of something I had not yet read, it would’ve expired, so maybe I’d just glance through it on my laptop. The laptop, being lightweight and portable as it is, is actually well suited to reading in my swing chair, but I could not find a setting to enable full screen, so there was the browser window bookmarking various things that need my attention and displaying the time, which was an obstacle to satisfactory immersion, so at some point after the first cocktail while the evenings chops were still marinating I switched to reading on my phone.

I have in fact been deeply engrossed in reading another novel over the last couple of weeks, States of Emergency, by Chris Knapp. I think I love this novel, but I am deeply frustrated by its being (as a review copy) in pdf format and therefore a strain on my eyes, as well as a strain on my brain as I’m unable to highlight passages, and am mystified by the perplexing muddle of prepositions and articles, as if they had all been removed and half of them randomly reinserted as part of some diabolical copyediting test. And it has me reliving 2015 and 2016 and reconsidering my own past and current states of emergency, though they are very different from the narrator's. 

So I took a break to read What You Are Looking for Is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama. And it was just what I needed— entirely undemanding and kinda sweet (verging on saccharine). It’s the naive career advice I needed to hear, less goal-driven than my sister would urge, slightly more practical than my manager’s suggestion to lie flat. (“Lying flat” is a Chinese concept, he told me, akin to quiet quitting, but more intentional, less burdened by external judgment.)

In What You Are Looking for, five Tokyo denizens, each the centre of their own story, ask the librarian at the community house for recommendations and get something different from what they'd anticipated. Through her intervention they begin to realize a life (dare I say "career path") for which they are best suited, by making adjustments (to attitude if not action) or by making peace. 

The book covers various scenarios: working mom, retiree, unskilled shopgirl, unemployed artist, and entrepreneur wannabe. 

The themes are fairly universal and translate well to North American culture, where for the most part identity is tightly linked to job. Being a company man may no longer be valued, or even possible, as it once was, and perhaps this mentality lingers a little longer in Asia, intertwined as it is with traditional expectations and obligations. 

Seitaro clasps his cup in both hands. "What kind of job do you think is totally secure?" he quizzes me in return.

"A public employee like you, or a big corporation?"

"Nothing is," he replies, gently shaking his head. "Not one single job I could name is absolutely secure. Everybody just does their best to hang in there, trying to balance it all."

His expression is mild, but his tone is dead serious.

"There no guarantee of certainty in anything. But the flip side to there being no guarantee of security, is that there's also no certainty that something is a dud."

The book isn't a dud, but it's thin and insubstantial — not the type of literature that typically feeds my soul. I only read it because it warranted inclusion in the 2024 Tournament of Books. But for a few hours, it charmed me and soothed my worries.

I think my cat is dying and I'm losing my mind

I've been grieving for my cat for six weeks now. She's alive, but we don't know what her future looks like. Every 8 hours I put drops in her right eye. It looks unchanged (except for that one day I was convinced it was clearing up), a puddle of dried blood clouding her iris. I worry that she's not eating enough, I check her litter obsessively. She's clearly depressed, adjusting to limited vision, and she's wasting away. Most days I cry, away from my daughter, away from my cat, because I need to stay positive for them. I've always cried to Rosie about everything. But not this. It's exhausting.

We'd been to emergency (that day I came home and she was yowling), and we follow up with a regular vet within the week. Did the emergency clinic give us a prognosis, he asks. You understand? They'd told us she was old. It's probably chronic kidney disease. It's probably a heart condition. It's probably a tumour that burst into her eye, she's probably riddled with cancer. But nothing definite. She's old. (She's only 14.)

We agree to do bloodwork to give us an indication of Rosie's overall health. It comes back mostly normal. Strange, he says. Nothing a little dietary adjustment couldn't improve. Still, he tells us to give her all our love and prepare for the worst. (He also tells us about the best Polish restaurant in Mexico City.)

A couple of weeks later, I call about a prescription refill. I send photos so the vet can better gauge the progress of Rosie's condition. He calls while I'm sitting with my mother in the ER, who's suffering a bout of UTI delirium. Her appetite is good, regular bowel movements, sleeping a bit more. (My mother interrupts to say she's not sleeping at all. Not you, mom; the cat.) Strange, he says. Normally, he sees a cat in this condition, it's dead in three, maybe five days.

Twice there have been issues with prescription refills. As if there's a note on her file: Don't bother, expected to die. (I think there may be a similar note on my mother's file.)

Every morning when I wake my first thought is of her. If I sense her in my bed, I reach out to check that she's breathing, and I pet her till the purr comes. Those mornings she's not in my bed, I panic. Has she slunk off to die? I'm crying again.

I am more distraught, or so I tell myself, at the prospect of losing my cat than of losing my mother. It occurs to me that I'm channeling all the stress of recent months (ailing mother, job change, general dissatisfaction) into my worry for Rosie. I'm depressed like I don't think I ever have been. I'm crying again.

I've been reading You Are a Cat!, a pick-a-plot book. In one thread, feline protagonist Holden visits a bookstore, whose previous denizen, Rosie, died. I'm crying again.

We're to see a veterinary ophthalmologist Friday. For two weeks I've considered calling, wavering between begging them to move up the appointment because she might die before then, and putting off the appointment for another week or two to relieve us all of the stress because she might die before then. Certainly, I can't face hearing a medical professional tell us that it's time. 

If she dies in her sleep, I'll bury her under the lilac tree outside my bedroom window, maybe plant a rose for her. I'm crying again. I don't know if this is legal. I ponder how I'll execute this plan without attracting the neighbours' attention.

Something's got to give. My mom's ok, she turns 91 this weekend. The houseplants are still ok. The outdoor garden boxes are beyond all hope. (What god can keep everything alive?)

Update (24.07.29): The ophthalmologist confirms that vision in Rosie's right eye is gone. But the anti-hypertensive medication is working. Rosie's not dying, she's been through a lot and she's tired; she'll be fine. And I'm crying again.

Life was work and also a performance

I perform in art time and in real time, and you can't tell the difference — no one knows how to separate a real act from an art act in my work. 

— Tehching Hsieh

Memory Piece, by Lisa Ko, covers the past, present, and future, with each major section focusing on one of a trio of lifelong friends: respectively, Giselle, the performance artist; Jackie, the techy; and Ellen, the activist. They met as teenagers, bonded over a barbecue.

Giselle's life starts to come into focus for her when she hears about a performance piece that can only be Tehching Hsieh's Rope Piece (for which I will be forever grateful this book introduced me to).

She could not make her mother happy yet felt responsible for her mother's unhappiness. Her coping mechanism was to treat everything like it was a situation, but her performance self and real self had become indistinguishable. Work was a performance; life was work and also a performance. It wasn't that she needed to wait for the perfect idea or invent something new. Instead, she recognized how she could shape her life into the performance itself.

(Perhaps I should treat my life this way: perform as an employee, perform as a writer, perform as a doting daughter, etc. to the best of my ability. Fake it till I make it.)

This is the most interesting section of the book for me — its exploration of art, time, labour, intention, context, posterity.

After months of writing her memories, Giselle had begun to see everything she did as future memory. The mundane could be fabulous; everything became expansive. This made her more daring, because when you saw life through the lens of potential nostalgia, even difficult events could carry the smallest element of fondness for having survived them.

(I think we do this every time we snap a photo.)

In the spirit of archiving the everyday, Jackie pioneers some blog software, but grapples with data management and the battle between democratization and turning a profit. When the dot-com bubble bursts, some of her moral grappling is alleviated. 

But. The novel as a whole doesn't really work for me. It's giving writer workshop. A couple linguistic anachronisms jarred me out of the story (young women were not calling each other "dude" in the early 1990s; similarly "vibe" and "hook up"  appear with clear 2020s usages). It describes the old women of 2040 as if they were the old women of yesteryear. 

Most significantly, I don't understand how we get to that future from here. It's a housing crisis taken to the extreme, compounded by constant surveillance and border checks. Despite the known evils of gentrification, real-estate speculation, property-flipping and vacation rentals, construction industry and municipal corruption, and plain old greed, it doesn't feel right for Ellen's story as a squatter fighting eviction to end up as it does. (At some point I figured that Y2K had transpired as the apocalyptic event some feared it would be. Except even in the novel's reality we know it didn't.) And I'm a little disappointed that aspects of Ellen's alternative living — community building, recycling and waste management, dumpster diving, rooftop-gardening — weren't more fleshed out. 

But, admirably, this novel shows how three women manage to sidestep capitalism. A little.

Giselle said she had stopped identifying as an artist, but she still worked. Art work is work, it's labor. So is working in a café. It's all the same thing.

Something is lost here

But something is lost here. While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty. In Intercourse (1987) Andrea Dworkin warned of just this:

Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which in only — pathetically — a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses.

If sex education sought to endow young people not just with better "rote responses" but with an emboldened sexual imagination — the capacity to bring forth "new meanings, new forms" — it would have to be, I think, a kind of negative education. It wouldn't assert its authority to tell the truth about sex, but rather remind young people that the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them. Sex can, if they choose, remain as generations before them have choses: violent, selfish and unequal. Or sex can — if they choose — be something more joyful, more equal, freer. 

— from "Talking to My Students about Porn," in The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan.

(What would it be like to discover sex with a wholly open mind, with child-like innocence, without media influence? Instead, we live in a world where porn is now if not ubiquitous then very readily acquired. Granted, my generation sneaked peeks at girly magazines stashed in their dads' garages and  videos pilfered from adult-only backrooms. Sometimes I think I would've benefited from an education of this sort, beyond the romance and passion modeled for me by mainstream film and television. But it's all so performative, so results-oriented; and even when it's different, it's same same.)

The essays in The Right to Sex cover #MeToo, incels, porn, sex positivity, race, TERFs, sex work, carceralism. Clearly, sex is political. Mostly accessibly written, veering slightly into the overly academic, many of the issues described here are at the heart of today's feminist thinking. Endless questions raised, no clear answers offered. 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn't imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

Essays
Does anyone have the right to sex?"  
Who lost the sex wars? 

Reviews
Is a new book feminism’s next new wave or yesterday’s backlash?  
Who Gets to Be Desirable?  
Questioning Desire 

I didn't know what I wanted

The Art of Vanishing, by Lynne Kutsukake, transported me across time, space, and culture. Set in the 1970s (odd to call it a historical novel when it describes events within my lifetime), it has a peculiar quality of feeling true to its time — that is, I felt like I was discovering a decades-old novel inspired by real-life events, not reading recent release fiction.

My parents didn't know anything about university. My father hadn't even gone to high school — he'd had to start working right after his father died of a heart attack. More and more young people were going to college, though, and my mother wanted for me what other parents did for their children. Yet because it was a foreign world — a world she and my father were afraid of — they could offer no advice or direct encouragement. As a result, they could only give me mixed messages that reflected the confusion and insecurity they themselves felt. It's good to go to university, but university is only for rich people; you deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, but home is best and there are lots of jobs you could do with a high school diploma; and so on, back a forth.

I didn't know what I wanted, either. I was a mediocre student, the kind who was too conscientious not to do my homework but not smart enough to get good marks despite my efforts. I never failed but I never excelled. 

Akemi leaves home to study medical illustration in Tokyo. At the girls' boarding house where her lodging was arranged, she quickly becomes enamored of its most elusive (and somewhat disreputable) resident, Sayoko, an art student from a wealthy family.

Akemi struggles to assert her independence from her family, to see some of the world beyond her small village and study with the aim of establishing a career. Sayoko on the other hand is used to having her wishes granted, sees no need for school, and aspires to a wholly bohemian lifestyle.

We witness Sayoko bossing Akemi around and taking her friendship for granted, but Akemi is too fascinated to be able to extricate herself. 

Things turn strange when Sayoko meets an older couple. They are "artists" who stage happenings; they stay in Sayoko's apartment, and for a while it seems their lives are an endless orgy of alcohol and cigarettes, possibly sex, and just a soupçon of art. And then they're gone.

When Sayoko resurfaces and invites Akemi to one of their happenings in the wilderness, we see that the couple's charisma has cult-like proportions and things may not end well.

This novel is essentially Akemi's coming-of-age story, focusing on the nature of the girls' friendship, and its transience. But with a firm grounding in 1970s Japanese counterculture, it also explores the nature of art (and its transience) and what it is to live an artist lifestyle. 

Excerpt.
Interview, with excerpt.

Activity as volumetric thinker

Looking up at the heavens she howled and cried until she grew hoarse, but even after her voice had given out, her whole body continued to shake. If only she could become a sculpture. Though she had produced many drawings and prints, she had know that she was meant to be a sculptor since her youth. And now, the only way to escape this pain was to become a sculpture herself.

— from 3 Streets, by Yoko Tawada

1. Can I call myself an artist? Yes. Apparently I am emerging. Some of my sculptures are on display at the Montreal Art Center and Museum, June 8-22.

Women sculptors have often been single figures, whose very activity as volumetric thinkers caused consternation. (Penelope Curtis)

2. What am I trying to prove? And I am certain I am trying to prove something. I am, however, not sure if it is to the world or to myself, or to someone else. This is a partial proof that anyone can be an artist. If I can do it, surely anyone can. Or at least anyone who takes the time to respond to a call for submissions, prepare a portfolio and a statement. Anyone who can manage the logistics of exhibiting one's work. Alternatively it is proof that I have some artistic talent. Can both hypotheses be true?

3. Having the goal of exhibition has shaped my time. There are deadlines. Paint must dry. These past months have been exceptionally stress-laden, for life reasons, yet I made a commitment to participate in a group exhibit — an added pressure, but also a distraction from life, even a handy excuse.

4. Would these sculptures have turned out differently without a looming end date? Minimally. In some cases, a decision was forced. I no longer had the luxury of procrastination. But the right decisions were made, of this I am confident. 

5. Some finishing detail was rushed. As I browse work in galleries, I notice the precision I didn't make time for — a sanded contour, a crisper edge, a neater mounting. Such detail can be a differentiator between competent work and confident work. While parts of the process are meditative and slow down time, I need to relearn patience, I need to take more time.

6. How do I title a sculpture? A title can change everything. It gives the viewer a framework, it sets a tone. An artwork must announce itself to the world. It takes a stance. It makes a statement. It tells a story. Sometimes it's an untitled story about nothing in particular.

7. I play a game with myself when I visit galleries and museums: I look at an artwork cold, understand something about it, identify how it makes me feel; then I read the little white label at its side, for its title, year, materials, maybe some other context. And then I look again. This game makes me feel like both a winner and a loser simultaneously, that I am some clever purist exercising her cumulative knowledge and insight but also never fully appreciating what an artist might be trying to say. Is the failing mine or the artist's, I wonder.

8. They say a picture's worth a thousand words. What is a sculpture worth then? Why do we title artworks with words? An artwork can generate a feeling; but a title can help the artwork tell a story. Sometimes I think the title should be able to stand on its own, without the artwork.

9. I read artist statements and laugh at their empty wordiness. I have collected many sample over the years. Enough to fill a book.

10. How do I price a sculpture? Unlike a canvas, I cannot charge by square inch. I can calculate time and materials, but what of found materials? Do I count the time involved for mould-making on top of the time to make the clay original? If I reuse the mould, should I adjust the price? 

11. What is my artwork worth to me? What do I want for it? At this point, mostly I want someone to take it off my hands. I'm not in this for the money. I like the idea of barter pricing, because some things are more useful to me than money. One sculpture is priced at "Removal and disposal of two old hot water tanks from the artist's cellar basement, accessed via trap door and steep step ladder." Another costs "Air duct and dryer vent cleaning in the artist's condo, which may include the removal of animal remains and other debris." But it's only because I'm financially comfortable that I can entertain alternative economic structures.

12. Curatorial philosophies and logistics are confounding me. How do I choose what to display? How many pieces? How do I display them? Painters must choose how to frame their paintings; sculptors must stage their work, in three dimensions. I put my work on a pedestal. Should these platforms conform to each other to forge (a perhaps artificial) cohesiveness of the sculptures, or should they play to each piece's distinctiveness?

13. Where do I find such pedestals? Do I make them, modify them? How do I transport them? How much time have I devoted to the material that supports the art, beyond making the art itself?

Object-sculpture is by it nature materially and spatially assertive, so a sculptor needs logistical and material support as well as the endorsement of others who believe in the undertaking. (Clare Lilley)

14. Here's a smattering of books I've read in recent months (rather, almost years), either directly or tangentially about art and artists, that have shaped some of my art thinking, bringing me to where I am now.

• Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945, published on the occasion of the Arts Council Collection Exhibition
• Old in Art School, A Memoir of Starting Over, by Nell Painter
• Like a Sky Inside, by Jakuta Alikavazovic
• Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey
• The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, by Michael Finkel
• The Deceptions, by Jill Bialosky
• Tell Me I'm an Artist, by Chelsea Martin
• Sirens and Muses, by Antonia Angress
• The Art of Vanishing, by Lynne Kutsukake
• The Exhibitionist, by Charlotte Mendelson
• 3 Streets, by Yoko Tawada

15. Why do writers have so much to say about art?

16. There is so much more I want to say about these books, but I'm not sure I remember what. I read differently now. I regret not blogging, not documenting my response, not writing my way through my opinions. 

17. I've been messing around, playing with art, toying with the idea of art school; if not a degreed program, then workshops in exotic places. What do I hope to accomplish with school? More proof, validation? (Of what?) More importantly, what do I hope to learn?

18. I don't even know how to properly clean a paint brush.

19. I have been making things out of clay and, for the most part, casting them. I want to learn about different casting materials. How do I even begin to go about casting bronze? Where do I get some bronze? Can the things I do with clay be adapted for ceramics? How do different types of clay feel, or behave differently? I have trouble finding answers in books or on the internet. I suspect the answers may come from people, possibly school. I want to experiment with materials, to find the material best suited to the story I want to tell.

20. Perhaps I want to prove that art is easier than literature. The price of admission is lower. It's easy to show my work at the little gallery down the street. People actually stop and look. It's less simple to publish a book. There is no little publisher around the corner. There aren't many people who will casually spend 20 minutes with my writing and spend a few hundred or thousand dollars on it.

21. Perhaps this exercise in art was a warm-up. Or merely a procrastination tactic.

Exhibitions are not the end point of a process. Exhibitions start things, and they begin processes of change and reassessment. They don't close a chapter but open it. (Joy Sleeman)

Gaping holes in the body of her argument, 2024; clay, acrylic. On the beach at Benitses, she came apart at the seams, 2022; plaster, acrylic. 
The body is a construct, the body is a triangle, 2023; hydrostone. Jeremy is a delicate flower, 2024; clay, plaster, acrylic.

An infinitely more physical way to touch

There was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch.

Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical way to touch. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener. The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack. 

Why does one thing resonate when another leaves me cold? Greek Lessons, by Han Kang, is an exquisite thing.

The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.

Why do I love this book? Maybe because it is about language. Maybe because it is about beauty, and favours the ephemeral over the eternal, turning Plato inside out. Maybe because it is cosmopolitan and urban, but intimate and quotidian. It reminds me of being in Greece. It reminds me of learning German. It reminds me of now. It makes me want to write. It makes me want to sculpt. It makes me cry. It puzzles me, how it unfurls.

Maybe because I read (most of) it on a plane. A friend of mine claims watching movies on a plane is a more intensely emotional experience, and I keep meaning to google this allegation, ascertain its science. Maybe it’s the same for books, only there are books I recall reading in flight that were less memorable, or at least memorably not enjoyable (which perhaps proves the point?). Maybe because I’m so high above the ground, I have a god's eye view, a richer appreciation of the earthly. (It turns out it's the air pressure, lower oxygen levels in the brain.)

I want to forgive this book everything. At about halfway (days ago, while still earthbound, nursing my ailing mother) I felt confused, but also swept away. I wanted to make sure, really sure, I understood everything, so I started over.

I want to read it again now.

He teaches Ancient Greek and is going blind. He pines for his first love, when his family lived in Germany; he regrets how rebuffed another friend. 

She is unable to speak, a response to trauma, not for the first time in her life. She's mourning her mother, but perhaps also grieving her own life. Divorced, she's lost custody of her son.  

How can these two people break through their isolation and connect?

I will for a few days come back to the thought that maybe I should study Ancient Greek (or some similarly inconsequential language), or that I should be crafting poetry. I expect this impulse will fade entirely within the week, but part of me hopes it doesn't.

I think about the lovely turns of phrase I’d like to borrow, to use as titles for sculptures I’ve yet to mould: "My eyelids quiver like stridulating insect wings." (The sensation he feels repeats her earlier state of being. "The woman’s eyelids tremble. Like insects’ wings rubbing briskly together.") "I will see the fabric of darkness, unraveled into bluish threads, wind about the city." "The latter part of his life began, which could not be called anything but a chaotic mess."

Now and then, words would thrust their way into her sleep like skewers, startling her awake several times a night. She got less and less sleep, was increasingly overwhelmed by sensory stimuli, and sometimes an inexplicable pain burned against her solar plexus like a metal brand. 

The most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one. Even the most nondescript phrase outlined completeness and incompleteness, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, with the cold clarity of ice. Spun out white as spider's silk from her tongue and by her hand, those sentences were shameful. She wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream.

There is clay, and there is touch throughout this book (and the colour blue). "Her face is thin and drawn, like the elongated features of certain clay sculptures." Touchpoints for me. "The flesh remembers." "A brighter and more concentrated stillness filled the dark clay jar of her body."

The sadness of the human body. The human body, with its many indented, tender, vulnerable parts. The forearms. The armpits. The chest. The groin. A body born to embrace someone, to desire to embrace someone.

We are earthy, and earthly. Everything we do or say has physicality. Language is physical. This physicality that Kang emphasizes makes everything sensual.

She no longer thought in language. She moved without language and understood without language — as it had been before she learned to speak, no, before she had obtained life, silence, absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton, enveloper her body both outside and in.

The man across the aisle is playing chess. I am sad that I have no one to play chess with, or backgammon. This week I wondered if I could teach my mother to play backgammon, and then I rejected the idea. I consider playing chess online, at least it will exercise my thinking, my logic, my projection into the future, more than my daily sudoku anyway. I think about whether I prefer the blue labyrinth of the UK cover or the hexagonal pencil in cross section of the North American cover.

("She just didn't like taking up space. Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self.")

Sometimes she thinks of herself as more like some form of substance, a moving solid or liquid, than like a person. When she eats hot rice, she feels that she herself becomes that rice, and when she washes her face with cold water there is no distinction between her and that water. At the same time she knows that she is neither rice nor water, but some harsh, solid substance that will never commingle with any being, living or otherwise.

Excerpt.
"The Middle Voice"

It's not a fetish, it's a belief system

how had some people worked it out made kink a natural part of their lives that was the dream was it to assimilate kink into capitalism along with everything else that was once subversive the forces were pushing up against each other true peak capitalism wanted everything it wanted the queers it wanted to market vodka to trans girls it wanted fetish weekend breaks but it had been brought about through alliance with a resurgence of right-wing religious Christian zealotry & these two forces once aligned somewhat were now starting to rub against one another creating painful friction because those zealots hated the degenerates but those capitalists were like the degenerates are a valuable market share you didn't want to be part of that & anyway the fetishes that were successfully or semi-successfully for now embraced by capitalism in the brief time before the neo-reactionary uprisings well those fetishes weren't even close to the thing you liked

Definitely one of the weirder, non-mainstream stories I've read in some time. (Thank you, Tournament of Books!) I don't think I can recommend it to anybody. (Except Vincent. And Leslee. Maybe Yann, and Nancy. But not you, I don't really know you.) Some people would be thoroughly disgusted by it. It's classified as body horror, if you're into those kinds of labels, which personally I don't really understand. But I couldn't put it down.

She'd pissed on a few men, once for money. It was hard to describe what was fun about it. In a way, it was easier to understand what was hot about being pissed on — that was so degrading, so filthy. But pissing on someone ... the pisser is dominant, but pissing itself is a moment of pure vulnerability. It's about loss of control. The power dynamics were more complicated than they appeared to outsiders.

Brainwyrms, by Alison Rumfitt, is set in  a highly transphobic near future. Political acts of terrorism are commonplace. Social media posts are scrutinized for questionable behaviour. It's also a love story, exposing the (literally) parasitic nature of relationships, and for this reason and others it's heartbreakingly sad.

The novel follows two main perspectives: Frankie (she/her) is a trans woman with an impregnation fetish, and a victim of terrorism, who falls hard for Vanya and tries desperately not to fuck it up. Vanya (they/them) is young and beautiful and has a dark secret, and their stream of consciousness narration is thoroughly unsettling. 

Vanya's mother also figures prominently, representing TERFism. The public face of the activist group she's involved in is a children's author clearly based on JK Rowling. 

People take fetish and kink seriously, they treat it as a lifestyle and structure their existence around it. There are many people in communities on the internet who essentially are engaged in fetish that would never think of it as such. There are communities of men online who obsess over cigars, their phalic shapes, the feeling of having them in their mouths, and they may never realise what that really means. They might never even get off on it properly. There are communities of people who dress up in Red Army costumes who don't fuck one another — and yet ... fetishes can burst out of the specific easy boundaries they are put in and overcome the entire self. They can become an ideology. Gaz was one of them. It was not enough to simply get infected. It couldn't just be that. It had to be something more. It had to have some wider meaning or what was the fucking point? You nestled into him to keep warm and he wrapped you close to his body underneath his oversized coat. He smelled of sweat and weed. I'll keep you safe, he said. You believed him because right then you couldn't bear not to.

This novel depicts a future grounded in today's fear, intolerance, and closed-mindedness fascism, while it pokes and prods at our tender spots. 

What is intimacy? What is pleasure, what is pain, why do we do what we do, why do we seek what we seek? Do we seek to escape reality, resolve past trauma, fulfill our human potential? Who are we when we are naked before ourselves? 

Transformation. Self-realization. Simply being is transgressive. Being is political.