Books Read in March/April
I’ve been a very slow reader lately. Some of these were sitting in piles for weeks, half-read.
May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks
The short stories in this collection feel like like they were meant to be told out loud to groups of people. Many are just a page or two. They alternate between surreal and mundane in a natural way because there is a constant thread of loneliness that never leaves.
Out by Natsuo Kirino
H O L Y S H I T is all I can say.
Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
Strings Too Short to Use was the story that interested me the most and I wanted more of, but Moore spends the most time on The Nun of That instead, which didn’t interest me so much. I do love the overall idea that these characters are the same yet different, with the same names but then with the details rearranged in a different light—except you realize that things don’t change that much after all.
Plus there’s this line: How can she say that she has begun to think that all writing about art is simply language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind?
Bluets, Jane (a murder), The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson
I want to press a copy of The Art of Cruelty into the hands of everyone I know. It is easily some of the best criticism written in the past ten years. Maggie Nelson is scary-smart and omnivorous and big-hearted and sharp-tongued and brave and never flinches when she writes about anything difficult. I don’t quite understand how she does it but I believe in her and I would follow her anywhere.
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
You’re a chump if you don’t read this book.
Speedboat by Renata Adler
I wonder whether this or Out was the more brutal book. People aren’t murdered or chopped into pieces in Adler’s New York but they do get shuffled around meaninglessly. They aren’t anyone you know and the narrator is unreliable to the last. I know a lot of people’s entry into this book was how the hyper-fast fragmented style was supposed to mirror contemporary media consumption or something? but the whole time I was thinking these people lived on Mars, they are Martians whose feelings all evaporated.
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, w/Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Ballad of the Sad Café, The Member of the Wedding
I didn’t like Carson McCullers as much this time around. I already read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter before but this was the first time I tackled any of her other novels. She is always at her best when writing from the POV of tumultuous young girls.
Madness & Civilization by Michel Foucault
If I said I wasn’t bored at times while reading this, I’d be lying. Though, I can see how Foucault’s approach was revolutionary. Reading it now, especially, is so strange. No one talks about the broader social and historical aspects of madness these days; the focus is on the intensely personal or the medical. You can trace the walls being erected through this narrative. I do think a lot of his ideas are crucial and have even shaped the way I think about culture, but I’m not sold on him as a writer.
Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger
Caroline Blackwood first caught my attention in the painting Girl in Bed. I then heard she was an aristocrat and writer and bohemian who was, of course, known for marrying famous artists and because I have this thing about reading the biographies of women who are mythologized as muses to figure out what they were really doing I picked up this book and for the most part was entertained.
![One of my girlfriends and I went to see the film Renoir because we have this thing about watching period pieces about artists, and we both left the theater so angry. It wasn’t so much about the film itself—which is pretty to look at but strained slight by design—but the apparent actual history of the thing.
Renoir’s main thrust is that ‘flesh is what matters’, and it sticks hard to this viewpoint throughout, so most of what you get to see are the twisted, aged fingers of the famous painter, nude posing ostensibly in the name of love and art, plus maimed faces and bodies. WWI soliders abound but we get no indication of war’s psychological impact on them so much as actual wounds. Jean Renoir, soon-to-be-film-director, probes the hole in his thigh and looks wistfully beyond his father’s new young muse at reenlistment in the air force. There is one scene where he shouts at some unscrupulous traveling salesman with a half-assed plan to deliver corpses in coffins for bereft family members of soldiers whose bodies disappeared in the trenches of the war front (no, the salesman doesn’t have a mustache to twirl). After his visit to a brothel where he proceeds to choke his love interest in the name of bringing her back to the house to pose for his father again, I really wondered at the unexplored emotional fallout. Tons of film stock is instead devoted to capturing the French Riviera, which okay yes, is lovely to look at. Dialogue is so-so. Renoir the painter croaks a lot of shit about going with the flow like a cork and how hot one of his previous models was and how he’ll keep painting until he falls right over. The house help carry his wheelchair through verdant fields at sunrise, where tall grasses sway in the wind, and that means more for better or worse. War is a rumor on the horizon that doesn’t interest him, except that it keeps occupying his sons to their bodies’ detriment. Romantic intimacy is a rumor, too. There’s a lack of love scenes between Jean Renoir and Andrée Heuschling; we would always come in in the dozing after love, or at the act of redressing, which I thought was strangely shy of a film that is supposed to be about flesh and shows full-frontal of its main actress in another context [1].
I think the film really means to say ‘flesh is miserable’, or more bluntly, “death is miserable”, because here flesh is just death, not sex. Your hot models will all have to leave you. Sucks for you, but really for them, because they end up as maids in your house instead until your wife kicks them out for making eyes at you. Statistics indicate your face will be partially blown off in battle if you are a young man. Look but don’t touch. Enjoy your painting before it warps your hands. The kicker was the note just before the end credits. Jean Renoir of course went on to be a successful filmmaker. Andrée was his girlfriend and in his films for a while, until they broke up and then went their separate ways and she died alone and poor and “forgotten”. At least Renoir does’t even try to pretend it’s right; it just indicates you’d be a damn fool to hope for more.
[1] Also hinted at: Andrée’s lifestyle outside of posing for Renoir. She calls herself an actress. When she says actress, we know she has silver screen ambitions. She courts drama in the way she interacts with others on the daily, is enthralled by movie magazines. She is also is boldly casual about navigating her sex life and body in general. When she says ‘actress’, Renoir intuits ‘prostitute’, a very old perception dating back centuries. After he sends her off on her first day of posing, he gives her five francs. Aggravated at him for wasting her time she tells him her rates are ten, but we don’t see her paid again and she raises the question several times. Historically women who acted were seen as all-around immodest and available for approaching backstage after the show. There was no way to fit them into polite society. They had odd schedules outside of the home. Andrée also seems to live in a brothel?](http://24.media.tumblr.com/ceaac7b5e2cb3b503b6d1e5888419695/tumblr_mmbhkrQJEN1r491hvo1_500.png)
