This Week in Books: The hair of an It Girl laid on an altar for the dead.
“She is thirty-five / Everything else is mere hypothesis.”
Dear Reader,
An image occurs twice in this week’s reading: the hair of an It Girl laid on an altar for the dead. One, Jane Bowles: a lock of hair on a priest’s bedside shrine; two, Sean DeLear: false eyelashes on another punk’s altar.
Fame, fashion, self-insert fanfiction: those are the sub-themes. But the It Girls of bygone days tower above all: a cheerfully tragic pantheon.
Unrelated: a friend and I were looking at someone else’s copy of Vuzz the other day. Vuzz, the main character, a fetishistically violent freelance warrior wandering an alien hellscape in search of challengers, eventually seeks out death/final cancellation. On the last page, a mournful narrator makes a beautiful soliloquy over the corpse of the vanquished Vuzz, and I wish I had taken a picture, but I didn’t. It’s a plaintive address to the arid waste on which Vuzz was laid low, in which the speaker repeatedly asks something along the lines of who will remember the things Vuzz remembered? Who will remember Vuzz?
Later that day, I saw a sticker promoting something called Vuzz that was in no way connected to Vuzz, and I thought That’s funny, because I remember Vuzz.
It’s the little synchronicities that make life worth living, I guess. Just today I was looking at this online bookstore I was told about recently called 50 Watts Books. They do this cool thing where they just show you scans of the inside of cool-looking books. Dunno how else to explain it, that’s what it is. Anyway, that’s how I found out Philippe Druillet, the comic artist who created Vuzz, has a book called Salammbo which is an adaptation of Flaubert’s notoriously weird Salammbô. Salammbô, another It Girl, dies because she touches a veil which… kills whomsoever touches it.
Why do I feel so melancholy? The It Girls: dead. Vuzz: dead. Salammbô: dead. But all: remembered. Well, by the books. By the bibliographers. I was reading about Frederick Leypoldt a bit recently. Today we would describe him as a bookseller and publisher, but he really identified above all else as a bibliographer. He liked to make lists of books. He in fact abandoned book publishing (he was partners with Henry Holt) to “devote himself personally to bibliographical work” as wikipedia puts it. Making lists of books, and founding magazines in which to do so.
I feel a great spiritual kinship with this man, obviously.
So, so, so. I must take another week off the books newsletter, as I will be very short on time next week. Back soon.
—Dana
1. “Finally, Some Freaky K-pop Writing” by Cat Zhang, Vulture
Cat Zhang reviews Esther Yi’s Y/N (Astra).
… [A]n unnamed protagonist undergoes a process of spiritual conversion after attending the concert of a South Korean boy band… As is commonly the case, the woman initially resists proselytization, seeing herself as a person of greater refinement: “My spiritual sphincter stayed clenched to keep out the cheap and stupid,” she proclaims. But, subjected to the effusive sermonizing of her flatmate, she becomes curious about what life-altering devotion feels like….
… Y/N does not stand for “yes or no” but “your name,” a type of fan fiction in which the reader inserts themselves as a character in the story. In one scene, the narrator attends a meeting of the Berlin chapter of the band’s fandom, where an attendee raises complaints about this style of writing: “There is never a story when it comes to Y/N. Only absurd and arbitrary leaps of plots.”
2. “Wilder, Riskier, More Generous” by Negar Azimi, The New York Review of Books
Negar Azimi writes about a newly reissued edition of Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories (Semiotext(e)).
Mueller once described her stories as “novels for people with short attention spans.” Walking contains nine overtly fictional works, which appear under the heading “Fables.” Her characters are mainly women at odds with the world, Jane Bowles–esque in their peculiarity. “The Truth About the End of the World” opens with this sentence: “Late one night after Joanna put her two kids to bed, she sat down at the kitchen table with a bottle of Remy Martin, the Bible, an ephemeris, an atlas, a calculator and seven grams of cocaine.”
3. “Grand Normal Girl” by Joe Dunthorne, London Review of Books
Joe Dunthorne writes about Jane Bowles and her only novel Two Serious Ladies.
…In New York she made herself into what Capote would later call ‘that modern legend named Jane Bowles ... the eternal urchin, appealing as the most appealing of non-adults, yet with some substance cooler than blood invading her veins’. Her leg had now been fused (she couldn’t bend it at the knee) and it remained in a cast for seven months, during which time she began wearing boys’ clothes and making herself known in the bars of Greenwich Village. Bowles had various girlfriends, but her possessive mother tried to convince her that she ‘was a grand normal girl and this lesbian business was just an adolescent phase’. When that didn’t work, her mother changed tack and encouraged her to have a coming-out party. As though nothing could be worse than her mother’s approval, she then met and married a polite and reserved young composer, Paul Bowles. He was the anti-Jane: detached, tidy, driven. He would come back from rehearsals to find their apartment full of smoke and drunk strangers, men with names like ‘Dick the Shit’...
4. “Take a Lesbian for a Drink” by Trish Bendix, Los Angeles Review of Books
Trish Bendix writes about Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle.
…While most of her political writing had been published in movement newsletters, she’d been trying to sell Rubyfruit Jungle to all the major houses but, as she told Time magazine in 2008, “nobody wanted to publish it.” … [E]ven an agent she had been told on good authority was “family” rejected the project. “[She] threw the manuscript at me,” Brown said. “You would have thought I’d tossed a canister of mustard gas into her office… ”
Always her own best publicist, Brown didn’t need an agent. She took Rubyfruit Jungle to a small independent feminist press called Daughters, Inc., launched in 1972. Run by Houston oil heiress June Arnold and lawyer-editor Parke Bowman, the press paid Brown $1,000 and printed 5,000 books, available via mail order in lesbian and feminist publications. Eventually, 70,000 copies of the hardcover edition were sold…
…A New York Times article on the 1977 paperback edition called the book a humorous novel “about a woman who grew up homosexual and enjoyed it.”
5. “I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear” by Sean DeLear and Brontez Purnell, The Paris Review
An excerpt from I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear (Semiotext(e)). This is from Brontez Purnell’s introduction to the book:
…I remember in eighth grade reading The Diary of Anne Frank—the uncensored version, which was withheld from the public until her father’s death because he stated he could not live with the most private parts of his adolescent daughter’s diary being consumed by the world. There is a certain sense of protection I feel for baby Sean De’s most private thoughts being so exposed; however, so very little is written about the lives and the bold sexuality of young queers, and specifically of young Black queers, that I also have to give regard to the fact that there is something ultimately explosive about this text… A gay Black punk one generation AFTER DeLear, at the age of fourteen I was rather content staring at a wall and obsessing over my Lookout Records catalog—I can’t even comprehend a gay Black kid some thirty years before planning to blackmail older white boys’ dads for money for acting lessons…
6. “Epic Annette – Anne Weber” by Emily Hershman, Full Stop
Emily Hershman reviews Anne Weber’s Epic Annette (Indigo), translated by Tess Lewis.
…Written in free verse, Anne Weber’s Epic Annette engages with classical forms to chronicle the extraordinary life of Annette (aka Anne) Beaumanoir, a French neurophysiologist who was once a member of the Resistance. …A militant communist, she never received the national accolades of her French contemporaries in the Resistance. Instead, she was charged with treason for siding with the FLN (National Liberation Front) during the Algerian War…
A gentle but knowing narrator reveals how this passionate young woman is thwarted at every turn—often by the male intellectuals and leaders she idolizes. …While assisting Jewish families to safety and couriering packages for the Resistance, she recognizes the value of anonymity. “She must be silent as the tiny fish she is/In the great machinery of the movement/Without acquaintances or friends.”
…Why does she continue to feel this urgent need for a great cause?... It is hard to be sure of her motives. “She is thirty-five / Everything else is mere hypothesis.”
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