WORMS DIGEST
ARCADIA MOLINAS
True Love Will Find You in the End.
To me, Their Eyes Were Watching God (what a title...) by Zora Neale Hurston has two peaks. The first is Janie's sexual awakening and the second is at the introduction of Tea Cake.
I was stunned by the description Zora Neale Hurton makes of a girl coming into herself. This is how the book opens, thus we’re immediately made to reckon with the idea that Janie is a Desiring body. Janie is destined to place Desire at the heart of her path in life. This brazen acceptance of the pursuit of earthly pleasures, happiness and satisfaction as a purpose in life is a compelling point of departure for me.
"She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her."
Hurston uses a pear tree as a metaphor for her awakening; the curiosity to bite the forbidden fruit, to learn about the birds and the bees. Hurston employs the first of the two vocabularies of the book, which can be broadly defined as a rich metaphoric language and the vernacular, at its best in the magnificent opening of the book. In it we're told all we need to know about the formidable character that Janie is. She aspires to more than to live like white people; she aspires to suck the juice out of the orange of life until the rind is dry and shrivelled.
"She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from room to tiniest branch creaming in very blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!"
After a series of trial and errors in loveless marriages, through which Hurston gets to display her control of the vernacular, diction and syntax, here enters Tea Cake...
What I find so compelling about this character are his imperfections. In saunters Tea Cake, a man 15 years Janie's junior, full of life, who doesn't see Janie as an adornment or a prop to hang off his arm but a companion, someone with whom to share adventures and create joy with. Being so full of life as he is however, the very spark that Janie is so enamoured by, means that his thirst for life is unbridled and will remain unbridled. Tea Cake is wild and young and that's his nature, much beyond his love for Janie. Sometimes we love people despite their flaws but sometimes their flaws are what makes us love people too.
"God made it so you spent yo' ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo' young girl days to spend wid me."
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I will be studying that first chapter for years to come. What a beautiful, delightful lesson in autofiction (?) and structure.
Despondent, comical yet deadly serious. Throwaway sentiments of a moving force. How does he manage to shoehorn aliens into the narrative to seamlessly?
The regret at crucifying Jesus leads to the ‘opposite’ thought that there are people who were ok to crucify.
What a moving reflection on death too. Everything has happened, is happening and will happen for eternity and over again.
So it goes.
I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp by Richard Hell
If I may be allowed a short bout of nostalgia for a second, I first bought this book in 2014 or so when I was 15 or 16 after seeing someone on the internet that I thought was very hip and cool and with it shared a picture of it. For the next ten years it sat in my teenage room in my parent's house among all the other books I was reading at that age: Burroughs, Kerouac, Dostoyevsky. I picked it up at the rear end of 2023 inspired by an anti-consumerist spirit I suppose, I hadn't bought the book in vain, because of Reference Point in London, that has an impressive archive of all things punk and because of my recent experience reading Julia Fox's memoir Down the Drain which I'd thoroughly enjoyed. So, between Christmas meals and tense family time, I plunged this book.
Richard Hell is a great writer. He's perspicacious, poetic when necessary, and, significantly, unafraid of transparency. He often comes across as unlikable: insolent and immature. I found myself asking if these unlikable traits were a manifestation of the spirit of punk, which he describes as adolescent: needlessly angry, distrustful of authority and nihilistic by nature. What truly irked me was his treatment and descriptions of women, which were always breast-first. It was cringy as hell.
His depiction of the rise of the CBGB as the Mecca of punk was void of any sentimentality and his description of punk - "vocations often begin as poses" - equally cool as self-effacing will stay with me. I scribbled all over this book, underlined and told friends over the pivotal time in music that New York in the 70s was.
Great book to end my year with.
Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders
My first watch of 2024. I related to Travis. I too am full of suffering.
I watched this with my mother and she told me that Wim Wenders is “a European turning his eye towards America”. That explains the landscapes; desolate expanses of soil, sand; the futile quest of a man; walking to Paris, Texas, the place where he was conceived, the start of it all, in search for answers, retracing the steps of his life - how did he get here?
I played Lana del Rey’s song Paris, Texas on repeat the following day. The infantile, lullaby-esque tune, Lana’s soothing whispery voice takes me inside Travis’ head - measuring his losses, the desire to escape, thinking there’s salvation elsewhere, where you’re unknown, there in the mind’s Paris, Texas.
There are many layers to this film. Each of them speak of loss to me. The loss of a son, loss of a father, a mother, a partner, an identity. How does one become good at any of those roles? Where do you start searching? How can you speak them into existence?
The Gleaners & I by Agnès Varda
I rewatched this perfect documentary and still found it as moving and funny as the first time I watched it.
“Where does play end and art start?”
Pierce Eldridge
I have Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H. in my hand at the moment. Written with humour and a tenacity to understand that which agonises the intersections of our lives, Hijab Butch Blues stands as a testament to the complexities of navigating gender through religion and the ensue of racism that emerges as a displaced immigrant trying to make sense of a life. It’s funny, sharp, and feels like dipping into the inner workings of someone’s personal diary as they dissect and find new connections between the Quran, feminism, radical black activism, queer theory, and so much more. The texture of this book is full of vulnerability that could be described as quiet but it’s anything but. Lamya’s voice is confident and full of honest reflections, it’s like sipping tea intimately with a dearest friend. I really love this book.
Caitlin MCloughlin
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
I gobbled this up in a couple of days and was gripped and deeply disturbed in equal measure. It’s a lot about control, denial, shame, desire and the crippling pain of loneliness. In her desperation to be noticed, loved, desired, narrator and namesake Eileen is fickle in her selfhood, one moment swelling to become sure of herself and then in the same breath she dissolves, her resolve curdling as self loathing comes crashing back. More than anything, and despite its dark subject matter, it’s a real page turner and it’s always fun to read something that you can’t put down for a day or two.
I absolutely loved Greasepaint by Hannah Levene (forthcoming with Nightboat in Feb 2024). Full review coming soon…
I finally watched Past Lives (dir. Celine Song) which was incredible. The shots are wide and beautiful and what is unsaid in the dialogue is said in small gestures and knowing looks, the crease of a forehead, the twitch of a mouth. The quiet in this film speaks with such beauty and pain and intensity and wisdom.
I caught Sofia Copolla’s biopic of Priscilla Presley (wife of Elvis) and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t disappointed. Priscilla was a producer on the film and it’s based closely on her auto-biography, but it fell short of portraying her as anything but a victim. It’s true that she was a victim, just 15 when she met Elvis, who essentially groomed her, his friend and associate ferrying her to and from his mansion-like residence on the German army base where they met. The casting was perfect, Jacob Elordi as Elvis towers over a tiny, girlish Cailee Spaeny; every interaction was deeply uncomfortable to watch, each awkward kiss or nervous grope. We see glimmers of Priscilla’s personhood, moments where she attempts to claw back some agency, but none are fully explored and the film ends as she leaves Elvis, tearful and terrified, though somewhat determined, to the tune of Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. If you're going for the outfits and Coppola’s pillowy, pastel sets (as a part of me certainly was) then there’s something there for you, but don’t expect a groundbreaking or insightful portrayal of Priscilla the living, breathing person.
The Philip Guston at Tate Modern is really worth a visit. It buzzes with energy and colour, and I admire the deeply political spirit that threads Guston’s work together – work that evolves dramatically over his 50 year career. His refrain that it is the obligation of the artist to ‘bare witness’ to societal evils is the force that drives him. His later paintings take on a cartoonish quality, comic and dreamlike, yet impactful in their narrative depictions of social injustices. KKK members are reimagined as fat, waddling hoods with dashed charcoal eyes, seen carrying out menial tasks; fat, cone shaped pillows jammed into cars, smoking cigarettes, walking down the street. These paintings convey the banality of evil, that evil can always be present, exist among us – evil can go to the shops, drive to work, pick the kids up from school. When he first exhibited these paintings they were also unanimously slated by critics and peers alike, but they are what he’s known for today.
