Weekender 02
Devotion, writing angst, & a short overrated list
Happy Sunday! I had four piña coladas this past week, went to Coney Island, and got TAN. I finished Age of Innocence on Wednesday at the beach (I always end up finishing my favorite summer books there!) and watched the underrated Scorsese adaptation ft. Daniel Day Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder. I am seated for the Metrograph showing on the 29th and… will likely watch it more than once…
This weekend’s column includes my thoughts on… MORE Edith Wharton, sexy John Malkovich, a pair of perfect vintage pants that barely fit, writing angst, a performance-art-lecture on devotion, and Dirt’s overrated list.
I am tearing through House of Mirth even though I feel like it’s a mistake to read Wharton too quickly; I want to re-read Age of Innocence once I’m done with Mirth. To me, AoI is the more restrained of the two, from its close perspective on Newton Archer (we never really know what the other characters truly think of Archer) and the stifling social norms of the 1870s. Mirth, while published 14 years earlier in 1906, takes place during the turn of the century. Social mores were slowly but surely changing, and the narration, while mostly kept close to protagonist Lily Bart, more acutely foreshadows her tragedy. There is, I think, more room for interpretation — and therefore optimism — in AoI, which makes the conclusion all the more devastating (“the lack of happening is the tragedy”), whereas in Mirth, we get a sense of Bart’s missteps, well, every step of the way.
For those interested in reading AoI, I found this cool Substack,
, currently dedicated to a close-reading of the novel.I haven’t watched the adaptation of House of Mirth with Gillian Anderson (a lesser movie, so I’m told), but I’m almost compelled to based on the screencaps in Brandon Taylor’s essay, Justice for Lily Bart.
I was telling RAFTM Michelle Santiago Cortés about how Wharton has rekindled my love for period dramas, and she recommended Dangerous Liaisons (1988), the only movie where John Malkovich is sexy. Indeed, he is scary sexy in a wig! But Malkovich is so unserious that it seems like he and Michelle Pfeiffer are acting in two completely different movies. I guess that’s the point, but after seeing Pfeiffer’s chemistry with Daniel Day Lewis, seeing her and Malkovich together is… just unbelievable. My Letterboxd review: “goofy feud between two divas takes a tragic turn”
I feel like I’m constantly re-negotiating how much time I spend writing for fun, writing for exposure, writing for practice, and writing for money. Getting a job has temporarily relieved me of the fourth consideration, but the tension between exposure, practice, and fun/self-fulfillment is still there. The latter two are similar, of course: Writing is my creative practice, but not everything done for practice’s sake is fulfilling or fun. It can feel like a chore sometimes. I’m currently dreading writing an exhibition review that I’ve pitched during an anxious fit last month (I am my worst enemy), but like eating vegetables, I know that it’s good for me, and once I stop procrastinating, I derive a deep enjoyment + pleasure from the process.
The latest Momus podcast ft. Elvia Wilk touches upon the aforementioned tensions. Last year, Wilk (rather dramatically) announced that she was quitting writing after a decade of freelancing. She didn’t intend to quit quit writing; she wanted to prioritize writing she enjoyed doing and to free herself from the unsustainable cycle of frequent publishing and public writing that most freelancers fall into to cobble together a living. I certainly still suffer from the same angst even though I’m under much less financial pressure; I fear that if I stop publishing monthly or bimonthly, I’ll become irrelevant in “the imaginary public consciousness,” even though, as Wilk says, “nobody cares!” Here’s to caring less and writing stuff that matters more.
To that end, I’m treating these Sunday newsletters as an opportunity to wean myself off the publishing bandwagon, while also creating a space for me to reflect upon art + writing that I enjoy, without wracking my brain to come up with the PERFECT sentence…
On Thursday, I went to see Sophia Giovannitti’s performance-lecture Does it have a sincere relationship to God? at Blade Study. The title was from a conversation between the artist and Catalina Ouyang, whose show I had recently reviewed. I have been following Giovannitti’s writing since reading her phenomenal n+1 essay “Whores at the End of the World” in 2020, and interviewed her last year for her book Working Girl. The lecture was an hour and a half long and the chairs were not quite comfortable, but Giovannitti is such a fantastic speaker and curious writer that, although the lecture covers some familiar/old territory from previous works, namely the abject exchange of one’s time & soul for money under Western capitalism/empire, I left the lecture feeling reinvigorated… about language (which Giovannitti said she lost faith in last year), devotion as artistic practice, and rather unexpectedly, pop culture.
Catalina Ouyang’s response to a question posed by Sophia Giovannitti. I think often about the soulfulness of a piece of art or writing, though it’s hard to put into words what actually is “godly” about work that has a sincere relationship to God/the soul. There is an element of self-effacement or surrender in this complex equation, wherein the artist/artwork is not apprehensively defensive—something that is, I find, easier to clock in writing than visual art. I wonder if loss or some kind of personal desecration is essential to discovering (or rediscovering) the stakes in one’s work. Giovannitti appears to gravitate towards this kind of effacement after the publication of Working Girl; she says she began dressing differently, wearing oversized T-shirts and pants to cover up her body, because she felt too overexposed.
Tying it back to Wilk, another writer who felt similarly “overexposed” after publishing new work, it seems as if “quitting” writing/publishing was a preemptive attempt to protect of her energy and the work that mattered to her. Lucky for us, Wilk hasn’t stopped public writing entirely. Her review of Gabriel Smith’s Brat in the latest Bookforum (not online yet) actually convinced me to give the second half of the novel a shot.
Finally, my contribution to Dirt’s 2024 Overrated List:
No shade to men in finance. I love them as individuals. It’s when we start talking about them as a category that I’m like, have we lost the plot? You cannot seriously think finance is the pinnacle of luxury. That being said, I love talking to an older man in finance. Like, 45+. Very well-read and cultured (usually with a humanities degree), whereas the younger crowd is too bro-ey and obsessed with tasteless status symbols.
Nostalgia as an aesthetic: More on this in the next weekender, but this moodboard shit is getting exhausting!
One more addition to the list: There are wayyyy too many link-farming newsletters on Substack now. Just links with a few lines of commentary. I guess this is useful if you’re in marketing (which I am in now too) but my eyes kind of blur over when I realize the amount of content one has to sift through to compile that list… Thank you for your service, I guess? But also, I want to be blissfully unaware of how over-saturated the information economy currently is.
The Hit List
I checked out Frank Bidart’s Metaphysical Dog from the library, which has a meta-poem about the process of writing “Ellen West.” I read Ellen West this morning and was simply floored.
I’m listening to SISTAR’s Loving U, a summer K-pop anthem from 2012.
I went to a screening of Diane Severin Nguyen’s two films at Metrograph on Friday. My favorite work of hers is currently up at the Whitney Biennial, In Her Time, an hour-long fictional mockumentary about a young Chinese actress preparing for her leading role in a historical drama.
On my to-read list: Elaine Scarry’s The Art of Nonfiction
really loved reading this!! especially your thoughts on “writing for fun, writing for exposure, writing for practice, and writing for money”…I’m trying to focus on writing for fun and practice, but my anxious self is always like…maybe you should write more for exposure?? and I worry that instinct pushes me to do less ambitious work
I’m going to listen to the Momus podcast—also this post was a nice reminder to actually pick up a copy of Sophia Giovannitti’s book! I’ve been meaning to read it for ages
This resonates.