019: citation as sexting
My love language is MLA 8th edition
Despite having no intentions to do so, I watched the first episode of the Kardashians’ new Hulu show, The Kardashians, which I surprisingly enjoyed. While I didn’t watch the final seasons of the E! show, the new show feels really different from the old one. The content is the same old, same old — the sisters eating salads and talking about Scott Disick’s bad behaviour — but there is an effort to emphasize the production of it all, the editorial efforts behind it. The confessional asides are more purposeful annotations rather than carefully placed narrative builders. I found myself engaged by the show in a way that I haven’t since 2016. Here are some things that had me furiously texting “WHAT??” to RAFTM1 Aisha:
Kim telling a pregnant Kylie that she knows that Kylie is having a boy because girls “take the pretty for themselves.” OK, Miss Kim Ferrante! 2
Scott Disick somehow managed to scrounge up a contract so that he can talk about how hard it is to find a life partner when he keeps dating teenagers and complain about how he always thought he and Kourtney would get back together. Like, grow up!
Khloe repeatedly saying that Tristan( the man who cheated on her while she was pregnant and then made moves on her little sister’s bestie) is her best friend — completely diabolical!
Kourtney and Travis’ are truly sickening, and yet I found myself almost tearing up when Kourtney was talking about them finally getting together and she was like, “I love how he is with my daughter.” When will I find my sweet tattooed goblin prince??
I recently finished Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter which I found to be a lot more captivating than the movie. My favourite thing about Ferrante’s writing is the way she depicts the yearning of the ambitious, of those who wish not only to be good but to be BRILLIANT. She gets into the most minute neuroses of the intellectually insecure in a way that makes you feel like you’re the one desperately pinching the tip of a Ticondorega No. 2 pencil, trying to write the best sentence of your life. In The Lost Daughter, she depicts the way that the euphoria of intellectual recognition — the feeling when someone cites you — can feel like sexual pleasure. Reminiscing on a memory of attending a past conference and hearing a distinguished academic, a Professor Hardy, praise an old essay of hers, Leda, the protagonist-narrator, remembers “feeling as if all the liquids inside me were boiling up under my skin.” In the moment, her intellectual pride looks and feels like sexual desire. Later, when she does have sex with Hardy, she notes that “sex is an extreme product of the imagination” that becomes more about one’s own fantasy than the physical connection. In this case, it’s not her desire for Hardy’s body but him as a representation of her own possible success, her own brilliance, that gets her horny, that makes her feel like she loves him. Anyone who has ever experienced the breathlessness of eagerly thrusting their hand in the air to answer a question in a poorly lit lecture hall and been told their answer is “spot on” knows exactly what she is talking about.
On the weekend, I took myself on a little date to the cinema. The night felt like the sort of scene I would gobble up if it belonged to any black and white film made in 2013: getting absorbed in Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights in the Uber, finding my solo seat in the dark, the two minutes of fear during trailers when I was certain I walked into the wrong theatre, crying during the credits. The film I went to see was Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades), directed by Jacques Audiard, who also co-wrote it with Léa Mysius and Céline Sciamma. I went into the movie with little knowledge of what I was getting involved with — I was mostly drawn in by the fact that the stories had been adapted from stories by Adrian Tomine, whose Killing and Dying remains one of my favourite (graphic) novels ever. But it was easily one of the best films I’ve seen this year. My biggest complaint about a lot of films I’ve seen lately is that they’ve sort of failed to fill me with any great feeling. I have been moved by little and bored by much. For a good part of Paris, 13th District, I felt this sort of intense, focused hum all over my body, sort of like the aura of a force field.3 As the final scene played out and the credits rolled, I found myself spontaneously bursting into tears, happy and grieving. On the streetcar home, excited by what I’d seen and felt, I read Elif Batuman’s New Yorker profile of Sciamma which addresses sexual identity and desire, the truth of action (Sciamma doesn’t believe that all stories need conflict), and how to think about your past work and mistakes. Although the profile made me eager to watch all of Sciamma’s films, I was most struck by the section on sexual identity and desire in which Batuman talks about her own experience discovering her sexuality and desire separate of a male perspective. She writes about the male gaze and how discovering her attraction to women (as well as watching Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire) made her feel that what she had learnt about her own desire had been a scam. She writes that she’d believed “it was part of the rich, ineluctable fabric of the human condition for women to ruin their lives over unsatisfactory men.” It wasn’t until she saw (and felt) that it could be different did she realize that there had been little truth to the yearning she’d learnt to feel.
On the topic of yearning: As anyone who has talked to me about season two of Bridgerton knows, I’m in my horny season. I’m in my getting flustered watching fancams of Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley, overusing the drool emoji (🤤), saving photos of Jacob Elordi in Calvin Klein season. So! I really enjoyed Bolu Babalola’s “A Meditation on Yearning,” from her newsletter. She writes about the “sweetpain” of desire and the way yearning “allows us the space to learn the specificity of our want, our taste.” I sent the last line to my fellow romantics and yearners, the Pansy Boys (whose music is all about this stuff btw!!): “I think the specificity in our hearts is not unfounded, and I think it exists to be found. That is where the hope in yearning lies.” Excuse me while I go watch Bridgerton for the fourth time.
More citational material re: literature and fashion/books as accessories: The New York Times’ T Magazine published “Searching for the Notorious Book Stylist,” that is sort of about the hunt for a mysterious “book stylist” who helps Hollywood’s glitteriest stars (and other people who have money) purchase books that will make them look really good and really smart, even if they never read a single one. The article doesn’t really do a deep dive investigation to find this book stylist but rather considers why anyone would want such a service and whether it’s good or bad for literature that books have now become mere accessories. (Most of the quotes are from Belletrist’s Karah Preiss which is like, if you wanted to do a feature on Belletrist, just say that?) It’s obviously a controversial topic considering the reaction that people had to Ashley Tisdale’s AD video. I don’t really want to be part of self-righteous, judgemental Twitter but I’m sorry, not to be a snob, it’s so weird to buy books you have no intention of reading. I think it’s one thing to get someone to curate a selection of books for you to read (we all do this in some way) and another (completely deranged) thing to pick them out like you do pillowcases at West Elm! The whole situation is giving “you can make so much $$$ from writing.”
In another edition of “WOW MY FRIENDS ARE AMAZINGLY TALENTED AND SMART,” this week RAFTM Hannah’s oral history of Marina and the Diamonds’ Electra Heart was published on NYLON. It’s such a delightful read, perfectly executed. You should go and read it, RIGHT NOW.
Until next time! This weekend, I’ll be singing “Before He Cheats” at karaoke and pretending I’m in Season 2 of Gossip Girl at Queer Seder.
Reader and Friend to Me. Borrowed from Rachel Tashjian’s Opulent Tips.
In Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, the protagonist-narrator thinks of how mothers and daughters take from each other. She says: “The mother’s power always seems to be that they give unfairly, beginning in the living niche of the womb.” She thinks of her daughter, Marta, accusing her of this robbery: “You gave the best of yourself to Bianca, she repeats constantly, to me the worst. Marta is like that, she protects herself by seeing herself as deprived.”
Because this dispatch quickly became a musing on sex and desire, I also want to note Richard Brody’s criticism of the film that finds its depiction of sex to be weak and deplorable. I don’t agree with him but I kind of found his criticism that Audiard “doesn’t punctuate sex with anything that isn’t overly erotic or puncture the bubble of his own entranced gaze with shoes and socks, zippers and hooks, stumbling” to be endearing. Richard just wants to see the holes in your Joe Boxers!