075: stylish girls
terry nguyen on elizabeth hardwick, contemporary desdemonas, and microdosing movies
This week, we have a dispatch from Terry Nguyen, essayist, critic, and poet. Terry and I met last fall at a Drift issue launch at Bar Kitsuné. The party was so-so (I spent most of it trying to drink ever last drop of my $17 G&T, melting ice and all, as my paper straw wilted in my mouth) but hanging out with Terry really turned the night around. Since then we’ve connected over the work of Elizabeth Hardwick and David Berman, as well as the deep allure of adidas trackpants. As a writer, Terry is so compelling because although never evasive—she always says what she thinks—she manages to remain in the pose of questioning and investigating. For her, the book is never closed. She recently revived her newsletter, gen yeet, where she’s so far blessed us with insightful musings on time and rest and Derek Jarman’s Blue, amongst other things. I loved reading Terry’s dispatch this week because it manages to bring together plant foraging in New England and literary toy boys, all with complete ease and magnificent style. Enjoy!
x Akosua
This past weekend, I found myself on Martha’s Vineyard, an island that a friend once jokingly called “the Hamptons for intellectuals.” There were, alas, few intellectuals in the company of many entitled WASPs, who, in another time, might’ve been the prospective patrons of said intellectuals, artists, and writers. It’s truly a shame that today, the wealthy have poor politics and poor taste: Every art gallery had the same boring seascapes and childish horse portraits, and patrons wore the most god-awful branded apparel (Vineyard Vines and Black Dog Tavern). The upside: The vegetation was gorgeous, and I stuffed my suitcase with all kinds of rocks and seashells.
I am still relishing Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, a novel that I began in June and have been inching my way through. I’ve read “Part One” probably five times, and yet to tire of Hardwick’s lush prose! Anyway, while lounging on the beach, I came across a curious passage in “Part Four” about “a number of intellectual men, radicals, [who] had a way of finding rich women who loved them in the brave and risky way of Desdemona,” which led me to wonder: Where have all the gigolos gone? Does this specific kind of rich woman, this intellectual patron-in-waiting, still exist? Certainly not on Martha’s Vineyard.
A few weeks ago, I re-watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). I realized I had somehow forgotten that Holly Golightly’s (Audrey Hepburn) love interest and upstairs neighbor Paul Varjak was, in fact, a sugar baby. His lifestyle is generously sponsored by a rich married woman, his “interior decorator,” who Paul later confesses his love for Holly to. Paul wants to break things off, but instead, his sugar momma writes him a check for $1,000, coolly declaring that he should be entitled to “a week’s vacation with pay,” adding: “It’s simply a matter of fair labor practice, darling! If you were really smart, what you would do is get the other boys together and organize a union.” Incredible.
Even though old Hollywood movies were subject to the Hays Code until 1968, “inappropriate” sexual relationships and conduct were still heavily alluded to. And to my pleasant surprise, a number of films tackled shockingly progressive subject matters that are still relevant today. In Adam’s Rib (1949), two married lawyers take on opposing sides of a trial, where a woman is charged with attempted murder for shooting her philandering husband. The woman’s defense attorney, played by Katherine Hepburn, argues that her client was a grief-stricken mother and wife, who was only trying to protect her family’s integrity. In other words, under feminism, women should be allowed to shoot their philandering husbands! It’s a delightful little rom-com that, in my opinion, makes a more convincing feminist argument than Barbie (2023) does.
Our flight off the island was delayed by a clogged lavatory, which is honestly a new one for me. (JetBlue had to import a mechanic in from the mainland.) I kept myself entertained by watching YouTube clips of movies, a pasttime I call “microdosing cinema”: Queue up a 3-minute scene that I’ve been itching to watch, and the urge to re-watch the entire movie is, for the most part, quashed: when Alana fumes at her family in Licorice Pizza; the frighteningly realistic but deeply funny Marriage Story fight; most La La Land musical numbers; the Wolf of Wall Street scene that should’ve landed Margot Robbie an Academy Award nomination. I’ve done this plenty of times with movies I haven’t seen (Black Swan, Her, Goodfellas, A Star is Born), mostly for scenes detailed in Hunter Harris’s “This One Line Plays In A Loop In My Head” column. This works for shows, too: Tony Soprano yelling “Carmela, can you please shut the door”; Girls’ Marnie singing “Stronger” (cursed clip); Fleabag’s hair is everything mantra.
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More guest posts: Tia Glista. Emma Cohen. Casey MQ. Rachel Davies. Hannah Ziegler. Tony Zelenka. Jess Kasiama. Blake Mancini. Kyle Curry. Sonja Katanic.