094: beauty is unattached

THIS WEEK: one day; minor detail; art monsters

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Today’s title comes from Agnes Martin via Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather.

“I’m not being a footnote…In the story of your life.”

An indicator of my state of mind this week: on two separate occasions, I was moved to literal tears by fancams of the new Netflix series One Day, starring Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall. I watched the entire series last weekend between two consecutive hangovers (is this 26?), and was surprised by how GIDDY it made me feel. It’s no secret that I love a good romance (I mean I have seen the second season of Bridgerton so many times it’s sick) but when I initially saw the One Day trailer, I had few hopes for it. One Day takes place over twenty years and follows Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, an unlikely pair (she’s bookish and outspokenly feminist; he’s a charming libertine used to getting what he wants) who, following a fateful encounter on their last day of university, develop a lifelong friendship. Obviously, they’re in love with each other, though they manage to do almost nothing about it for like 80% of their relationship. The premise of the show (and the book that it’s adapted from) is that each episode takes place on the same day, each year. The episode format lets the show feel more literary and less rushed (a problem of the 2011 movie adaptation starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess¹). At the same time, not every plot point needs a twenty-minute episode and so the quality of episodes is sort of uneven. Some episodes are so engaging to watch you never want them to end, while others plod on. What really makes the show is Mod and Woodall—they have great chemistry and the best parts of the series are the scenes when it’s just the two of them.

“…there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on a desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence.”

I lead a reading group at school as part of our Postcolonial, Race, and Diaspora Studies Colloquium, and this week we read Adania Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail. Minor Detail is a two-part narrative: the first documents the capture, rape, and murder of Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in the summer of 1949; the second part of the book is narrated by a young Palestinian woman who becomes fixated on the fact that the killing happened on the same date as her birth, just 55 years prior. One of the first thoughts I had when I finished reading is the way in which all the synopses I had read did not prepare me for the novel itself. This is less a failing of those who have attempted to summarize it (though some attempts are bad²) and more of a testament to the complexity and depth of the novel. Minor Detail is a novel that is not interested in resolution, with Shibli suggesting that the desire for resolution tends to elide all the things that make up an existence. With the novel, she offers a dynamic view into the experience of living under occupation, the routines and rituals of its violence, without any suggestion that the story is representative, as if Palestinian existence could be boiled down to these 105 pages. In her review of the novel, Isabella Hammad, capturing the richness of Shibli’s novel, compares it to Kafka’s parables, particularly how they unfold “like buds into blossoms: multiplying in complications, more like poetry than allegory.” She continues:

Minor Detail shares something of Kafka’s parabolic strangeness—the brevity, the nameless characters, the initial suggestion of allegory, and the subsequent refusal to behave like one; the air of nihilism. While the novel’s two brief parts, set fifty-five years apart, seem as though they will speak to each other across the gulf of time in a way that provides resolution, by the final page the reader has in their hands only a repetition of violence for which it is clear no narrative will provide consolation.

“Likewise, the slash of Art Monsters denotes both an injury and an opening, a sense of possibility for looking at and living in our bodies otherwise”

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the Kate Zambreno interview where she talks about how much she hates the term “art monster” because of the connotation that to be intensely committed to one’s art practice is to somehow be monstrous. But Lauren Elkin’s new book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, takes up the idea of the art monster in a different light. In Elkin’s book, which covers both visual and literary artists, the art monster is an embodied state, the excesses of the body and art congealing into something that defies being. RAFTM Tia Glista recently interviewed Elkin about the book for the Los Angeles Review of Books. The whole interview is so good (it’s Tia so of course it is) but what has stuck with me all week is this bit from Tia’s intro:

Elkin’s study also coheres under the sign of the slash, a tool for holding together, adding on, conjoining, and dividing ideas on the page. The choice recalls a real slash, one cut with a meat cleaver into the flesh of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus by a suffragette in 1914 (a tear in the fabric of the feminine as smooth, untouchable, angelic whiteness). Likewise, the slash of Art Monsters denotes both an injury and an opening, a sense of possibility for looking at and living in our bodies otherwise.

And on a final art monster note, I am watching Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, which is exactly what you expect a Ryan Murphy show to be like. After finishing the second episode the other night, my immediate thought was, I need Hilton Als to write an Instagram post about this. And I am so committed to making that happen that I popped into Als’ IG comments to ask if he’s watching. As of writing, he has not responded, but I think a response is inevitable. So when you see a screenshot of Hilton Als’ TV screen featuring Tom Hollander as Capote with the craziest caption you’ve ever read, you’re welcome!

Thanks for reading. The next time you hear from me I will have seen Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me…Now. I am sick with excitement just thinking about it!

1. What the movie adaptation had that the series, sadly, doesn’t: Anne Hathaway with bad bangs, sobbing and saying: “I love you Dexter…I just don’t like you anymore.”

2. Including the blurb from J.M. Coetzee that is completely bizarre and, in my opinion, should not be attached to the book.