116: showtime

THIS WEEK: reading Miranda July and Christina Sharpe

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Goodreads / Letterboxd / Instagram / Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)

• RAFTM Tia Glista¹, writer of No Outlet and all-around genius, is hosting a summer book club in August, which you should totally participate in!

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For those of us who didn’t get an ARC of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Miranda July’s All Fours is the book of the summer. (To be honest, it’s the book of the summer for the Intermezzo girlies too.) I haven’t interacted with Miranda July’s work for years—I missed the Margaret Qualley IG Lives that seemed to have delighted everyone—but within the first pages of All Fours, I was reminded why I had loved her work as a teenager, even as I was confused by it or didn’t always understand it. July manages to capture earnestness and a sense of wonder without ever feeling too cringe.² The catalyst in All Fours is a planned road-trip to New York, after the protagonist’s husband, Harris, suggests that there are two types of people in the world: Drivers and Parkers. A certified Parker—someone who needs “ a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and which they might receive applause” (the applause is very important)—July’s protagonist (”a semi-famous artist”) undertakes the roadtrip as an attempt to “switch from Parker to Driver.” Of course, choosing to do so for those reasons is a very Parker thing to do. And of course, she proves her true Parker status by never completing the roadtrip—after driving thirty minutes outside of Los Angeles, she checks into a local motel, where she decides to stay for the length of her planned trip. What at first seems like an avoidant and silly detour becomes a portal for enchantment and rebirth.

Apart from being incredibly funny and delightful, the novel evokes/embodies the rawness of desire, the ways in which it can turn one into “a froth of longing.” As I read, the hunger of the protagonist echoed a hunger in me that sometimes gets buried in the cycles of routine. That is, the novel engendered a hunger within me for wonder and constant transformation. I kept thinking about how July deals with the spontaneous and the coincidental, the possibility of our worlds to hold something fantastical or magical that is not beyond the real and tangible, but very much of it. I couldn’t really put it into words that felt accurate (I’m still not sure I am) but there’s a line near the end of the book that indexes what I’m trying to get at: dealing with heartbreak, the protagonist asks herself, “Was there any actual enchantment or was it all just survival, ways to muddle through?”

I was also compelled by what might be called a choreography of collapse in the novel. There are two key moments that demonstrate this choreography: the first being the actual choreography of a dance that the protagonist creates to seduce someone, in which she plays a record and attempts to drop down and knock the needle off the player before the singer says the word “love.” If/when she fails to do so, she falls to the ground. The second is near the end of the novel, after she gets plane induced vertigo and is talked through an exercise that promises relief by her best friend, Jordi. Maybe contradictorily, the solution to vertigo seems to be a willingness to collapse: “Head to the right, collapse, head to left, turn, sit up.” As she repeats these gestures, July’s protagonist recognizes the exercise to be just like “any dance or song or prayer repeated, the point was to keep going without a comprehensible end in sight.” It seems then that collapse, particularly the repetition of collapse, can be an act of devotion, to one’s self or to another. And like all acts of devotion, it demands vulnerability, an openness to being hurt, as the catalyst for a transcendence or freedom.

Miranda July's 'All Fours'

I finished Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being yesterday, which I picked up in London and read for my class tomorrow (after wanting to read it for many years). Near the end of the book, Sharpe writes about Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and how the film addresses the afterlife of slavery, managing to capture the tension of slavery’s continued trace in the present as well as the efforts to build lives premised on care counter to that persisting terror. Sharpe’s discussion of Dash’s film reminded me of another film I watched a few weeks ago, Drylongso.³ Directed by Cauleen Smith and remembered as part of the 90s DIY film movement, Drylongso follows Pica, a young photography student in Oakland who takes Polaroid photos of the black men and boys in her community. Pica does so, as the film’s summary tells us, “out of fear that they [black men and boys] are going extinct.” Like Dash’s film, Drylongso addresses the terror that marks Black life after slavery, while also depicting the various modes of care undertaken by Black communities in a counter to that terror. (Yasmina Price’s essay, “Drylongso: A Refuge of Their Own,” is great on this aspect of the film.) For me, what Sharpe’s book recalled for me about Smith’s film is the way in which it deals with the matter of witnessing. Part of its comment on care is the way in which witnessing, attention, regard, is something that cannot be solely towards the tragedies of Black life.

A few months ago, I wrote about Sharpe’s idea of regard, as well as an n+1 piece on who sees the horrifying images out of Gaza. At the time, I mentioned that the n+1 piece had not sat 100% well with me though I couldn’t express why. As time has gone on and my mind has returned to the piece, I’ve come to accept that what bothered me about the otherwise thoughtful and critical piece was that it accepted too easily that those images should be disseminated at all as an effective way of bringing wider attention and empathy to the violence in Gaza. The piece too earnestly concluded that the mainstream display of these images—in and on major news outlets—would give them a better chance of affecting the change that their circulation on social media insisted on. By putting them in a better context than the addictive and doomscrolling space of social media, the images could demonstrate their true power. As someone whose stomach turned and skin crawled just merely reading the descriptions of these images, I couldn’t agree that context was the primary issue of the existence of these images on our screens and in our feeds. As Sharpe notes in In the Wake about the circulation of images of “extraordinary cruel and unusual violences enacted on Black people,” this approach of display and attention “does not lead to a cessation of violence,” but more often than not repeats it.⁴ In Drylongso, Pica is committed to taking images of the black boys and men in her community as they are living, in their quotidian glory, before tragedy strikes. As such, her witnessing, her regard, insists that the way to counter conditions of domination and violence is not to merely attend to the horrors that destroy lives, but to attend to those around us before violence strikes. That way, Smith suggests, alongside Sharpe and many others, violence may be reduced if not always avoided.

Other things I watched and read this week: I watched Taxi Driver for the first time as prep for our class watching and discussing Arthur Jafa’s “*****” (2024) (”pronounced” as REDACTED); hungover and extremely tired on July 4th, I cackled over Netflix’s A Family Affair, starring Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman, who should be the only people in charge of reviving the rom-com genre; I read and presented on Toni Morrison’s Jazz, the second book in her Beloved trilogy (I hope to write more on this soon); I basically swallowed whole Emily Henry’s latest, Funny Story, the perfect thing for when the heat turns everything to mush; and I became a dedicated reader of Emily Sundberg’s

Feed Me

, which keeps me informed on what The Guardian and Popbitch cannot.

the author (and her dying manicure) enjoy lemon ricotta ice cream before going inside to write this email

1. RAFTM = Reader and Friend to Me; borrowed from RAFTM Rachel Tashjian.

2. In her Goodreads review, Lucy Dacus wrote that July’s work “always makes [her] feel like [she’s] allowed to exist,” and that feels true for me too.

3. Thank you to RAFTM Jess Kasiama for recommending this one many months ago.

4. I’m constantly returning to Zoé Samudzi’s piece on images of COVID deaths that also addresses this particular problem of the visual address. I also mused on this topic last spring following a panel featuring Hannah Black, Cameron Rowland, and Fred Moten, moderated by Samudzi.