books, movies, and more of april
It is currently April as I write this which is strange as the previous iterations have never been written during the same month. Perhaps this speaks to my illustrious career of being in-between things and the abundance of free time I have on my hands! I spent most of the month morose in Sydney, wandering familiar streets asking how they get smaller and smaller and smaller with each visit, and lamenting that the last-minute trip was not a cure-all for whatever bout of mid-20s indecision I’ve been seemingly plagued by since late October 2023.
One week into the trip I stumbled upon the Louise Bourgeois exhibit which tilted my world on its axis. The singular paragraph I tried writing about it eventually ended up becoming a sprawling stream of consciousness that I hastily hit publish on here. Her work is enchanting and brutal, and the surprise experience of seeing it up close was life-changing in the most peculiar of ways. The work lingers inside me now, as if one of her statues dug its nails into my skin and buried itself underneath. It is not often that I think about an exhibit so much but I don’t think a single day has passed where I haven’t thought about it in some context. Since I spent so much of the month traipsing in, out and around galleries, there were lots of affecting pieces I saw over the course of the month. Some of these included the following works:
Boekan katjoeng (Not the ‘katjoeng’ — the savage), 2019 by Jumaadi at the MCA that was spectacular, this piece from the MCA website details the meaning behind the art and I particularly like this quote from Jumaadi’s artist statement ‘They are letters and postcards without a sender, and without a destination.’
The entire room dedicated to Kevin Gilbert at the MCA but most notably the reproduction of his poem Kiacatoo (1988) and the linocut Colonising Species (1994). The poem was printed on the front-facing wall as you walked in and is a telling of the Kiacatoo massacre of Wiradjuri People that is graphic and confronting. The whole room forces you to slow down and look, gives you pause.
Destiny Deacon’s Waiting for Goddess (1994) is another piece that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I saw it. This quote from her ‘she says she uses dolls in her work because she feels sorry for them.’ is beautiful and I think captures a sentiment about why dolls in art are so alluring to me.
Less art-related but other Sydney-specific highlights included the vegan salmon bagel from Shift Eatery that I’ve dreamt about once a week since I had it for the first and last time in November 2022, the ‘60s mustard wool skirt suit two piece from Potts Point Vintage that I very bravely did not try on and the small press art book shelves at Kinokuniya!
books
On the plane I read Reunion by Fred Ulhman. It’s a very slim novella that recounts the friendship between Hans, a young Jewish boy, and Konradin, an aristocratic Nazi. The prose is precise and situates the reader directly into Hans’ mind — there’s so much sorrow and longing in his wanting a friend, feverish desperation in trying to have Konradin become his friend, boyish delight once Konradin is his friend and then absolute heartbreak in their estrangement and his shunning at school. It’s stuck in my mind longer than the few pages would suggest, but mostly for its passage that firmly denounces zionism. This line in particular: “My father abhorred Zionism. The whole idea seemed to him stark mad. To claim Palestine after two thousand years made no more sense to him than the Italians claiming Germany because it was once occupied by the Romans.” I have also kept coming back to the following poems: I think destiny is the one who is who’s writing me a poem by Omar Moussa, God calls me again by Basman Derawi, The Man and His Girlfriend Who Argued All of Last Night and Now Stand at a Pharmacy in R City to Buy Medication for Headaches by Dalia Taha, What If? by Basman Derawi, The Man Who Writes Newspaper Articles While The Trees Disappears and No One Listens by Dalia Taha, and I cannot write a poem about Gaza by Tusiata Avia. These poems are harrowing and beautiful and transformative. Dalia Taha’s poetry will stick inside your head forever. This line:
‘their home
is collapsing over them while their flesh
grows over their flesh.’
from The Man Who Writes Newspaper Articles While The Trees Disappears and No One Listens is one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I’ve read — her words are magnetic and layered and rich in their complexity. I also urge everyone to read We Are Not Numbers which is a youth-led Palestinian project in the Gaza Strips that tells stories of Palestinians beyond the numbers in the news; I’ve linked two poems that Basman Derawi has written for them above. His poetry is also such a force, the kind that torpedos you, unsettles you, rewires you, haunts you.
Leading up to the Ockham’s I read both Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton and Audition by Pip Adam. Both were excellent but Audition felt out of this world — literally! I hope it wins. It is the kind of work you come across very, very rarely. As time has passed, the enormity of Nothing To See has also settled with me — it’s a book I can’t stop thinking about. Pip Adam is a writer I can’t stop seeking out the work of. Her work is inventive, daring in form, true to its ethics, diligent in its kindness, committed to its characters and concerned with using literature as a tool to exploring politics and asking in the margins what we can do to change. She might be the very, very best writer the country has right now. But more on that when I talk about Audition below…
I began Birnam Wood on the plane — on loan from a friend — and wasn’t sure what to expect of it. I suppose it may be terrible to admit but I hadn’t read any Eleanor Catton before — aside from Emma (2020)! But her style is addictive and I easily fell inside of it, swept up by the grandiosity and fast-paced nature and stream of consciousness imitation. In some ways, I thought it was a perfect partner to Lioness — political but in a very ‘liberal’, left-wing, upper-class sort of way — but instead of dissecting the wealthy, it was dissecting the politics of the well off youth. It was interesting because there’s so much conviction in the politics of Mira, Shelley and Tony — I believe that they believe in the work — and yet there’s also minimal discussion as to why they believe in the work or their politics or what it means to them at all. It’s like there’s this grand idea, a shape they all believe in, rights and wrongs they abide by (or don’t!) but there’s no real politics in the politics. That is not to say the novel itself doesn’t have clear politics — there’s a real critical lens towards tech billionaire bros and surveillance and selling out and politicians (in a sense) and mining. I liked the book but I don’t think I loved it until the very, very end. I suppose it had the potential to be a controversial ending but I avoided all the press around the novel upon its debut because I had high hopes of reading it around its release. For me, the ending elevates the book from being very good to being perfect. It’s confident and it’s big and it’s explosive and (spoiler) what other way could this mess end in other than mass murder? It’s melodrama! I also think there is this really lovely and subtle pace of catapulting the book to that ending so that when it happens, it is unexpected but not surprising. There’s this low-level persistent undercurrent of dread and disbelief at all the events that unfold that the event fits neatly inside the plot. I think the ending also helped to support some of the more sardonic, sarcastic elements of the book — i.e., the Sir Owen (!) whole bit felt less hokey to me because the sense of silliness was retained right up until the very end. And I say ‘silliness’ loosely because Catton captures this sense of utter conviction through out each character — everyone believes so utterly in what they believe that you almost believe it, too, even when it’s absurd and out of reach. I loved it, and I love an ending that is unafraid of being messy or unpredictable or leaving loose ends. More novels that commit to endings that aren’t endings in the typical polished sense, please!
I read Audition next. It is an absolute tour de force: unusual, unexpected, playful and sincere. It is surreal but very, very rarely did I find the world or characters or text elusive. In many moments, the surreal is not surreal but very ordinary, and very brutal and mundane, and rooted in such reality you want to recoil in shame. Reading Audition is like having a set of keys in your palm and you don’t know yet which door each key opens but you know that you will because you have all the keys in your hand and you could try to open up every single door until you get it right. It is very much a once-in-a-lifetime type of book. The writing is transformative. The themes of hope are abundant and plentiful. There’s also a lot of exploration around power and who has it and who exerts it and what does it mean and do we hold it over each other and how do we hold it over each other. The less you know going in, the richer the experience is. But — !! It would be amiss to not mention how crucial & central prison abolishment is to the heart of the novel. It is extraordinary to read in fiction. It is extraordinary to be along for the ride of what is a strange, surreal world investigating lack of agency and then open your eyes and realise it has been code or subtext for prisons and then be situated within a prison and then to be back in space but then you’re somewhere new where the opportunities are endless and agency is back in the hands of people who have not been afforded agency or choice in a long time. It is such a beautiful book. And a difficult book to read, too. I think this last section — in this new world — is the most strange position of space you encounter in the book, and it is because it is so full of possibility. I also loved the use of rom-coms in the dialogue for the backstories each character was taught about themselves — so interesting and fantastical and says so much about the way we view culture / communication through the lens of media and art (much to chew on!).
In a very cool bookstore, post a very mediocre vegan almond croissant, I found a book I had been wanting to read since it was released last year. To be quite honest, I felt utterly compelled by the cover reveal (Mannequin and Sculpture by Josef Sudek and baby pink! It’s gothic and romantic!) first, then I read the blurb and knew it would be for me. So, finally, I had found it — Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes, recently published posthumously some 50 years after Taubes’ death. It is a magnificent, gloomy and stupendously funny book. A dream book! The first section — Lament for Julia — is delicious and terrifying in equal measure. We follow I for 100-or-so pages, a devil-like creature living inside the eye of a small girl and then woman called Julia, as he traces the highs and the lows (many, many lows in I’s eye) of Julia’s life. It is sardonic and scathing and sour. The writing writhes in perversion. I wants to control Julia, mould Julia, love Julia! But Julia can’t follow orders or know I exists. She is constantly fucking up her life. She is a difficult child, a difficult teenager and a difficult married woman—according to I! It is such an absurd, gothic concept that I simultaneously exists inside Julia but is also not Julia, and that I carries mature thoughts and wants to exert control and yet there is never any evidence that I is real or has a tangible effect on Julia’s life. There are moments where I blends seamlessly into Julia — being her when she has ‘disappeared’ — but there is absolutely no evidence of this. It’s fantastic. The prose is delicious, the kind you’d like to take a bite of. Here’s a taster: ‘But enough of the melancholy topic of the cunt.’ Okay, yes, best line of literature! The text probes you, excites you, disgusts you — it is so beyond fabulous. Julia herself is such an intriguing character, only ever seen through the eyes of this mysterious, ghost-like figure who loathes her and loves her — she is voracious and slightly vapid and so, so, so hungry for something outside of her reach. I think it is easy to read the narrator I as a man because so much of the power I wants to wield over Julia is around the idea of keeping her perfect in ways that are tied to traditional femininity — beautiful, sexless, polite and in a good ‘career’. I think it’s more interesting that I is genderless / spiritless / nameless. I could be Julia. I could just be a perverse demon. I could be an inner monologue of self loathing. I could be an external figure speaking on misogynistic ideas or ideals. And the very idea of this misogyny is so strange within the text because it straddles traditional ideas of misogyny and then completely subverts them while ultimately remaining inside of them because the subversion is always this strange sexual desire. It is so bizarre. The second half of the book are short stories — some are terrific, some are boring. For me, the highlights were Dr Rombach’s Daughter and Easter Visit and The Gold Chain. All have elements of strange psychoanalysis or weird sexuality that pushes traditional boundaries or obsessive / slightly off-kilter romance.
In April, I also read my very first Joyce Carol Oates. Night, Neon: Tales of Mystery and Suspense. I liked it and feel inclined to read more but also closed the book with the impression that the stories were almost too polished for my liking. JCO has perfected a craft down to the very bone, which removes some of the messiness and lavish language that I enjoy from fiction. The stories were almost sterile. I liked them but I didn’t feel wowed by them or overcome with passion for them or emotion for them. I really like Detour, the first short story, which is about an older woman who drives her car off a ditch and wanders into a stranger’s house which a stranger tells her is her house…it’s unsettling and horrible in a way that sends a slight chill down your spine, because, what is going on? Reading between the lines I suppose she has dementia but it’s inconsequential to the story itself. I LOVED Curious which is the very second story, so you can see I thought I was off to a very good start, which is about a very wealthy, reclusive writer who becomes obsessed with saving a woman who works at the supermarket he frequents. It is gross and builds in suspense and reminds me a lot of Bret Easton Ellis / Emily Perkins’ short story (that I unfortunately can’t find the name of!) that is about a young man who barks like a dog in clown school.
I never really track what essays I read during the month because I dip in and out of so many but Tavi Gevinson’s latest zine (!!!!!!!) was phenomenal; I’m always vaguely thinking about autofiction and have at least three half-finished pieces that touch on the subject, so reading this (as is anything she ever writes) was such a delight. There are so many interesting strands about fame, self-as-character and fan worship packed into it. It’s one-third Taylor Swift-theory, one-third dissection-of-fame-and-how-fame-creates-characters, and one-third email chain that reads as fanfiction.
movies
Before diving into this section I would like to say that I don’t have very much to say on most of the movies I watched this month. It’s like I was a sponge when watching: absorbing and absorbing and absorbing but the absorption went nowhere critical or intelligent. I’ve written and rewritten this section so many times its lost meaning & I have had nothing really interesting to say about anything I watched.
Rewatched Palo Alto — a movie that I was so obsessed with in adolescence & introduced me to Blood Orange (slay) — and holds up if you view it through the lens of a cultural artefact of 2012—13. It’s much more bleak than I recall, and I guess the majority of my impression at the time of its release revolved around the cool, bleak, vapid imagery that blew up on social media (Tumblr) because of its nihilistic adolescent tone akin to Skins. There is something slick, sweet and romantic embedded within the film, and it captures this acute sense of boredom, restlessness and detachment that feels prominent when you come-of-age. The scenes are all aimless and dreamy underpinned by this sweeping small-scale sense of dread that builds and builds but reaches no ultimate crescendo, despite half the actual plot revolving around disturbing scenes of sexual assault. I wish it did more with Emily.
I watched The King of Staten Island half-awake on a drizzly Friday morning. It was probably very fine — sometimes funny but ultimately forgettable. It has such a strange plot that vaguely annoyed me — like literally why do you care who your mum dates and then why do you become BFFs with him the moment he isn’t dating her?
Then, I watched Fried Green Tomatoes which I vehemently hated so much that I had forgotten that I even watched it until pulling up my notes app list. Its biggest crime was being boring. I just didn’t care about any of it except for the little old lady — she was iconic.
I watched The Departed for the first time ever and came away mostly underwhelmed — the middle to end section lost me — but I loved the dual characters whose positions were reversed. Immediately following, I watched Man on Fire which I expected to dislike but didn’t, although the middle to end section also lost me. I guess my action movie experience is limited; I’m not a fan of fight sequences or nonsensical retribution via a sullen hero — it doesn’t work for me! But what did work for me here were the emotional beats between John Creasy and Pita, they worked enough that I was sobbing during the ending.
I then had the choice between Hurricane or an Ethan Hawke movie that I’ve already forgotten the name of. I chose wrong. Ten minutes into the Ethan Hawke movie I was begging to turn it off — honestly maybe one of the very worst things I’ve ever seen, ever. I can see the awful green tint of the screen. Anyway, this is all to say that Hurricane was then put on and I was immediately enchanted. Oh my god. Incredible. No words. I had never really gotten the appeal of Bob Dylan before watching this either but the way Hurricane is worked into the film had me so hooked that I quickly became like obsessed and could see the appeal. The costume design was also so fabulous, as is the black and white opening sequence. Gorgeous. Loved it. No notes.
Casino was fine, enjoyable, fun but nothing that has really inspired me to say anything about it. I thought the same about A Bronx Tale, New Jack City and Lord of War. I saw Colours and hated it so, so, so, so immensely. I saw Alpha Dog and felt sad. I just don’t know if I have anything intelligent to say about any of these movies? There was thought-provoking material but my thoughts were not provoked. I saw Monkey Man and honestly thought it was kind of a messy narrative that felt like it was trying to do a billion things but enjoyed it! The violence was surprisingly violent. I paid a sliver of attention as Catch Me If You Can was on but missed the ending.
Lots of love,
Ruby xxx