What I've been reading and watching
Irish novels, audiobooks, and rape revenge
What I’ve been reading
Books
It’s been an Irish autumn for me. A friend gave me a trio of Claire Keegan’s slim volumes, as they like to call them, and I couldn’t put them down: Foster, So Late in the Day, and Small Things Like These (now a film, which I haven’t yet seen). While all Keegan’s novels and stories are melancholic page turners, each a keen and bluish dissection of misogyny, Small Things—set in County Wexford in the 1980s—is the superior specimen. She really hit her stride with Bill Furlong, the upwardly mobile son of an unwed mother who discovers the local convent’s training school for girls is a Magdalene laundry, because he is somehow a good man, and you really believe it. Inspired by the recent fanfare around Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, I also listened to Conversations with Friends on audiobook. It was as dishy, diverting, and (on one or two occasions) humblingly relatable as I remember Normal People being1. Keegan and Rooney are a funny pair of spoons: the former does postmortems of patriarchy, while the latter’s characters are as preoccupied with interpersonal right-doing within the big P as they are with creating the conditions for it2.
From Ireland, I bopped over to the Caribbean, Florida, and New York City for Nights in Aruba, which took a little of the shine off Andrew Holleran for me, to my surprise. The self-centered perspectives of Dancer from the Dance and The Beauty of Men provide both charming and disenchanting looks into twentieth-century gay life with protagonists who are both saturated in and exiled from their own desire. Nights, which draws on the author’s life—from his upbringing in Aruba, to his military service during the Vietnam War, to his strained and claustrophobic relationships with his parents and sister—while often beautiful, and even emotionally incisive, suffers from a main character whose defining characteristic is avoidance. Maybe I’d have more patience for it if I found Holleran’s stand-in, a pathologically apolitical young man who prefers his family’s abuse to almost any other relationship, to be sympathetic, but his ennui wore on me. I can only take so much (literary) masochism before losing interest.
This whole audiobook thing is because I’ve started rowing four or five days a week, so I need something to listen to that isn’t Democracy Now! because I refuse to be alone with my thoughts for even an instant. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights3, an old favorite, was only 99¢ on one app or another, so I’ve been working my way through that, although this go-around has been admittedly more of a slog. Could be the medium; could be that, due to my advanced age and thousands of hours of therapy, the tragedy now outweighs the romance. When I get sick of all the little voices the audiobook reader has to affect so I can tell the difference between Cathy and Cathy, Jr., I switch over to whatever film studies nonfiction is free or immediately available on Libby, like Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey or one of the many about 2001: A Space Odyssey4.
My goal is to have read 40 books by the end of the year, and while I don’t think I’ll quite make it, I’m doing my level best with what’s on my night stand: Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (so far funny, good-hearted, and ambitious), Anton Solomonik’s forthcoming Realistic Fiction (more on this fascinating story collection to come), Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Georg Lukács on Lenin, and my Gary Indiana backlog. Pray for me, if you’ve ever prayed5.
What I’ve been watching
Film
A few weeks ago, Nes took me to Film Forum to see Shuchi Talati’s splendid Girls Will Be Girls (2024). While I initially resisted—I’ve never been a fan of coming-of-age in any medium—Girls’ Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) and the stellar script won me over. Set in a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills, Girls follows high-achieving Mira’s disruptive romance with another student, which her mother (a smokin’ hot Kani Kusruti) supports at first ambivalently, and then inappropriately. To say that Girls gets emotionally incestuous with it wouldn’t be inaccurate, but I don’t want to sensationalize what is, at its core, a gentle yet fearless movie about what it means for a girl to be a grown-up.
Some other 2024 releases I saw recently:
The Substance, which was so boring and pointless I wanted to walk out. Everyone who enjoys this film as anything other than a smorgasbord of practical effects is a fool! What a waste of Demi Moore.
Heretic, which was good, clean fun. I agree with pretty much everything Fran had to say about it, but you really do have to be a Hugh Grant fan for it to work, I think.
Desire Lines, a hybrid documentary that Anthology Film Archives screened for its Narrow Rooms series. The narrative sections left a lot to be…desired…but the transfag interviews were really lovely. Plus, Nes and I got in for free because we’re clocky.
Plus some older fare:
I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982). The election was still looming over the BAM screening I went to with Jade in October. Spritely, amber-voiced James Baldwin returns to the American South to talk with old comrades from the civil rights movement, people who where there at the March on Washington and risked their lives on freedom rides, protests, and sit-ins. Directors Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley6 intercut their recollections with archival photographs and footage of profound suffering and humiliation: a white woman dumps a jar of ketchup onto a Black man’s head at a lunch counter; firefighters turn hoses on human beings that strip bark from trees and clothing from skin (pinioned against a building, a man shields the bodies of smaller people with his own). Baldwin joins a former teacher who tells the story of being incarcerated and tortured, along with her classroom of children, for protesting school conditions in Jimmy Carter’s Georgia (Carter, who is still alive at, like, 100, is these days hailed as a hero while his handlers cast his vote in the presidential election between genocidaires); as a new generation of schoolchildren learn her story, someone in the row behind me sobbed. I don’t have the luxury to be afraid, one man tells Baldwin while speaking of his youth as a political prisoner, because my grandmother lived through so much more, and her grandmother before her; now older, he devotes his life to teaching children, and his gentleness with them is almost destabilizing. The exhausted disillusionment of Baldwin’s interviewees is certainly not inspiring, in the sanitized way we like to use that word these days, but it is…motivating? Encouraging? I don’t know. Though carefully and boldly done, Grapevine is not a pleasant movie. In fact, it’s harrowing. But I needed to see it because it’s proof that courage is real, and that people have it all the time. Through it all, there is Baldwin’s sensitive eye and queenly warmth, his easy but nervous smile, his voluminous silences and insistent, even overwrought, speeches. He hugs easily, befriends curious children, offers his subjects sympathy without asking them to lie to him or to themself. Many of them believe integration failed; none have rose-colored glasses about the incoming Reagan administration. In the face of all this, is the great author cynical? I do not know. I do not think so.
Starship Troopers (1997): Of his fascist space fantasy, Paul Verhoeven said: “All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are [the characters] crazy?’” It’s difficult for me to tap into the shock and horror America’s great Dutch portraitist sought to elicit: I don’t think the ultraviolent teen soldiers are “crazy” at all, even though I know they are. I’m not really sure why I’m not crazy in the same way, to be perfectly honest.
Foxy Brown (1974): My favorite fun fact about Pam Grier is that she came in second in a beauty contest in her hometown of Denver. Breathtakingly beautiful and almost studiously badass, Grier’s best-known contribution to blaxploitation is campier than Coffy (1973), her other big one, despite of course also being brutally, graphically violent. If you enjoy the genre, there’s a lot to love about this movie, but the script’s management of Foxy’s sexual assault, and her hilariously gruesome revenge, is one of my favorite elements. If you’re promising me rape revenge in your movie, then somebody better die—at bare fucking minimum!
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I tried to read Beautiful World, Where Are You? and got bored.
Some may attribute this to her Marxist politics, which others have questioned in light of her subject matter. I don’t really care either way because Rooney has been unambiguous about her support for Palestine and her condemnation of Israel, which is unfortunately not the majority position among a lot of these big-time authors.
All the cool girls are reading it.
A favorite film of mine now, and a favorite book of mine from childhood, in no small part because Clarke was one of the first authors to create a world in which homosexuality could be ethically neutral. Imagine that.
Another Kubrick favorite.
Who was not originally credited for her work.