Drama is an author’s best friend (especially when they lack a fashion sense!)
Coverage Report 12/2021: Mariah Kreutter laments the loss of cruel women writers as Bryan Karetnyk resurrects the Russian Proust
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Mariah Kreutter entered her Back to Basics era for Gawker and paid tribute to Jean Rhys, the author who “laid it down and paved the way” for contemporary writing “about pain and abjection” by women. Kreutter believes Rhys, although solidly safe in academic circles due to Wide Sargasso Sea, has been marginalised in the culture and sets to settle society’s debt to the author. She invokes Rhys’ four autobiographical novels (Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight) which she sees as precursors to today’s Ottessas and Sallys. “If they had been published today,” she says of the four novels, “they might be called autofiction,” borrowing generously from Rhys’s life. Her writing would be described as “sharp”, an effectively universal blanket term applied to women writing in this tradition since at least Melissa P. Rhys’ contemporary critics weren’t better exactly: one, Kreutter notes, believed her to be “enamoured of gloom to an incredible degree.” If you were to step out of the realm of fiction (or autofiction), Rhys then becomes the precursor to women artists in other mediums. “To be enamoured by gloom,” Kreutter says in her defence of Rhys, “is to dare to find your own suffering romantic.” In this sense, Rhys becomes the precursor to Lana Del Rey too. Original sad girl. Back to books, the frankness in Rhys’s writing is now reflected in the prose of Moshfegh, Rooney and Raven Leilani to name a few. The abjection, the sex. Kreutter takes issue with the fact that Rhys’s impact isn’t recognised when discussing the works of these writers. “They are rarely compared to anyone but each other,” she writes, perceiving the criticism industrial complex to be lacking in historicity and suffering from cultural memory loss. She snaps when her contemporaries hold myopic views about women finally being able to write about sex, as if Anais Nin never existed. Along with this literary amnesia, Kreutter observes something else Rhysian has been lost somewhat, and that’s cruelty, which she attributes to the cultural obsession with “ethical performance.” Women, she says, write about craving and receiving pain, but they seldom inflict it themselves. “Is that only for men?” she asks. Perhaps a true successor to Rhys will present herself soon to give us the answer.
New York City interrupted L’Officiel’s centennial celebrations by hitting them with a lawsuit for not paying writers, editors, photographers, videographers, graphic designers and illustrators propping up the enterprise with their creative labour. The City triggered the “Freelance Isn’t Free” Act on the behalf of two dozen workers, according to NYT, with Dean Kissick and Natasha Stagg among them. A year ago freelancers were already dragging the fashion rag to court in France, now it’s an international affair. L’Officiel’s US edition has systematically failed to both pay freelancers and to respond to written notices forming part of the Act since 2018, only one year after publishing its first issue. The total stood at $45,000 before the lockdown. Now the lawsuit is asking for double that and civil penalties to NYC, in addition to a court monitor being installed to ensure L’Officiel has learned its lesson. How long before they call it quits and fold? And what magazines are next?
In a blockbuster essay for The Point, Brian Patrick Eha relays his story of seeking “kindred bodies” in literary circles and their inherent reservation towards “physical culture”. Then he discovered Yukio Mishima. Conceived as a way to rectify the fact that the fiftieth anniversary of Mishima’s death largely went by unnoticed, the essay traces the author’s transformation from a “decadent romantic” to a kamikaze of beauty. Literary stardom, which he attained early on, wasn’t enough and he soon found himself desiring something else, shifting from conquering the mind to conquering the body. The ending is known to anyone who knows of the author. Eha notes, “time and again in his work, the desire for beauty and the attainment of classical perfection lead inexorably to their destruction.” In recent years, he’s witnessed a revival afforded to the most select few of writers. “He has a way of getting inside you,” says Eha, “enlisting you…in his aesthetic program, his reality hunger, his world-destruction.” What is Mishima then if not the male Didion?
The techno scene in Berlin is determined to not allow the club cycle prevalent everywhere else to threaten its current and future existence. DJs and music fans are bidding to secure UNESCO world heritage status for the capital’s techno scene as part of which venues Tresor and Berghain would become cultural landmarks and be granted protections from the ever extending claws of gentrification. Berlin’s clubbing kids learned the lessons no one anywhere else wised up to soon enough to act. Around 100 clubs have closed for good over the last decade [nothing compared to the utter obliteration of London’s nights] and back at the beginning of December existing venues were dealt another blow when the City banned dancing [“What’s next, no fucking in bars?”]. The Unesco stamp of approval would enable techno to be protected, meaning property developers and city planners could no longer price clubs out of existence.
THE SCENES
The Russian Proust, Yuri Felsen, will receive a second lease on life this spring, with translator to the hottest authors you’ve never encountered before Bryan Karetnyk bringing the author’s debut novel Deceit to English audiences for the first time, The Guardian reports. Karetnyk previously wrote about Yuri for LA Review of Books when he discovered him in the writings of another emigre he salvaged from obscurity, Gaito Gazdanov. Yuri’s first novel, Karetnyk said in 2018, would become the first instalment in a “great literary project” encompassing almost everything the author would come to write, known as The Recurrence of Things Past or A Romance with an Author. In his LARB blast, Karetnyk noted the “mysterious disappearance” of the author’s archive. Fast forward to December 2021 and both Karetnyk and Alison Flood believe it was destroyed by the Nazis following his arrest. Karetnyk previewed Felsen’s writing in a translation of his short story Extras for LARB in 2020, which beyond the setting, couldn’t have been written anywhere else other than Paris, a modernist piece recalling not only Proust but also Radiguet. The Guardian summary of the upcoming publication seems straight out of several Paris-based writers in the first half of the 20th c. from Nin to Gide: “Written in the form of a diary, and set in Paris between the wars, it sees the unnamed narrator tell of his fraught relationship with his love interest and muse, Lyolya.” Karetnyk sees him as another precursor to the current trend of autofiction, so perhaps today’s writers have someone dead to battle too now.
John Merrick went Edouard Louis for Soft Punk. Anyone who grew up in a small town will find themselves nodding along to Merrick’s desire to break out of Crewe. The city became an emblem of possibility, allowing him to become lost in the crowd, to become someone else, to re-contextualise himself. Crucially, it was an escape from the chokehold of a community that is not only watching your every move but criticising it and may even come to use it as a weapon against you, ready to claw you down for the slightest indiscretion. “It was this that came to define my relation not just to the town but also to those around me,” he writes. Precipitated by a personal and professional undoing in 2019, he found himself wishing for a sense of belonging in his past. Upon returning, he understood that unlike others, including his parents, he can enter and exit at will, with his hometown being a “waystation.” This freedom, characterised here as an escape, also doubles as a rejection of his origins and comes with a sense of loss. Via Didier Eribon, Merrick describes feelings of alienation and an unavoidable reckoning with these when he return to Crewe. No one can ever be free of their working class background, he seems to suggest, but he sets out to interrogate what he calls the “impossibility of working class achievement.” Specifically focusing on literature, he asks how a working class person can write about the experience of being working class. To narrate it, he posits, includes by default an element of distance - it can only be narrated retroactively once the writer has propelled themselves beyond their origins and has become something else: “To write about the working class today, though, it is nearly impossible to be of the working class. To find the time and outlet to be able to firstly write and then to navigate the publishing system, requires a level of cultural capital that suggests that one is no longer within the class of which one speaks.” He terms these works as novels of escape, began by D.H. Lawrence and continuing through to the 1950s with the so-called angry young men. There can ever be two kinds of escape novels, he says: one that idealises the past from the remove - and possibly alienation - of the present and the literary poverty porn enshrining a narrator-author for escaping the fate of becoming trapped in their origins like Merrick’s parents.
“Don’t leave Rob [Doyle] with a cannon for long.”
Roisin Kiberd told Otherppl she’s a few thousand words from finishing the draft of her second book, a novel about paranoia and doppelgängers. She went on the pod to discuss The Disconnect and the emotional disintegration she hit prior to writing it: “We all have ways of bringing our lives to the point of catastrophe, so that we can change them,” she says nonchalantly about her overdose. She described her debut as a journey from isolation and alienation to consciously departing that frame of mind to gain some perspective. She was diagnosed with emotional instability, now her life’s mission is to manage her emotions. “I just know now what I’m not,” she added. She wrote a book about the dangers presented by social media, discussed here centred around the question of how these platforms shape our reality off the screen (we never evolve, for one, always trapped by digital doppelgängers that reflect back at us a vision of our future based on our past). It’s hardly a dark episode. Kiberd is funny, especially when a discussion of the sartorial choices of Silicon Valley evolves into one of how Irish writers present themselves, which she finds austere at best, a not so subtle dig at some of the blockbuster authors that have come out of the island in recent years. “I want drama,” she says, “I look at pictures of Truman Capote and Joan Didion and I’m like…that’s it!” As for life beyond the internet-induced breakdown and the happy ending at the end of her book, it’s worth quoting her in full:
“I’m really taken with the most old school approach of writing an essay which is to try, to go in knowing nothing and curious and exhaust that curiosity and take it as far as you can. Be honest with yourself, with the world around you and with your reader and see where that can take you. If you are honest, then you don’t have to worry, you have nothing to hide, even if you don’t find an answer by the end, which is almost certainly what will happen. You’ll still know that you did the job as best you could and you furthered some kind of alternate reality of the written word. Literature will outlast us all and it has this sort of sense of time all its own and if you’re sincere and you interrogate and you don’t just try to meet some trend or impress people then you will have contributed to tradition and what comes next will be altered by you in some tiny way.”
Drew Zeiba interviewed Dennis Cooper for frieze to mark the author’s return to novels following a ten year absence. “I forgot how much I like writing novels,” Cooper is quoted, mentioning that after the publication of The Marbled Swarm in 2011 he felt he was done with writing. I Wished, in which he revisits the famed George Miles, was originally written in the mid-2010s and abandoned in favour of making films and creating GIF novels, an experience which has had a transformational impact on how he develops his ideas, no longer opting for novels by default. Paramount to this was his collaboration with Zac Farley, as he knew early on he was “not good” at making films. “I think I’ll probably keep writing novels,” he adds and clarifies his interest and commitment to adolescence as a theme in his work. What emerges out of his conversation with Zeiba is just how committed he has always been to his vocation: “I decided to be a serious writer when I was 15 and I was terrible for a long time. I didn’t publish my first novel until I was in my thirties.” This devotion to adolescence as a subject for his work then is not only down to its “transitional” qualities but the author’s reaction to not finding publishing success from the onset. He had to wait till adulthood to publish things he had first attempted to think through by writing about them as a teenager. In spending so much time in this frame of mind, the subject seeped so deep inside him he could never rid himself of it. “I don’t like being an adult,” he says, “it doesn’t interest me.” Is I Wished then a bit of a break away from his previous work at least in intention? The author seems to suggest so: “I was really trying to negotiate my emotions…how do I articulate this and what distance do I take? How do I find a certain distance from what I’m feeling?” Maybe he’s ready to leave the transitional phase of adolescence for the next.
PRESS CLIPPINGS
Cat Marnell teased the return of Amphetamine Logic but with Vice no longer at the height of its cultural preeminence, where would her column be best at home [hi Dirt!]? The Observer set the stage for Ottessa’s sixth release. Colin Barrett has begun the promotion cycle of his upcoming sophomore collection Homesickness. Tolka Journal returned with its second issue, featuring Roisin Kiberd, Liam Cagney and an interview with Claire-Louise Bennett. NYT’s Mariah Kreutter is reviewing films for Cultured.
Tag yourselves I’m Balkan depression (Is Greece part of the Balkans again? I can never keep up.)
In her review of Marlowe Granado’s Happy Hour, Philippa Snow considers the narrator as a performance artist. Adam Cook contextualises Benedetta within Verhoeven’s career to date. Daisy Alioto believes the promise of film is forgetting in her review of The Hand of God. On Harper’s, Rebecca Panovka says that “death is not always the worst option” [in the world of Hanya Yanagihara’s fiction].
People were angry at Anne Imhof again for spending a lot of money on her stylised performances, this time Natures Mortes at Palais de Tokyo, as if collapsing theatre, opera, dance, music, industrial design and fashion isn’t what makes her a great artist. After Sex, all I can say is that you can understand her work only if you’re present when she unveils it in front of your eyes, mesmerising you into partaking yourself [and almost getting kicked out of the Tate in the process].
So much to be excited about! And to be enamored by gloom.. I love that. That's totally Neptunian glamor.