Jung dudes and Ozon boys
Coverage Check 07/2021: Post Alt Lit, post autofiction, totally out of touch!
Nico Walker would rather be caught jacking off or watching porn than talk about writing a book. Or rather that was how he felt when he was in prison and his book had just been published, resulting in an Esquire profile that brought attention to him from other inmates. He was popular in jail, he said in his Aquarium Drunkard chat, although it’s hard to imagine anywhere he’d be anything but. He was “hard for Finnegan’s Wake” while on anti-depressants, but now seems them as counterproductive to writing.
Jon Lindsey’s promo tour continued throughout July, with interviews published in The Southwest Review and Juked. He wrote “raunchy plays” in elementary school, we learn in the former, to be performed by his classmates. In the latter, he comes out as a “Jung dude” and relays how at a reading he almost rolled in broken glass to attain posthumous remembrance [I’ll die on this hill, but someone needs to start a scene report on US book events]. He talks about the pressure he felt to write temporally close the experience, so that he doesn’t forget. Now, no longer bound by a desire to share the “anguish”, he’s ready to offer a more “complete picture”.
What transpires through both interviews is that Body High was a labour of love involving some of the most brilliant minds writing today: Sam Pink, Blake Butler, Bud Smith and most of all Allie Rowbottom (who not only helped Lindsey improve the manuscript, but also reach a deeper understanding of himself) are just some of the writers credited with helping him throughout the editing process. Cory Bennett, Kelby Losack, Big Bruiser Dope Boy, Troy James Weaver and Sam Pink excel at minimalism, according to Lindsey. He believes most writers should opt for “fewer words” (a consequence of the internet, he asserts) to move readers to consider what’s been left unsaid. Maximalist language is the domain of romanticism, or of Expat Press. He considers the movement’s revival to be imminent: “We are entering a new period of Romanticism.” What would be more romantic than him bringing back his so-called raunchy plays for his new set of friends to perform?
“This must be what real art feels like.”
In firsts, Daniel Clemens brought his film sensibility to i-D in the form of a major retrospective look at Brad Renfro’s finest moment and Larry Clark’s film Bully, for which he spoke with Clark himself along with various members of cast and crew to mark the film’s 20th anniversary. Reading it made me think of Justin E.H. Smith’s latest on the “untenability of the boundary between spectatorship and participation.”
It’s not Euphoria, said the casting director, who had to go to skateparks and backyards to observe teens in action to cast the film. Everyone seems in agreement that Stahl and Renfro’s casting, which you’d expect to be the opposite way around, was what made the film great. Stahl wishes, in retrospect, he had grounded the performance more in the psychology of Bobby Kent’s possible homosexuality. Clark managed to inject some into the script, citing the scene where Renfro’s character is dancing in his boxers at a gay club.
Through these interviews, Clemens uncovers onset romances: “Everybody was just partying and having sex with each other,” said actor Leo Fitzpatrick. There was also a lot of drama [a lot of it coming down to the notorious Bijou Phillips]. The experience of filming wasn’t all that pleasant and cast members interviewed here come across as having recovered from intense trauma. But coming away from reading this, it’s impossible not to look at Brad Renfro as too pure, too beautiful for this world, similar to how contemporaries of Neal Cassady viewed him with a halo around him.
Olympics discourse ran rampant but the only interesting tidbit [except the pics of the beautiful victorious Russian gymnasts] came from Ryan Petersen.
I stand by my assertion that they should be cancelled and revived as a Greek-set free-from-sponsorship low-key affair with oiled up hotties competing in the nude or semi-nude to be crowned with an olive wreath upon victory.
For ArtReview, Philippa Snow XOXO’ed the new Gossip Girl, which she sees as a shell of its former self, lacking the savagery of the original.
Yelena Moskovich can’t define the rhythm of her writing. It’s similar to the experience of feeling in love with someone you haven’t yet met, she says in an LA Review of Books interview, an experience every teenager has had, the experience of loneliness that gives birth to the rhythm. She emphasises kids’ freedom from “preconceptions of narrative” as a method for writing (“I’m like a kid who wants to play.”) and takes a stand against what she refers to as “imposed continuity”, a structural choice issued to writers mandating that nothing is out of place. “What if things fall out of place?” she asks and calls for a looser definition of continuity. For Moskovich, it comes down to language. She considers English more freeing than others, because it isn’t tied to a national identity that it has to reflect and represent. Her reverence for “utmost honesty” is rooted in her interest in the Russian canon and Slavic culture, ever melancholic, ever aware of the inevitable badness we all carry inside. Dishonesty “is worse than badness”, she says, a form of abjection that may just be unforgivable.
Rob Doyle, the proclaimed enfant terrible of Irish letters, stopped by the Independent to offer his thoughts on the island’s flourishing literary scene in the wake of a variety of journals popping up throughout lockdown - among them Tolka Journal, to which he contributed a piece that’s Threshold’s matter-of-fact continuation. He considers these journals as fundamental for writers to flex their muscles and get their ideas out to the world, citing Tangerine, Winter Papers, Banshee, Crannog and The Dublin Review [the Summer issue of which he has also contributed a piece to] as examples.
The Irish have developed a brief history of discovering writers through some of their prestigious magazines, from Colin Barrett to Kevin Breathnach to Kevin Barry. Even the ubiquitous Sally Rooney cut her teeth publishing shorts before landing a contract. Doyle believes that if you don’t write (that is when you have a novel locked inside of you), it will “twist you up inside.” I guess then Autobibliography is his involuntary act of releasing whatever is inside him (?).
Sam Riviere is against poetry groups or the concept of a poetry community, which he doubts exists to begin with. A poet, according to Riviere, exists by definition on the margins, which gives them the critical distance from the “main social flow” to offer interesting viewpoints. He spoke with The Believer following the publication of his debut novel Dead Souls, which is set at the Waterloo Bridge Travelodge bar [where mid-decade a Grindr hookup told me he’d pay good money to see me in porn. “Ditch your job.”]. Riviere believes that becoming “isolated and unreachable” can only ever be positive for an artist. It’s unclear whether he’s suggesting that a solitary existence enables greater clarity of observation, or something else entirely. He calls Thomas Bernhard a “superspreader”, the sort of writer who produces more and more writers. He himself was “infected” after reading My Prizes and claims that some stories generally are “highly contagious”. He never specifies which or if a universal definition is even possible.
Previously in didn’t-have-sex-in-high-school, sensitivity readers got coverage on The Spectator via Zoe Dubno. They advertise their suffering and adversity, she writes, in order to land what are effectively low-paid freelance editing gigs, offering publishers an opportunity to “cancel-proof” books from authors who are writing about experiences outside their own. Everyone should stick to whatever identity they’re proclaiming in their Twitter bio and never, ever step out of it, seems to be the reasoning.
Dubno talks of an editor who believes that men writing women is offensive because they’re not women themselves and can therefore never understand the experience of being a woman. Isn’t that the main issue with people who didn’t fuck in high school? They’re permanently offended and will never attain anything beyond feeling forever offended.
Dubno believes that this is the result of the “obsession with depicting reality and lived experience pushed to its logical conclusion.” She calls to question how the individual experience can accurately reflect the collective, before deciding she wouldn’t use a sensitivity reader herself.
I’ll side with Dustin Illingworth (“I don’t want a lesson or a moral. I don’t want to heal or be healed.”), who I imagine has a lot to say both on this and the “go to therapy dummy” madness that swept Twitter.
Angelicism proclaimed Alt Lit extinct, while Our Struggle predicted the rise of Dirtbag Lit. Post-Fence, John Phipps shared his excitement over Leila Slimani’s next arc, The Country of Others, the first in a planned trilogy, which he deemed “a big leap forward in novelistic vision” for The Times. I’ll never understand why everyone seemed so turned off by her debut, but then again I considered 100 Strokes high art for about a decade.
Benjamin Moser reviewed the new Pessoa biography before pulling the plug on his Substack. He considers the latest effort to define the writer who’s typically seen as beyond definition due to his chaotically constructed literary world populated with various heteronyms illuminating; this is primarily down to its success at showing the writer’s obsession with becoming a published author and in not shying away from addressing his homosexuality. But he sees the book as evading the more difficult question of Pessoa’s alcoholism, which he considers indisputable fact. What is the link then between his homosexuality [especially as he apparently died unfucked] and his love for the bottle? Are these connected to his inability to finish projects and his “splintered sense of self”?
Jake Nevins reviewed the “clash between the suits and the sluts” for The Nation. Huw Lemmey pondered how the queer canon can recapture sensuality, beauty and escapism, citing the works of Genet and Baldwin as examples of sexual exhilaration and a sense of freedom. His answer is the meaninglessness of queer sex. “A youthful glimpse of a fresh white cotton sock, the smell of smoke on the breath from painted lips…”
Sex is back, if Cannes is any indication. “Sexuality is the most essential element of nature,” said Paul Verhoeven in an interview following his girl-on-girl flick Benedetta. On a scale from 1 to Elizabeth Berkley orgasming in the pool, how excited are you to watch?
The festival was jam-packed with sex-on-the-brain flicks, all sensual smoke and gazes, from Norwegian The Worst Person in the World to Austrian Great Freedom to Finnish Compartment 6. Sharing cigarettes, exchanging smoke, breaths, drawing closer and closer together.
Might we be in for a new age of erotic films?
Till they’ve arrived to London screens, I’ll be here reading and rereading odes to Rohmer, this month on Artillery.
[I also can’t wait for Sebastian Castillo’s “The Cigarette Painter” chosen by Ottesa as the runner-up for BOMB’s 2021 Fiction Prize.]
In her newsletter, Angela Nagle lamented the end of permanence as a result of people’s relentless geographic movements. The rootlessness of our age, she argues, has caused complete and utter destruction to culture, with all forms of artistic production in free-fall. “The standards have plummeted,” she says. “Today nobody is creating even good quality pop culture.” To suggest that she’s been the prime thinker of my 20s is an understatement. This is, as far as I recall, the first time I find myself disagreeing with her. Rootlessness, for Ireland specifically, has seen the creation of some of the most beguiling works of literature over the last decade. I’m not Rob Doyle’s groupie without good reason. He’s hardly alone. Kevin Breathnach’s Tunnel Vision remains among the most guttural books I’ve ever read. Like Threshold, it would have never been possible without the writer’s ability to travel. Their departures haven’t exactly bashed the Irishness out of either of them. Colin Barrett’s Young Skins, much more rooted in the Irish locale, was written at a time of mass immigration, meaning the rootlessness of the time didn’t stop him from offering his beautiful words on masculinity, violence and vulnerability. Roisin Kiberd was put forward as “voice of her generation” following a debut which drifts from light to darkness like the lens of a Gaspar Noe film.
Pop culture is in decline, no one’s denying that. But were the most mainstream offerings ever good to begin with? And is this the reality all over the world, or is this issue specific to the English language? Francois Ozon is now as mainstream as they come [unless your definition of mainstream requires $1bn ticket sales at the box office]. His films aren’t masterpieces. They’re not even necessarily good. But he taps into parts of the human psyche and human intention or desire that are relatable to a wide enough audience to constitute pop [Water Drops being the prime exception, still fucked up cos of that film]. Regardless of the criticisms I am always ready to pass on his films, I enjoy every minute. I can’t get enough of his characters’ lust. Maybe this is down to always wishing I was an Ozon boy. I just don’t buy that rootlessness has wiped out culture. Charles Jeffrey left Scotland but after all these years it is still alive in his collections. Perhaps I am singling out the outliers.
I agree that the behemoths that control marketing and advertising budgets [Penguin Random House, The Walt Disney Company] are failing to give people fictions or fashions that set their minds on fire. But to suggest rootlessness as a cause seems insincere, a way of propelling what has become Nagle’s central argument over the years. The problem, as I see it, is the relentless, never-ending consolidations across cultural industries that have become chokeholds on artistic freedom. Look elsewhere. There’s plenty of exciting voices tirelessly working away (I don’t think I have to show where my artistic sensibilities lie at this stage, essentially all the writers I’ve been writing about in this column and others on the same wavelength I will be writing about soon). Writing outside the main flow has and continues to enable them to try out different forms to experiment with. And as difficult as it may seem from where we currently are, the culture wars will end, the monoculture will collapse in spectacular fashion, taking with it all the garbage pushed to audiences starved for something real. And artists like Breathnach, Kiberd, Elizabeth Aldrich, Honor Levy, Elle Nash, Blake Middleton et la will be right there ready to at long last take their place.
Don’t ever tell me the vibes in NYC are off.