Stripped, with torrents of blood
Coverage Report 10/2022: Anniversaries, adaptations and archives but crucially no Standard bangs
The Secret History’s 30th birthday publicity cycle, which began back in January, peaked this autumn with New Statesman and BBC Culture weighing in. Roisin Lanigan offered her view on the book’s long lasting impact on Prospect, zeroing in on its second act as a social media phenomenon. From Tumblr to TikTok, new generations have come to obsess over the aesthetics of intellectualism Donna Tartt became famous for three decades ago. The book’s popularity reached its climax during lockdowns which commentators perceive as part of a wider recalibration to a more Dionysian way of living in the face of life standing still.
In this newsletter’s beginnings, I was obsessed with this idea that post-lockdown society would go off the rails in a hedonistic blowout never seen before (I can’t call it till 2024). Are young people then drawn to this book only for its aesthetics (elitist schools, etc.) or are they magnetised by the darker impulses the characters display? Are we at the end of a dark romanticism (if, for nothing else, reading habits)? Barry Pierce, quoted in Lanigan’s essay, isn’t impressed by the younger generations’ fascination regardless of what it might signify: “There are people out there reading The Secret History and thinking those kids are models for how they should dress and act and what they should read… when those kids are deranged! They should all be shot!”
Reissues and reevaluations abound in publishing, so the new attention to Tartt’s debut isn’t surprising. I expect more books from the 90s to receive the audience hype treatment (my money for 2023 is on Girl, Interrupted).
Speaking of old writers you should be sinking your teeth in, Terry Nguyen introduced me to the work of Katherine Dunn through the posthumous publication of The Resident Poet, a short story about the impermanence of agency: “I could never be a professional whore. Not for long. It would be such hard work.” Obvs I’m obsessed, much like the New Yorker forever searching for tutor-pupil f***fests (will anyone ever top Alissa Nutting? Why won’t anyone else dare tread that ground?). Part of it is that at 32 I’ll never experience that particular brand of fucked up dynamic because I’m unlikely to ever be a student again. Perhaps I’ll return to Blok for boxing with Declan to approximate the push and pull of going too far and not far enough with someone who’s off limits and for whom you are in turn untouchable (well…ish. Dunn’s story doesn’t disintegrate into the bullshit moralising having its heyday at the mo, so don’t go hating on me either).
Dunn’s Toad has skyrocketed to No 1 on my list similar only to Cookie’s collected writing in the summer (2022 has been a bust for new books, soz). Dirt’s principal book pusher also got me to look into Constance DeJong. Her debut, Modern Love, is an autofiction project about identity and transformation. Guess I’ll give anything described as an orgy a shot.
From books to music, it’s been a month of anniversaries, with Xtina and Stripped, her record of reinvention, marking its 20th birthday. W Magazine published an oral history on the album, interviewing a variety of contributors who brought it to life. Baller move on Aguilera’s part to not participate. She eventually lifted her silence on Rolling Stone but somehow skipped Cruz, Soar and Get Mine, Get Yours, which together with Dirrty form the album’s wildest sequence.
In his public diary, Matthew Gasda says that “no single experience is transformative” but listening to Stripped for the first time certainly was, eclipsed twelve years later by Night Time, My Time and Ultraviolence. Or was it the collective experiences tied in my memory to that album that I have come to consider as a transformation?
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s papers and unpublished manuscripts remain without a home three years after her death, according to New York Magazine. Institutions US-wide may finally be kicked out of inaction following Choire Sicha’s missive on the online auction of the late author’s personal belongings. It isn’t surprising that the entire affair was in bad taste. Reading about it after the fact isn’t a joyride either, the people behind it looking to pull the author to pieces and auction her off for parts.
Is it possible to not romanticise Wurtzel (she “used scent…to aggressive assert her presence”)? How quickly can that dissolve into animosity? The piece takes an aggressive turn in its second half (almost an afterschool special at one point, warning against Wurtzel’s excesses), describing the writer as “putting on all the best disasters.” (In fairness, Wurtzel would have, in all probability, loved that line).
Thomas Chatterton Williams profiled Rachel Cusk, who somehow manages to come across both out of touch and at the precipice of an artistic breakthrough (you too can have one once you’ve published fifteen books which, it turns out, is how much it costs to move to Paris and buy an apartment in Le Marais). “To change artistically,” she says, “does require some breaking down of your personality and breaking down deep sediments of your identity.” She expresses disillusionment with British literary culture, the banality of events she’s had to attend to promote her books. Uprooting to France, where writers still possess cultural capital, then makes sense regardless of political fallouts.
Paul Mescal also got the profile treatment by the NYT, his PR doing it like no one else in the game. Pegged to his latest flick Aftersun, the profile offers almost no insight into the actor beyond some mere facts: he’s prioritising films by people he admires; he’s left London; he’s been to therapy. The newspaper of record seems to believe Mescal wasn’t in on it with the rugby-inspired photos shot at Clapton that melted the internet during the first lockdown, coinciding with his breakout role in Normal People. He felt “objectified” by the level and intensity of attention he received, he tells the NYT.
The Fence is bonkers for books. Isabelle Huppert’s going horror mode this spring with Dario Argento. Roisin Kiberd is writing fiction. Patrick Nathan has signed with Counterpoint Press for his sophomore novel The Future was Color, billed as a blend of Gods and Monsters and Eve Babitz: a gay Hungarian immigrant, sex scenes set in corners of working-class New York, behind the scenes shots of the Hollywood studio system. He’s now working (or rather reworking) his third (and feels “a little more in control.”).
The Standard hosted a poppers party, as reported on The Face. Corporate coopting and flattening of subcultures and cultural artefacts is unsurprising, but the fact that everyone’s willing to go along for the joyless ride still is. Breath it in, but don’t worry about the part that poppers were made for, which is fucking. Everything is an experience, but one that exists to scandalise milquetoast bored executives looking for something transgressive albeit in the safety and security of a curated event (in this instance by Bompas & Parr with proceeds going to Tom of Finland). If magazines like The Face were to be taken as an example, there seems to be no Dionysian energy circulating in London at all, everything remains almost Puritan clean.
Digging through the Vanity Fair Archives, I came across an essay published over a century ago, in which British poet Arthur Symons compared and contrasted the experience of opium and hashish. Conversely, In our so-called “privileged era”, The Face published a criticism-free event promo “to find out what the fuss was about.” Obviously the event was a dull affair, but it’s disappointing that no one even thought of a novel way of writing about the product at hand (is it really worth shelling out £100 for poppers? Do they feel different from your garden variety available for much less? Should The Standard splash out on a bottle per room? Is The Standard breathing new life into the sterilised environment of Kings Cross? STANDARD GANG BANG: I TRIED THE NEW POPPERS AND THE MOST ACROBATIC POSITIONS AND YOU SHOULD TOO). We’ve fallen far not only from Symons’ essay but from Belle de Jour’s Secret Diary and Cat Marnell snorting bath salts at work.
WORST WORDS OF THE YEAR?
“I see people on the Interview Instagram writing “This is fashion?” It’s like, fuck yeah, this is fucking fashion. What the fuck did you think was fashion? This is great. It’s incredible. Ugh, it’s so good.”
Mel Ottenberg “got into the mud at Balenciaga,” turning possibly the worst writing of 2022, surface-deep personal babbling that passes for reporting. “It’s just tea,” he writes on Demna’s SS23 show, stringing together a series of loosely connected sentences that resemble tweets and “Oh My Gods” to conclude with nothing but “it’s just what’s up.”
What’s frustrating is that Ottenberg analysed the show and identified its underpinning inspirations (McCarthy’s The Road, Fight Club, the work of Ryan Trecartin) but, much like a lot of the writing circulating now, tossed them around without building a coherent critique; everything is an experience but the experience is flat af, the conversation boring and sexless.
I don’t know what anyone who keeps insisting fashion reporting is having its moment is reading…the bar couldn’t be lower.
One exception is Bailey Slater, Editor in Chief of the fabulously named Fag Mag, who recently argued that it’s time for celebrities to be booted out of fashion on Hunger. Slater connects the induction of celebrities into fashion and the flattening impact of social media, which in combination have led to a disappearance of risk and experimentation.
In The Art of Dying, which I’ve returned to frequently over the last three years, Peter Schjeldahl says he’s never kept a diary or a journal “because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect.” An unlikely fav for me then. Gasda, in his diary again, says that “the only real wisdom I’ve ever gained has come through the exercising of my own stupidity…over and over,” and that lost time “is also time wasted, lost track of.” This strikes me as reflecting my own worst qualities. Wasting time on a diary encouraging me to record the totality of my stupidity.
Schjeldahl again: “A gay friend I approached would have nothing to do with me in that way. Well! I hooked up with a bisexual friend, but too much to drink made whatever happened a blur. So I seduced a straight friend. It was interesting. Nice, but obvious.” More time wasted, more stupidity, but isn’t this what leads to clarity? Perhaps I should take a leaf out of Cusk’s work: “One needs to have a very, very good reason for imposing ones writings and thoughts on the world…Pretty much everyone should shut up.”
FLESH, WITH TORRENTS OF BLOOD
Becca Schuh reviewed the theatre adaption of A Little Life for Dirt, finding it even more miserable than the book, robbed of the latter’s intimacy and “how friendship can, if not save a life, make it bearable and offer innumerable joys.” Ivo Van Hove’s four hour long attempt is, to Schuh, pure violence for entertainment, reducing the narrative to trauma porn, so much so that blood should receive separate billing if this review is anything to go by (I recently booked tickets to the West End version so I’ll be revisiting this in 2023).
Violence and death as entertainment have been recurring themes this month. In Numb at the Lodge, Sam Kriss turned the only interesting review of Blonde (they felt psychotic, similar to the reception of Tarantino’s treatment of Sharon Tate in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood). The crux of his argument is that the vast majority of critics built their takedowns on false premises. The film isn’t about Norman Jeane Baker but Marilyn Monroe. “There is only the character,” he says.
Kriss considers Monroe’s realm, the entertainment industry, as a fundamental (maybe even foundational) part of her nation. “The American empire entertains,” he writes, fashioned on the Roman model to keep vast populations controlled and neutralised. Everything is a performance put on for the population’s amusement. American entertainment stems from the camera and the screen, which double as weapons capable of killing the human beings they depict and capture and replacing them with someone else - an image, a mere reflection of the real person. Much like the entertainment in Rome died for audiences’ amusement, Marilyn was vanquished on Hollywood’s altar to entertain. “America is where the beautiful women die.” His review reminded me of something Philippa Snow wrote about the book the film is based on years ago: “This is the beauty of famous women — they are all too easily consumed.” Kriss is in agreement. Norma Jeane Baker was consumed by the camera, by the very image of herself, Marilyn Monroe. He considers this to be the great American epic.
If this was the price of fame reserved for the select few back in the day, Kriss is suggesting that now, through social media, we all partake in the grotesque spectacle. We all create images of ourselves “out of your own corpse” for an audience that will inevitably become larger, realer than we are and will consume us (Jeremy Fragrance is just one example).
Snow, as always, is prescient. She ends the above-mentioned review by admitting that “only once the poor, doomed girl had died did I feel myself able to put down the novel and live.”
Perhaps that’s how we should consider works of this calibre, such as A Little Life and Blonde, as glitches in the relentless entertainment machine that force us out of our amusement, propelling us to go out and live, forget the images we’re building or have built, reject their reflections and just live.
stripped is a transformative experience hard agree