Worms Best Reads of June 2023
CAITLIN Mcloughlin
The Jacques Lacan Foundation by Susan Finlay
Last week I finished The Jacques Lacan Foundation by Susan Finlay which has well and truly shook me out of my fiction slump. It’s such a fun book and has tbh been the perfect antidote to Gaspar Noe’s Climax which I also watched last week and which left me mildly traumatised. I wanna say it’s a kind of academic heist story/rom-com(?). It opens as protagonist and narrator Nicki Smith from Croydon, who has just rebranded as Lettuce Croydon-Smyth, begins a new job as an admin assistant at The Jacques Lacan Foundation in Austin, Texas. Nicki seems to be caught between running frantically from her past (dead dad, depressed mum, passive-aggressive little sister and her ex ‘that dick Lee’) and ’surging gloriously towards the future’. The absurdity of the main plot line in which a newly-discovered Jacques Lacan notebook is revealed and subsequently stolen at the Foundation’s annual week-long conference is a playful and mischievous satire of academia whilst making space for a thrilling celebration of the ridiculousness of language. There’s definitely a clever critique of class politics in there: how masking parts of ourselves (or completely lying about your background and upbringing) feels like the only option in a world that values a certain ’type’ of person. But it doesn’t shy from the glory of a cheesy romance narrative—two lovers gleefully running into the sunset—and I think it’s all the better for it. I kinda hate it when people describe books as raucous, but this was raucous as fuck and fucking hilarious.
Arcadia Molinas
Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
I absolutely loved reading In The Dream House and since reading, I have also read some of Macahdo’s biggest inspirations like Shirley Jackson and her We Have Always Lived in the Castle and her short stories, which I absolutely loved reading too. So I had loads of expectations coming into her collection of short stories, Her Body & Other Parties. Although some stylistic flourishes are to my taste somewhat unrefined in it, Machado’s talent and ease with words shine through impertinently. Her choices are bold and cleverly executed. Particularly, the most mystifying of the stories within, ‘Especially Heinous’, which uses the structure of the two hundred seventy two episodes of Law & Order: SVU is the one story that I can’t stop talking about for I suppose the very way it mystifies me. She creates such an atmosphere of sadness, abandonment and profound loneliness that I found it all quite captivating. Even if I didn’t entirely know what was going on all the time.
The first story in the collection, The Husband Stitch, was extremely reminiscent of Angela Carter to me. Reworked fairy tale type story, much like Carter does in The Bloody Chamber. It’s a killer opening to the collection. My personal favourite though has to be The Resident, a gothic Hotel California by The Eagles take, on a writer’s residence in lush and green America. You feel yourself lulled to the dizzying tempo of this purgatory-like place, aptly named ‘Devil’s Throat’.
Another win for Carmen Maria Machado.
PIERCE ELDRIDGE
Obsessed with Kathy Acker sitting down to interview the Spice Girls. I’m so late to knowing this even existed, but it feels totally punk and sissy and fabulous that she makes it a feminist class review of how they are having their cake and eating it too. Educated, sexy, and frivolous. I like to think it’s circulating again because of the Barbie movie, I honestly think (this was) the film is the cultural reset we need. I’m obsessed with Acker and the voices of repressed dolls, mwah!
In love with this poem by June Jordan, from the 80s, called Free Flight. Been feeling this way the last few weeks, wondering what might fill me up at night, if the refrigerator needs to be pulled out and placed onto the floor, where my desire is currently reaching toward, do I need a dog, what will it be that totally, unequivocally, sustains me? I was reflecting with a friend the other day that I feel really human right now — in the midst of a mighty transition — and this poem placed me a little firmer into the ground, gave me balance and stability. In fact, this poem filled me and will for a few more nights. Read the full poem here.
Lauren Berlant’s Desire/Love is going to take some time to settle into my body. There’s a healthy dose of Freudian critique in this book, and one of my favourite parts is the following:
One imputed result of women’s weaker erotic organisation — that is, not having displaced and condensed the traumatised love of the mother onto a fragile and over symbolised body part — is that women are deemed incapable of fetishism. Since fetishism has been shown to be a central structure of “normal” sexuality, women’s lack of relation to it in traditional psychoanalysis has contributed to the sense that women are hysterical or narcissistically disordered with respect to the objects they desire. Teresa de lauretis, Naomi Schor, Emily Apter, and others counter this implication. Schor argues that there is a feminine fetishism, and that it recognises the play of presence and absence, aggression and idealisation, trauma and plentitude between the lover and the loved in the classic model of fetishistic desire: but because women’s “castration” is a given, women can have an ironic relation to their erotic repetitions: they can admit them without disavowing or doing violence to them.
De Lauretis argues later that there is a specificity to lesbian fetishism that brought sincere tears to my eyes, affirmed as an intersubjective fantasy playing a bigger part in the production of lesbian love. This is in opposition to the Freudian, requiring two lovers to fantasise together, which just feels so rewarding to read and feel. Mmm, letting the greatness of this nestle into me.
Clem Macleod
mmK this one is a bit rogue but my best read of June has to have been the Murakami book about being a novelist. ‘Novelist as a Vocation’ is a collection of essays about the writing life. I read it whilst having Covid because I didn’t want to read anything too heavy, and I really loved it. There were definitely a few issues that I had with it - namely the way that he writes about women, in particular his wife who is his first reader of all his manuscripts, but seemingly receives no appreciation for it. I also think his references are incredibly close-minded and again he could do with expanding his reach a little in terms of the diversity of the writers that he’s familiar with. However in saying this, he is kind of aware of these shortcomings and asserts that not everyone will agree with him on a lot of what he’s saying and that he hasn’t written any of the essays to please anyone. It’s written from his experiences and from a very raw place. He isn’t sugarcoating anything or pretending to be someone that he isn’t. I especially loved the chapter that he talks about the importance of looking after your physical health for your creative output. He breaks any stereotypes of the ‘smoking, drinking, sleep-deprived tortured writer’ and puts bluntly that if you want to be successful at being clear thinking and creative, you have to eat well and exercise. He really gives away all of his tools for success though, and I value that. He does a complete step by step of how he gets a novel written, including the editing process and the amount of drafts that he does.
I know that people have issues with Murakami’s writing because it can be a bit disconnected or uninformed, but I read his books when I was quite young and they always stuck with me. They’re not necessarily very profound or overly insightful (apart from Dance Dance Dance, but that’s for another ‘Best Reads’ post) but I have always enjoyed reading the stories. I think they’re creative and the characters are well formed and they’re well written. I just thought that this book was incredibly straightforward in dishing out advice about writing from someone who has spent a lifetime doing it. I don’t read many male writers though, and this kind of reminded me why I don’t…. All in all I do recommend it because I did enjoy it and found it helpful, but I’d take it with a pinch of salt.
I also finished reading ‘The Healing’ by Gayl Jones which I started to find difficult and a bit tiresome halfway through because of its lack of a coherent narrative, but ended up absolutely loving and finding it completely amazing in the last three pages. It’s truly an artform the way that Jones manages to wrap this novel up and just completely bolster it in those last pages. I got through the book by appreciating the associative reading that I experienced during. Not only this but I became incredibly involved with the characters and really empathised with them. The last pages will affirm that this is EXACTLY what the writer has intended to do.
