Worms Best Reads of February 2024
Caitlin McLoughlin
Can the Monster Speak? By Paul B. Preciado
This slim volume records the full transcript of the explosive speech given by Preciado at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in France, that was cut short due to audience heckling and was subsequently posted online in decontextualised phone clips – to equal uproar. Preciado passionately, and somewhat provocatively, argues that psychoanalysis is in need of a drastic overhaul in order to rethink its pathologization of gender non-conformity and transness derived from archaic models devised by the likes of Freud and Lacan. I occasionally got a little lost in the academic jargon, but the central argument is crystalline. Psychoanalysis is built around rigid heteropatriarchal notions of gender and sexuality that have helped to solidify and validate the heteropatriarchy in its non acceptance of trans people and the very idea of transness itself. He calls for a paradigm shift – not just to swing the pendulum but to dismantle it and rebuild it entirely. Preciado says: “To transition is to come to a machinic arrangement with the hormone of some other living code - the code may be a language, a music, a gesture, a plant, an animal or another living creature. To transition is to establish a transversal communication with the hormone which erases or, better still, eclipses what you call the female phenotype and allows for the awakening of another genealogy. This awakening is revolution. It is a molecular uprising. An assault on the power of the heteropatriarchal ego, of identity and of name. The process is a decolonization of the body.” (P.35) Molecular uprising, mmm I love that. There feels like there's so much to be gained here – the idea that we can decolonise the body, starting from the molecular plane – it’s both hopeful and reminds us of the work we still have to do.
Pierce Eldridge
Ponyboy by Eliot Duncan is a story of a troubled and throbbing king who is instantly recognisable and loveable. If you go to Goodreads you might find reviewers suggesting our protagonist was pretentious, but I doubt they had the empathy or experience to read a novel like this. It’s not here to cradle you into some sentimental respite of a trans experience, instead it chews you and your theories up like gum and spits the mass out onto the curb. Within the clump of sticky shit is where he, Ponyboy and later Eliot, festers on love; hate; life; death; substance abuse; transitioning; all of which contain a duality to their meaning in dubious shapes across the novel.
Love is stretched so far, pulled apart and tattered, across experience, people, objects, and into the consumption of drugs that our hazy and lamenting main character feels in a constant state of unassured rebellion. As the man of him aches into others, I fell more and more in love with how we can — as humans — substantially relate and navigate all of our pain toward the most self-deprecating fear of: being who we ought to be. That’s his compass here, the dread of marching toward the obliteration of the self and hoping to come out unscathed and alive on the other side. I loved Ponyboy, both the novel and the character, the whole way through.
Jeanette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died made me deject parents with unresolved trauma and chaotic ambitions that they relentlessly obfuscate into their child/children. In the book, there are countless shocking moments that further situate Jeanette deeper into her unstable habits of bulimia… all of which can be attributed to an abusive upbringing that reminded me of the horrors in A Child Called It. The book taught me that there’s nothing greater than the tenure of humanist reflection, that’s where all good stories feel situated from; in the brutality, the shame, the guilt of detaching ourselves from the romanticism of death and wishing for the pain to end… sometimes at the expense of those we love most.
Enya Sullivan
Working Girl by Sophia Giovannitti
I’ve been a fan of Sophia Giovannitti’s work for a long time, her essays, interviews and performances range across numerous topics from selling sex, selling art, having sex, making art, capitalism, freedom, love, work, and incarceration. Her work combines theory, and the everyday seamlessly.
Working Girl orbits around the comparative acts of selling sex and selling art, exploring what it means to sell these two things marked as ‘sacred’, when capitalism has corrupted everything we do and sell anyway, often monopolising and commodifying such sacred things. This isn’t to say that we should give into capitalism, but, more radically, examine how it operates in every element of our lives in order to attempt to live more freely: to spend less of our waking hours at the whim of our bosses, to ensure safety of sex workers and migrants and all suffering at the hands of capitalism, racism and the state, and to revel in beauty and desire. And this is what Sophia tries to do: work as little as possible for as much money as possible so she can make art, support her community and love in heaps.
Sophia is extremely generous throughout the book, at the beginning she writes that both art and sex act as ‘conduit[s] to a feeling’, something vital in comparison to much sterile discourse on both art and sex, and invites the reader to feel deeply throughout the book by giving insights into her own feelings and experiences throughout her life. She shares snippets of poetry from Frank O’Hara, lyrics from Leonard Cohen, joyous memories of hosting a huge party for her friends and details of a bloodletting performance between her and her boyfriend, all between the much harsher realities of the state, the law, death and the tapped psyches of a lot of men.
I think this generosity and onus on feeling is vital in how we conduct our lives, how we think about contemporary discourse, which can often be usurped by liberalism, and how we make sure to break away from constraints, and to ensure freedom for all. So beautiful and full of life!
ArcadIA mOLINAS
Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir
Ever since reading this book, I’ve felt a change: the way I think has shifted, the way I see the world has slanted, how I see myself and especially how I talk and listen to other people, has altered, and I feel like I’m breathing clearer. Isn’t it beautiful when a book does that?
Animal Joy is above all, a book about laughter. It opens with a quote by Chekhov that reads, “The so-called pure childlike joy of life is animal joy” and throughout, returns to the idea of joy, the spontaneous outburst of laughter from our bodies, and how it is connected to our inner child, animal tendencies, or, in psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s terms our “True Selves”. The second paragraph of the book is a quote from George Orwell, incredibly placed and incredibly revelatory, that reads, “A thing is funny, when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution”. Departing from this reference, poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir reveals to her readers why laughter is a direct channel to our unconscious and the many ways we can tap into its “revolutionary” power.
This book is undoubtedly ambitious, it’s overflowing with references and encompasses a wide range of subjects. Starting with the author’s experiences in clown school under the tutelage of Christopher Bayes, this serves as a springboard to talk about comedians such as Sacha Baron Cohen who learned clown from Philippe Gualier (described as the “Dumbledore of Clowning” by The New York Times), to which she gracefully attaches psychoanalytic concepts penned by Winnicott, or Sigmund Freud. For example, when she presents and explains Freud’s work Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious saying that Freud “proposes that jokes operate by the same process as dreams, in that they hide a powerful unconscious ‘kernel of thought’ in what he calls a ‘joking envelope,’ a neutral container that seems innocent, unalarming”. I cannot understate how underlined this book left my hands because from there, Alsadir takes on subjects such as Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye melting across his face in an uncanny manifestation of “truth leaking from the body”, the unsettling, funny effect of the ‘mechanical’ seeping from Trump’s right-hand man, to the laughter that Dr.Ford testified Brett Kavanaugh performed after sexually assaulting her during the infamous 2018 trail, to how Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction was symptomatic of her “True Self” being stifled and the presence of what Winnicott coined a “holding environment”, an “atmosphere that communicates to another person – a child, an analysand, a lover – that whatever they express will be accepted: the good, the savage, and the ugly” between her and Vronsky deteriorating as Anna becomes more and more ostracised from society.
The sparkling thread that glimmers throughout the book is Alsadir’s reflections on art, creativity and poetry. Art wakes us up, it “pricks our conscience”, it excites, it “rushes out of the intellect and into the body”, it’s erotic, like Audre Lorde outlines in Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power. Like laughter, creativity that comes from the body, that isn’t extracted from what people expect us to be, is a direct channel to our sense of empathy, ethics, and aliveness in that our true humanity is expressed. Animal Joy is an affirming book that succeeds (at least in my own experience) to open its readers eyes to a more genuine experience of the world around them. There is no naiveness however. Alsadir talks extensively about the dangers of living authentically. Society doesn’t value authenticity but rather prizes settling into the status quo instead. Felt most intensely during our experience of adolescence, fitting in, adjusting yourself so you seem to live up to other people’s expectations of you, creating “avatars” of ourselves, like the curated shelves we present on social media, is often rewarded by society instead of the fleshiness of our messy, porous, erotic True Selves. The spiritual rewards are immense, but the waters of authenticity are ones of sacrifice to.
The opening chapter can be read on Literary Hub here under the title “The Craft of Writing Empathy.” (Great place to start!).
