~*~*~*~*~*what delia read recently~*~*~*~*~
Pop Song: Adventures In Art and Intimacy by Larissa Pham
Every morning for weeks I woke up and took care of my new cat and while she ran around the office we locked her in, I tried to read a chapter of this essay collection by Larissa Pham. Each chapter connected to the next in a memoir-way, yet each essay was also a sort of art criticism piece, walking around museums and galleries, while also yearning for a “you” and discussing experiences with boyfriends throughout her twenties. I connect the experience of flipping through these wispy, analytical yet poetic fragments with the feeling of sitting on the floor cross-legged on a pillow, begging my new pet to calm down and sleep on me.
My bf has a standing desk in the office so the desk looked very high up while I sat on the floor down low, reading. I felt very stationary and stuck in the role of caretaker, in baby world, as Larissa Pham wrote about randomly taking trips to the desert and to France and to Mexico City. Perhaps I was a jealous reader. “The space between staying and leaving, I think, is called longing,” she wrote. Pop Song is advertised as a book of personal essays about art and love, but it is also a travel book, and a book about trips and residencies where she is actively writing the book. Maybe it is a book about escapism and the body, and the body wishing to submit to the world. I was most fond of an essay called “Body of Work” about being obsessed with Nan Goldin’s bruise photograph, and then taking photographs of her own injuries, including those from BDSM play with partners and in NYC dungeons. Most of the essays in the book went like this, in a Maggie Nelson kind of way: describing photography or contemporary art, and the experience of viewing it and why it’s pleasurable, and then relating that to a deeper desire for connection and self, romance and sex. The bruise essay ends on the thoughtful idea that maybe we take photographs of our painful bodies because we want proof that we lived it: we kept going.
She writes towards a “you”, like a pop song’s lyrics are written: I’m thinking about “you”. “You” is a boyfriend who Pham shares a love for art and who she is obsessed with for the entire book. They have a special bond and they have a special instagram where they post photography for each other to look at. It reminded me of exes I had in my early-20s, where I tried to leave messages for them on my diary tumblr. Pham had a diary tumblr, too. This book is kind of like that: leaving messages for short-lived boyfriends, and reblogging posts of Tracy Emin art and Anne Carson quotes. Like blog posts, the short chapters were insanely readable, relatable. My kitten on my lap, while my bf was out of town, and me, alone, reading, feeling, and wanting to really *know* someone through their writing.
This is a collection about intimacy, and there is a lot of sex in the book and explanation of yearning. I could tell there was friendship intimacy in there, too, but Pham only focused on the boyfriends. There were some darker events presented in the book that were mentioned quickly and then it moved along. As a lover of New Narrative, maybe I was searching this book for a deeper corner of the “the personal.” Sometimes I felt tempted to skim over the art history criticism parts. I wanted to really see these people, and understand *why*. Maybe I need to accept that this author didn’t want to let me in all the way, didn’t want me to know everything. It’s a piece of writing about a bruise, but the bruise itself is hidden from me, and maybe that’s why I kept reading.
Dear Angel of Death by Simone White
Dear Angel of Death is a two-parter, genre-wise. It begins with two poetry sections, called “Dollbaby” and “Endings,” and then the big chunk of the book is a nonfiction essay also titled “Dear Angel of Death”: a lyrical critical philosophical music history piece. Simone White’s writing style is piercing, plucked yet never-ending, lucid and dream-tugging. The poetry contains motherhood and memory and personal history and sometimes sea creatures. The essay is about Black music (and Black writing) in conversation with Amiri Baraka and Du Bois, Fred Moten and Nathanial Mackey, and then considering contemporary rap and trap music and what the purpose of music is. I have never read music criticism like this. A lot of the essay went over my head, in its mesh of poetic theory and reference. But Simone White is so brilliant and her writing is so unreal, I couldn’t stop traveling through. Black music and art punctuate thoughts through like balloons, in the terror of being caught between.
“It has passed through the writing of these sentences.
It is past.”
“Digging Baraka is digging the Black Art of Black Music is belief that black soul is movement outside the word of white supremacy’s denial of black existence, which contains the possibility of spontaneous pleasure, which is beauty.”
“-toward the end of white supremacy, which is freedom, or also, the end of time.”
“It is my hope that thinking moves over and past this iteration of our music like a tongue, its serious and interior disturbance, its delicious threat, in order to sense the future.”
