WORMS DIGEST

Pierce Eldridge

When I go to see How To Have Sex I don’t know anything about the film. I meet a friend at House of Momo for some takeaway dumplings covered in curry sauce, and we make our way to the Rio Cinema. We talk about love, as always, walking and slurping on the sauce and then we’re in our seats; warming as the cinema fills. The film is entertaining, the main throuple of girls are so familiar and hilarious. I feel when the plunge is coming and when it does I’m stuck in the rattling of the trauma experienced on screen, unable to move because people slump in rows on either side of me. Beaches are sacred spaces for me and I feel hollowed out; it’s harrowing. As I exit the film, the winter air hits me and I can let out a gasp, I feel my skin breathe again; I calm down. Someone on the street rolling a cigarette says ‘that was so shit’ and I feel they miss the importance of seeing stories of ‘consent’ completely. It’s meant to hurt, the grim nature of consent has still not entered into enough young adult’s vernacular.

I decide to pick up James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and I forget how mesmerising it is. Over the last two years, I read it each year, and I’m finding new meaning on each page. This time around, as it sits beside me now, I try to translate the French to English. I hadn’t felt the need to do this before, but I wonder if perhaps I’ve been missing something; which I know, in all readings, we neglect what we aren’t looking for. Rereading becomes essential.

Thoughts on ‘identity’ are shared at Compost Library and we speak through this in regard to Baldwin, how queer bodies are stuck in a constant generational trauma and that things feel worse for our rights more than ever. Sarah Schulman in conversation with Sunil Gupta at the Barbican says we should be investigating queer nostalgia and questioning its place in our own stories. She says ‘new ideas come from the margins’ and that lesbian literary smut is still unpublishable, unless of course the couple is married at the end. 

I think about trans literature. I think about Nevada by Imogen Binnie and how there’s nothing quite like it. The story is unforgiving and abruptly ends, there’s no rounded edges, only harsh realities that feel serrated. 

I flick on a video of Maya Angelou, I love the way she phrases how sticky the residues of words are; how powerful they can be. I wonder about how we can measure words the way she proposes, but what I notice is that words build walls, words build clothing, words will have their way at you until you surrender to the core of them and there… ~release~. 

I connect this to Joan Didion, who writes in essay ‘On Self Respect’ as a part of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, ‘Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.’ I think about how to be driven back upon myself in the communion of others and the answer feels: with words. 

I grab a copy of About Ed by Robert Glück. I really don’t know enough about Bob Glück or his lover Ed Aulerich-Sugai, but I know that these texts are coming to me at the time I need to read them. I’ve read a few chapters, I feel already its force; dreamlike and tender by the sentimental detailing of almost everyone Bob experiences. I yearn to be seen by him as I see him. I’ll provide an update on my thoughts in the next digest x

Arcadia Molinas

The Works of Guillaume Dustan

Last month we read The Works of Guillaume Dustan for the Worms Book Club and let me tell you, it was a RIDE. Incredibly explicit, this book is bound to have you feeling your own skin, whether it be crawling or titillated. Having just read To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Hervé Guibert for last month’s book club, Guillaume Dustan’s account of living with HIV in France in the 80s was a radical counterpoint to Guibert’s more sombre, tragic account. Dustan, faced with eminent death, surefire annihilation, Dustan decides to go out with a bang. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. A big celebration of life which at times reveal an inmense impulse towards self destruction.

This was a challenge, to say the least, to read in public. The detailed, relentless depictions of hardcore s&m sex were enough to make my own stomach curdle without fretting about my fellow tube-riders king a glimpse at the uncouth words on the page. This being said, this book made me live a little, I went out, partied, indulged in some reckless behaviour and a book that can enter your brain space like so and influence your actions is surely a book worth reading.

Past Lives

Caught Past Lives, which was a delicate punch to the gut. I found myself, the following days and weeks after my viewing, constantly brought back to the film - life is so very much about timing and circumstances. The most beautiful memories are perhaps those that didn’t even happen, those that were about to but didn’t. There are people in my life who’s connection to them is perfect, but perhaps precisely because life didn’t give us a proper chance to develop it. Nonetheless, my life would be so boring and empty without those imperfect encounters. I found the ending absolutely perfect, I was there emotionally with Nora and when the lights came back on I was left blinking the tears back, wrecked by love that never came to be.

Minor Detail

I also pummelled through this month’s Worms Book Club pick, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. Fitzcarraldo made this book free to download as an ebook after the Palestinian author got disinvited from the Frankfurt book fair a month ago. The institution cited the 'war between Israel and Palestine' to be 'too controversial' at the current time and featuring a Palestinian author as 'too political'. This is deplorable behaviour from a cultural institution. Shibli has given her first interview since this cancellation, offering powerful reflections on the uses of language, as a vehicle for abuse and erasure, but also for love and hope. Language can be a scar. Language can be a weapon. In the words of Lora Mathis “Language is not an empty vessel. It is a carrier of history, and what we say holds weight. Language archives time–it holds it in every word. What we say, what is repeated over and over, eventually becomes what is remembered. The way a story is told gets passed down through generations. Cultural memory lives on through language." We must call out language that weaponises and abuses. Language that silences.
Here are some images and words I've been gathering these past weeks, images and words that call out, that resist. May we all do our part.

The book was chilling. Incredible, understated story telling that tells you everything you need to know with the smallest (minor if you will) of details. Excited to discuss in a couple of weeks.

Enya sullivan

Nathalie Olah’s book ‘Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness’ came out a few weeks ago and is excellent. Olah is such an insightful writer on the post-crash era (which honestly feels like the only era I know, being born in the late 90s!) Being a working class person navigating the arts and world of work in such an austere age can make you feel insane, being sold the lie that education and taste will help you excel, make you a better person etc. Olah shines some clarity on the matter, and most importantly, makes us think about what we can desire and what lives we can live, beyond the mere drudgery of Capitalist rules around class and taste. Read this book and then have an aimless day walking around the woods after, or lying on the sofa.

SET Film festival has had some excellent programming! I attended the night ‘The other side of the screen’, a group screening of seven short films that offer partial, skewed, and fictive viewpoints.

Lovingly selective in their omissions and disclosures, the films in the first half are attentive to the materiality of pirated, forbidden and forgotten images, and the stories they leak and carry with them. In general, this made me think a lot about piracy, and I went down a rabbit hole enjoying this selection of pirate radio adverts from Death Is Not The End.

On the note of SET, my friend Oisin made me this excellent bookmark! Oisin runs a library in SET Peckham, called ‘Think Big, Read’, which has an excellent range of queer, anti-capitalist and radical books. Also an extremely beautiful Sun Rah book that you’re only allowed to read inside the lib hehe.