Worms Weekly
Arcadia Molinas
I finished Parable of the Talents, the second of the Earthseed series which I read in quick succession. Parable of the Sower was our December Worms Book Club pick and after reading it I felt a bit wanting and the second book really, really delivered on all fronts. To me they read as a two for one, informing each other continuously and together creating a thorough picture of this dystopian world Octavia E. Butler created. She’s not shy about taking her time to set the scene, or about presenting alternative perspectives about her characters actions (e.g the younger character in the second book who constantly criticises the main character's actions and decisions, veering away from the totalling effect of a first-person narrative). In the end we have a story about complicated family relationships, faith, narrow-mindedness, and above all, of course, the human capacity to adapt and overcome. Despite her planning to write three more books for the series, the two read as a self-contained story with a lot of action and a lot, a lot, a lot of suffering.
I've started The Years by Annie Ernaux, following a screening of 'Les Annes Super 8' a documentary film made by Annie's son. Using found footage from home videos her husband filmed after getting a Super 8 camera in the early 70s, the film traces their early family life, her feelings about her ascension into petite bourgeois life and the definite crumbling of her marriage. The voice you can hear throughout the film is Annie's, breathing a second life into the feelings and events of the recorded moments, which contain indications of one of her life-defining moments - the aforementioned separation. Recited with characteristic Ernaux style and candidness, the film is a good companion to Cleaned Out, her first novel which she was writing at the time of the home videos, or A Frozen Woman which is the novel she would eventually write about the separation.
Afrofuturism takes flight: from Sun Ra to Janelle Monáe
I'm taking an Annie Ernaux course at the moment with super-fans Punzadas so I'm getting a very thorough insight into all of Ernaux's works. With that in mind and The Years being my first foray into her written work, I can already perceive how this novel can be considered her most exemplary work, involving all the topics that have obsessed her over her incredible writing career. Expect to hear more from Ernaux's work over the next couple of Worms Weekly, as not only does the course stretch out for a couple more weeks but so has my humble collection of her works.
One of my favourite films of 2022 was Carlos Vermut's 'Mantícora' (which has one of the greatest third acts I've ever seen), so I've been going on a bit of a Vermut wormhole these weeks. I've seen his 'Magical Girl' and 'Who Will Sing To You' which were both bleak, brutal and suggestive films, very much in line with the masterpiece I saw last year. Vermut favours not showing over showing, leaving much to the audience's imagination, which suggests terrible scenarios and is so effective in getting your skin to crawl and imagination run wild without feeding you visual gore or outright images of violence. It's so intelligently done. His concern is destitution, bad people, people who will go to extremes for the ones they love, or what they love. It's horrifying but deeply, deeply moving. Magical Girl has more of a thriller structure to it, using a puzzle as a guide for the viewer to piece together the intricate webs that connect all the characters together. In a father's search for the money to get her terminally ill daughter's dream anime costume, he will go to unspeakable lengths, leaving a trail of violence and abuse in his wake. To me the matter at the heart of this film is "even monsters love". Bárbara, the victim of this tale, is unshakeable as a presence in her menacing quietness. Who Will Sing To You has less of an action driven plot but the same concern for matters of identity and how far you're willing to go for your idea of love, self and other. Glad to have discovered this director.
Been obsessed with AI lately, and these date ideas for a worm girlfriend generated by OpenAI are perfect.
Arcadia Molinas
I’ve been meaning to read At Your Own Risk for a while, and once I got a copy I devoured it with a takeaway coffee and pastry in Clissold Park. My first reflection is that Derek is literally the biggest sweetheart. There’s a few moments in the novel where he goes to visit the ‘boys’ at Hampstead Heath and instead of giving or receiving sexual favours, he hugs and shows them gratitude; taking them for a walk, away from the shadows, and out onto a horizon to stargaze. I think I could tell Derek, at the time of writing this, was penning an extremely solemn memoir. He manages to conceal, very well, his own grief through the narratives painted of those boys consoling in him. Perhaps he was as stoic as his words seem to be, or his turn of phrase tougher with hindsight. It’s a radical read, he’s a radical lad. The few photos in the novel feel so nostalgic to me. I mean, all this history really does feel like it was just the other day.
Kathy Acker is undeniably the pioneer of new narrative–and much like Blood and Guts in High School–Great Expectations showcases Acker’s unfettered literary anarchy. Reinterpreting Charles Dickens’s original novel by transporting it to a modern day New York City, we’re strung along through our main characters' identities switches, jumping across centuries, into a punk phenomenon of sex and violence. I’d say this is the more experimental of Acker, mostly because of the way she has incorporated a critical analysis of modern literature through a feminist definition. With great resistance against the original text, Acker moves with a tendency toward her own motives, fabulations, and greatest desires. A quote that stayed with me, page 75: ‘If you want to understand an event, always increase its (your perspective) complexity.’
I ran into Caitlin in London Fields and she told me about Carmen Maria Machado’s, In the Dream House. I knew I was going to buy it after seeing her when she started describing it as a difficult and gruelling read. That afternoon I managed to get halfway through, only stopping because I actually started crying one moment when Carmen describes the grittier details of the abusive relationship she was in. A scene in the bathroom when the partner has been screaming at her for a while, disappears and returns only moments later in high spirits asking, with concern, why she was on the floor crying. It’s devastating, I feel like maybe I’ve written that here about other novels before, but this takes the cake. It’s just one of those right time right moments for me, this read I mean. My temperament was ready for it, and it was easy to slip in and out of the autofiction style as each chapter takes on a different literary trope; romance novel, noir, science fiction, choose your own adventure (this chapter hurt), double cross, modern art, world building, and so on. Very impressive in structure and undeniably one of the best things I’ve ever read. I’m going to give it a read again at some point later in the year. I think one of the greatest results of this book is that it carves a space into literature with a well researched queer abuse narrative, thereby expounding the representational lens on queer relations. Ugh, oomph, so good.
I’m so happy to have finally stuck my nose into Afterglow by Eileen Myles, it’s been watching me on my bedside table for months. I’ve been looking at them, looking at me, looking at the dog thinking; soon! It’s really special, a very quick read, the concepts seemed to land without any fidgeting for me. I’m mostly excited by the catalogued items Eileen speaks of from Sophie’s, it’s striking to me how symbolic photographing becomes after death; and more broadly, how photographs become savoured relics for mourning. Loved the part where they explained: ‘The mark about a thought was always a drawing and not a word.’ Left me thinking about how we make an archive of memory, how we conserve thought. I suppose this relates back to Carmen (In the Dream House) too, where she questions: how do you convince a jury of an abuse without the scars? Ephemera of grief, loss, even abuse is something we hold in our bodies – not even white Lilies are able to fully satisfy their purpose.
Triangle of Sadness (spoilers ahead) was really fucked. Abigail was the star for me and I was living when she was getting her rocks off in the safety boat thingo. But the final scenes with her about to smash Yaya’s head destroyed me. Seeing her unable to physically move beyond the threshold of her renewed sense of power–in her purposeful, free life–back toward an artificial conglomerate of optimistic cynicism, fully packed its punch. I actually think that was the best scene of the movie, the most rewarding as a viewer to watch where dialogue is minimal and the breakdown of conscious rationality is challenged when your life feels threatened. I find it an interesting study in film and I think it summarises the compassion missing from ‘luxury’ lifestyles. The first part plays as it should, cringy where the characters are insecure even though the foundations (money) of life around them seem stable. They get what they want, blah blah, you’ve seen it all in the trailers. Second half is worth sticking around for. Just saying, Abigail fucking deserved all that octopus.
Speaking of which, I stumbled into doing this cool Becoming Octopus Meditation you might enjoy too.
I got pretty stuck into All About Love (again) by bell hooks yesterday. I read it every year. Chapter 4 really sticks out to me on the commitment to let love be love in me (you), which discusses self loathing and self-esteem. I think she is most pertinent when she reflects on love being the renewing spirit of how we approach interactions, relations, and work. I think full commitment, low attachment–something I spoke about with Ashleigh Musk here–is quite a striking concept; when we accept full commitment, our self of fulfilment increases and becomes the foundation to our loving practice. Maybe this is a little new years resolution love for you, let the joy in! Read if you haven’t, easy read and super yum on the heart.
TÁR was incredible. I actually wasn’t really expecting much, I think I was really naive. I only saw one trailer and thought, ‘what a bore!’ But it was anything but that, plus I mean Cate Blanchett is a queen. I see famous conductor, Marin Alsop, is causing a stir about the character being offensive for being a women-conductor-lesbian-abuser, and I can empathise with that. It’s difficult to see certain representational identifiers of ourselves in another, portrayed on screen, and then watch as they deviate from what ‘we’ might do. But, if anything, I think Alsop falls victim to reducing Blanchett’s character to a set of foundational (and irrational) archetypal pillars. At this point, I think we’re allowed to see a dysfunctional queer person fight for their place in a challenging profession, let alone a misogynistic one. Plus, when she became abusive (manipulative the whole way through), I didn’t think ‘oh wow, angry sadistic lesbian’. I thought, ‘fuck, a complicated, gatekeeping, lustful person deteriorating themselves by the hand of the thing they love most.’ The film made me think, sometimes when we love something so tight we squeeze the juice out of it without savouring. It’s an astonishing watch with a cruel end, and I oscillate between liking Blanchett’s character (in the beginning) to really hating what she becomes. She’s charming, an EGOT, intellectual, creative with a vocabulary that’s so delicious, all the frills that attract people to her; and yet inevitably, destroy her as she exploits her genius in conniving ways. I think I’ll probably see it again whilst still in cinemas.
Alcarrás – ouch, this film hurt to watch. All about land ownership, a family battles against losing their land to the rise of the solar panelling industry; and as they have no formal contract to keep the land, deterioration ensues. The film actually shows the destruction of the family, creating a clear delineation between the connections of place with our bodies, which is emotional and moving. This will stay with me, I think it’s probably one of the best films of last year. Aesthetically beautiful, you feel the family's pain the whole way through. Right up until the cranes are on their doorstep.
Online, I fell in love with misery; am blown away to see the Dalai Lama join CIRCA; and loved Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ essay on Hope. I’ve been circulating around thoughts on hope since the start of the year, still getting my eyes and heart through In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love by Joy James but there’s a lovely quote from Miriame Kaba, via Ominira Mars, which reads:
Hope as a discipline becomes restrictive, monotonous, exhausting. We must be able to occupy a multifaceted consciousness and way of reasoning with what could be that makes room for both the pragmatic and the impossible. We must practice regenerative and expansive hope, or else hope becomes contained only by what we assume and/or are told is not possible.
Clem
2023 has started and I have absolutely not read as many books by this point as I had last year. I think I might have been having a nervous breakdown this time last year, on reflection and when thinking about the amount of books that I consumed in the first two weeks of Jan 2022. This year I’m trying to be kinder to myself and in effect am not trying to beat myself to the ground with reading goals.. That being said.. I have set my Goodreads challenge to 60 for the year, and I am currently ‘on track’ to reach my 60.
I started off the year absolutely devouring ‘The Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia Butler. I hate how often I tend to cram-read our bookclub books. I think I must have some weird homework/deadline trauma that I am truly not ready to unpack. I love this book though. Never been much of a sci-fi or dystopian fan myself, but this one was just a brilliant story and felt simultaneously close to home and reassuringly fictional. It was written in 1999 but the ‘future’ is 2024, which is at the same time comical and frightening…
After that I needed something short and sweet. I’m in Australia at the moment visiting family, so I went for Drop Bear by Eveleyn Araluen which is short stories, prose and poetry from a first nations writer. Very Australian, very good.
(from Drop Bear)
I followed this up by Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko (another first nations writer) which I am 77 pages away from finishing and absolutely loving. I found it quite difficult to get into, and I would say it actually took me until Part 2 to get truly into the narrative, but that’s just my personal opinion. Lucashenko's writing is funny and witty. She uses a lot of Australian slang which I found myself looking up a lot of the time, which made me feel a bit like I was in on her jokes. The narrative follows Kerry and her family as they navigate white real estate agents taking over their sacred native land to build a prison. There’s plenty of contemporary references to a lot of pertinent Australian issues with white settlement, but Lucashenko manages to write them into the narrative with dark comedy. In saying this, she doesn’t dampen or lessen the issues with her humour, and it’s heartbreaking going through the notions with the families as it not only reflects problems with Australian history as a whole, but looks at the way in which these issues cause relational problems within first nation families as well.
Ps. I have Worms on my nails
(from Too Much Lip)
