Worms Weekly
Arcadia Molinas
This video by Mina Le explores the origin and meaning of the bimbocore and barbiecore aesthetic.
Personally, I’m obsessed with the fact that the headline ‘Bimbo Summit’ under a picture of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsday Lohan was allowed to go to print.
Not a click but I went to see Paul B. Preciado present his new book, ‘Dysphoria Mundi’ (only out in Spanish and French for now I think - although the first question by the wonderfully nerdy and eccentric Ernesto Castro alluded to precisely the fact that the book is written in French, Spanish and English). I’ve seen Preciado twice now, the first being when he performed his ‘Can the Monster Speak?’ speech in a theatre which was originally intended for the French Freudian School of Psychoanalysis but upon reception was heckled so much it prevented him from finishing.
Listening to Paul is such a riveting experience. He gracefully prefaced his conversation with Ernesto Castro (iconic interview @ the link) with a sly, “I’m a terrible interviewee, I never answer the question being asked” and then continued to give incredibly extensive, energetic and passionate answers to, yes, questions the interviewer hadn’t asked but which we were all somehow dying to know. The pairing of Castro and Preciado was a great intellectual match though it threatened to leave the audience in the dark as they swam in and out of philosophy, philosophers and long, complicated, multisyllabic words. Again, Paul dealt with this gracefully, and urged his audience to not be disheartened if they didn’t understand a word or a concept and as the time went on, he would circle back to these matters and give them different contexts offering a dictionary to the audience with which to understand him and his ‘pharmacopornographic’ framework of viewing the world. You can just see what a kind soul Paul is and honestly, leaving a room in which he’s just spoken in, you feel that more inclined to abandon the suffocation of binaries and binary thinking and jump into the vast, joyous inbetween of possibility.
Caitlin McLoughlin
This extract on Spike Magazine from a new novel by Tea Hacic-Vlahovic called A Cigarette Lit Backwards was good.
https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/cigarette-lit-backwards
Arcadia Molinas
Bimboland by Erin Taylor
I finished this collection of poems by Erin Taylor recently, which reminded me a lot of Tilly Lawless' NBMB, which aside from the obvious references to sex work, touched a lot on the significance of friendship, as well as sharing a vein for the obsessive type of infatuation. The poems are bristling with emotion and are refreshingly direct.
P.S Erin used to run a meme account on Instagram that they have temporarily left to one side, but here are some of its gems:
Caitlin McLoughlin
Which As You Know Means Violence by Philippa Snow
As good as everyone’s been saying. Like Arcadia, I couldn’t stop YouTubing every crazy stunt and performance piece she mentions - now obsessed with videos of Buster Keaton.
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
I’m having to read this slowly because it is so utterly devastating. It follows My Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s memoir about the loss of her husband, but Blue Nights is about the loss of her daughter a couple of years later. Whilst My Year of Magical Thinking of magical thinking is an incredible document of a grieving process and of grappling with acceptance, Blue Nights is so painful because Didion faces the complete impossibility of accepting the death of her daughter as well as her own aging and mortality. Very tough but amazing read.
Caitlin McLoughlin
I listened to the latest episode of Literary Friction with Yiyun Li which led me to revisit some favourite short stories by Yiyun Li: Extra and A Sheltered Women. I love her short stories so much, they’re always so strange and heartbreaking. In the LF interview she talks about how she becomes sp fond and attached to her characters, and how to her they so real, this rang so true from the stories of her’s that I’ve read because her characters always feel so whole and even when they are cruel she writes them with so much empathy.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
</3 had me crying on the metro.
Arcadia Molinas
El Agua by Elena López Riera
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. This was so, so good! Excuse me but it’s been such a year for Spanish film (Cerdita, As bestas, Cinco Lobitos, Girasoles Silvestres) !!!!! I’m living for it.
The basic plot is girl meets boy in a Southern Spanish town that holds many superstitions about water and beautiful girls. The naturalness of the characters, the sound design, were incredible. I felt so represented and the film was so wonderfully elusive and interpretative. Ugh. Masterpiece honestly.
