sadreads #15: art-world cranks
Well! Here we are in autumn. The air is crisp, baby. I’m wearing a beanie and nobody thinks it’s weird. It’s so cold in the mornings that I now need to think about baby socks in addition to all the other things I also have to think about. I hope you’re peeping some leaves wherever you are!
A couple of things that have come out since my last letter: this conversation with Matt L. Roar, a musician and therapist and poet and skater whose poetry book My War was one of my favorites last year. Matt is an excellent person and a longtime collaborator for various weird things; he and I were once in an one-night-only Misfits cover band, and another time we made some songs with poet Ben Fama. Anyway, Matt and I talked about humor against the void, and trauma bonding, and the weirdness of growing up in that era “before Desert Storm but after Vietnam.”
And then I was also on this podcast called Multi-Verse with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham. She asks poets to read and talk about a poem they don’t often read, and I talked about “How To Read This Poem.”
Now onto the reads. You might’ve already heard a lot about this book, but I just have to talk about it.
I just finished Catherine Lacey’s ambitious, sprawling Biography of X and I have to say that I really am its intended audience. Biography is funny — of course in the writing of a biography, the biographer’s identity matters. This book, this fake biography, does an excellent job of reminding the reader of that fact. It’s a seductively journalistic yet deeply subjective investigation that begins from a place of grief — C.M., the widow of a mysterious artist named X has decided to follow the threads of X’s life. She first undertakes this out of spite, which is the absolute best reason to taken on any creative endeavor (am I kidding? lol) — she wants to disprove the work of another biographer she hates, as a kind of revenge on her late wife’s behalf. But she ends up unpacking her own codependent reliance on X as she learns things about her wife that she never anticipated knowing, even while being fully aware that she was married to a slippery character with multiple identities who apparently needed to disappear for weeks at a time on a regular basis. As a result, the biography is certainly not impartial.
Also playing in the background is quite a bit of alternate history, which C.M. periodically describes in abbreviated detail to set the scene for some event or another in X’s life and career. In this world, the American South split off from the rest of the states after WW2, subsequently becoming a religious theocracy for several decades before the divider between territories came down Berlin Wall-style. The rest of the country, meanwhile, let an anarchist rise to Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff and fast-tracked a Bernie Sanders presidency. I found some of this alternate history fascinating, and some of it an annoying liberal dream. What I mean by this is also what I hate about when people Tweet (Skeet) that Bugs Bunny gif where he saws off the entire state of Florida in response to any politically terrifying news from there. It’s a little like, What if the people who didn’t want to be in liberal society simply weren’t? How cool would that be? So, I don’t necessarily buy the idea of a Northern feminist socialist democracy, however imperfect, even if I find the idea of a self-sabotaging Southern theocracy plausible. I wonder what that says about me. But as worldbuilding, it’s all ambitious, and mostly relevant.
And at a micro level, the book is so fussy in the exact way certain biographies I love are. X — a revered art-world figure who keeps a tight grip on her own life story — is a total asshole, pontificating about the worthlessness of art and the role of the artist in excruciating pull-quotes that Lacey has repurposed from interviews with real-life cranks like Lou Reed (famously a dick to journalists for seemingly no reason) and David Byrne (described once by a former bandmate as “incapable of returning friendship,” a quote Lacey attributes in this book to something Byrne said about X).
Lacey also makes up a whole body of work for X. She is like an avant-garde Forrest Gump — responsible for so many installations, films, books, and cultural moments that it’s almost unlikely; she created a Cindy Shermanesque exhibition about her own engagement with disguises and identities, and wrote “Heroes” for David Bowie. X was a multi-hyphenate who wrote tetralogies of books with ease and also somehow knew how to produce music. She had beef with Vito Acconci, turned down advances from Warren Beatty, and received a MoMA retrospective in her forties. She was a quintessentially mythologized amalgam of so many different people that it becomes tiring to read about her many accomplishments and involvements. And I think this is on purpose! Many biographies become similarly a slog through the middle as the biographer takes care to check and cross-check all the details. And it’s interesting to note that not all of X’s work is successful; she has many critical and commercial failures due to her own bad personality. That kind of self-sabotage is maybe the truest-feeling part of all about this imagined oeuvre (think Lou Reed choosing to release his most inaccessible albums after his most critically acclaimed ones, without fail).
X is unlikeable; she doesn’t learn; she doesn’t grow; she’s dead. This is a book whose main character isn’t there, and so cedes control of her story to someone else (X notably did not want a biography of her to be produced in her lifetime). The character development belongs to C.M., who comes to understand exactly how much of her own life she gave up to be with such a person.
I’ve talked before about the kind of art writing that I love — highly subjective engagement with how the art makes the writer feel, so that the reader may in the absence of the art itself at least vicariously feel what it felt like for another human to experience the art. I need to feel something; I can’t just receive description. What would biography be like if the biographer’s slant was built into the form of the biography itself? A kind of biography-autobiography. That’s what this book is. Highly recommend if you enjoy thinking about narrative form and how little control we have over the shape of our lives.
Next up for me is finishing a pair of books about parenthood and writing: Story of a Poem by Matthew Zapruder (a memoir about writing poems and being a father to his neurodivergent son), and The Long Form by Kate Briggs (an elastic, genre-defying, weird-time-filled novel about how to spend a day with a new baby). What are you reading?
Also, if you liked this, feel free to forward to a friend who might also enjoy it.