sadreads #4: emotional navigation
Well, we are all stuck inside, aren’t we? I’m taking one walk a day, in between the hours of work, and reading or watching TV the rest of the time. So here are a few thoughts about two books, sad in their own ways, that I read and loved recently. If any of this makes you think of something. I'd love to hear about it.
Yr pal,
Niina
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Sketchtasy, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
“I think about how sometimes I feel so lonely talking to the people I love, and sometimes I feel so lonely talking to the people I hate. And sometimes I just feel so lonely.”
Sketchtasy is a novel about the queer nightlife scene in Boston in the 1990s, and about the young protagonist Alexa’s own traumas and desires and the ways she tries to both escape and confront them in a place as hostile as Boston, where shitty neighborhood kids come after her and her friends as they’re walking to the train and hurl insults they no doubt learned from their parents. The city, with its puritanical underpinnings and buildings named after founding fathers, is a character in itself: the John Hancock Tower, which Alexa calls “Jeannine Hancockatiel,” is a shimmering navigational beacon whenever Alexa finds herself outside. Alexa imagines her as a well-dressed queen: isn’t Jeannine looking beautiful? I’m certain anyone who’s lived long enough in a city with a recognizable skyline has their own set of landmarks for emotional navigation. If you live in New York, and someone asks you to draw a scene from it, what buildings would populate the drawing? If not New York, then what city, and what landmarks in it?
The beginning of the book is a whirlwind, and feels particularly wild to read when you’re just staying inside your apartment; Sycamore’s prose is breathless as Alexa and all the other girls go out, ingest every drug available to them, dance, come back home, and sleep it off, only to repeat the same routine again and again. In between these chemically lengthened days, which sometimes stretch over multiple twenty-four hour periods, Alexa makes spinach salads for herself, or drinks juice, or even goes drug-free for short jags to try and rouse up some kind of normalcy for herself. The first half of the book is like this—a delirious ride, a non-stop carousel—and you could easily believe, as you can when you’re caught up in the whirlwind of substance and camaraderie, that this could be what it’s like until the end. But along the way it becomes clear that Alexa is both an enthusiastic participant in the escapism of a seductive but empty group dynamic, and a complex narrator with a radical politics who desires a sense of momentum for both herself and her friend group, but finds it difficult to break free of her own history and the patterns that she’s in. Because what is the end? Is the end when somebody dies? No; by the time somebody dies, it’s already too late.
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Optic Nerve, Maria Gainza
"Isn't all artwork—or all decent art—a mirror? Might a great painting not even reformulate the question what is it about to what am I about? Isn't theory also in some sense always autobiography?”
Optic Nerve is a book largely about looking at art, but certain sections of it also take place in a weird, apocalyptic Buenos Aires that has a dust cloud of some sort hanging over it. The event is almost an afterthought, and isn’t really explained; the narrator’s inner life is the important thing, but the eeriness of the external circumstances help to color the memories as well. The book is really a series of loosely connected vignettes about an Argentinian tour guide, a tertiary member of an aristocratic family fallen from wealth, whose life emerges in flashes in between what she really likes to talk about, which is paintings.
The narrator’s love of understanding her own emotional response to art, and the question she asks in the excerpt above, made me think deeply of the one recent painting that I’ve looked at countless times since I saw it in person: Alice Neel’s 1970 portrait of Andy Warhol, which is at the Whitney. It’s a very naked painting of someone we usually see clothed; it’s a strikingly gaze-y painting of someone who usually had strict control of his image. In it, Warhol sits on an abstracted couch with his hands across his folded knees, his ravaged chest exposed, his medical girdle holding his paunch in place; his eyes are closed and his head is turned away. He looks so unlike the image we usually see of him that he’s almost hard to recognize at first. Warhol is depicted in blue outlines, totally separate from his background. He’s forced into visibility on someone else’s terms.
So where, for me, is the mirror in this painting? I don’t love Andy Warhol, so that’s not it. But this is a painting that doesn’t make me feel sorry for Warhol despite his obvious physical injury. His standoffishness and pride are also visible; the pose is vulnerable but far from soft. He’s shutting the observer out and saying This is what you thought you wanted to see, but did it answer your questions? When I talk about pain, I don’t want to say what people want to hear, and I think this is what draws me to the painting. I wish I could know what Neel said to this famous control freak to get him to sit for it, and I’m glad that reading Optic Nerve made me spend a little more time articulating why this painting made me stop in the first place.