#i bought the like ‘lesbian sex ed’ book that has been going around in a post and reading it is making me feel like one of those endangered

[aldieb]

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[lit--bitch]

Current-Reads (06/04/2020 - 12/04/2020) 📖🌷

(Disclosure: I don’t know any of the authors (two of them are dead, sadly) nor the publishers from any of the books I’m recommending this week. Three cheers for impartiality, everyone.)

All the blossoms’s out and it’s raging blue skies at the moment. I’ve found some peace in it at times. I really can’t stop thinking about the sacrifices key workers are making, especially those in healthcare, and wishing I could do more. Keep loving the people around you, keep appreciating the springtime blossom, and I hope you’re all keeping safe and well. 

So, every Sunday I draw up a list of what I’ve been reading over the week and share them on here, in the hope that maybe some of the suggestions might pique your interest too. I know not everything will be everyone’s cup of tea, and if you think there’s something out there I should read, drop me a line and tell me about it. 

I generally gravitate towards a lot of emerging writers or contemporary literature from the 21st century. But as of late I’ve looked at some 19th and 20th century literature, which has been fun to read and write about. 

Anyhow, this week I’ve been reading Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, Cunt-Ups by Dodie Bellamy, E M Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born, The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading edited by Eileen Myles & Liz Kotz, and Adam Phillip’s Attention Seeking. It’s been great. So below I’ve got a small-ish breakdown in terms of what they’re all about, what they do. Sometimes I add ‘RECOMMEND’ next to some of the titles, but that’s not to say I don’t recommend all of them, I just love some books more than others. C’est la vie. 

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Okay so, first up: 

Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (RECOMMEND): Bataille spent most of his life being rejected by various writers and thinkers, (the Surrealists, the Existentialists, etc.) He was considered far too extreme, far too transgressive. Look at him now. He’s a Penguin Modern Classic. I have no doubt if he were alive today, he’d hate this. Though I find the idea of the canon a tenuous subject, I don’t necessarily avoid all the books. For the most part I absolutely loved this. I had been meaning to buy it since my old tutor from RCA asked us in class if any of us had read Story of the Eye and when my friend Tom (The Death of a Clown, Tom) said he read it when he was a teenager, and told me what it was about properly, I picked it up as soon as I finished my MA. 

Story of the Eye is about a guy looking back on his life and recalling his sexual exploits as a teenager with a girl called Simone. The relationship from the off is just odd, and for that reason well-matched. They take pleasure from the same fetishes that they explore together. They share that weirdness in each other. Some of these perversions get really specific, and I mean really specific. Like in the first sexual encounter (which happens on the book’s second page, Bataille doesn’t fuck about at all, no pun intended), Simone sits butt-naked in a dish of milk and it gets the narrator really hot under his collar. It’s a piece of psychoanalytic eroticism, and it just gets weirder and weirder. I suppose it’s all tied up in misadventure and adventure, and Bataille’s own life, his psyche. If you buy a Penguin Modern Classic edition of this, you’ll get his notes on Story of the Eye (which btw was originally published under Bataille’s pseudonym, Lord Auch, you’ll see this), and an essay from Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. I do think overall the ending is kind of abrupt... and it’s intentional but I wish Bataille had said more. Overall, I did love it for the beauty in Bataille’s choice of words to describe (what I deem to be) the surreality of sexual conquests and even the macabre at times.  

Dodie Bellamy, Cunt-Ups (RECOMMEND): Oh so wonderful. This book introduced me to the joys of the cut-up method and it is a sweaty, relentless fuck of a book. I salute Dodie Bellamy. It is exactly what Sophie Robinson says in the book’s foreword, ‘a kind of erotic Midas touch’. Everything this book touches is sex, queer, wet, shaky, writhing. It is absolutely exhausting. It consists of exchanges, voices, rooted in porn, rooted in love, the unachievable and the real in its gendered body. Won’t say anymore. You may have to look hard to find a copy available to buy in the UK, but when you do, just buy it. 

E. M Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born: This was the first time I bought Cioran. I was looking for new philosophy to read and came across this one line in an article, which quoted The Trouble with Being Born. 

It said:  ‘I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy’. 

It has been true of me sometimes in my life, to have fallen prey to imitating the ones who hurt me. It just so happened I read this line at a particularly difficult time, where somebody had failed me. So I bought the book. Did I use this text as a coping mechanism? Maybe a bit. Apparently everything goes to shit when you’re born, not when you’re hurtling towards death. That’s Cioran’s two cents. I like this book when I feel like life is never going to be okay ever again. It indulges my mindset at that point, then it gets so depressing I wake up and never read Cioran again until someday something else makes me feel lifeless. In his inherent nihilism, Cioran revives my optimism, and lust for life. 

Ed. by Eileen Myles & Liz Kotz, The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading (RECOMMEND): Incidentally, at the same time I read that line about never opposing your enemy again from Cioran, I was at the time, ill at ease with men. So I went looking for Kathy Acker. Instead I found this, an anthology of 37 writers talking about everything. The book was published in the 90s, at this point ‘queer lit’ isn’t really a term being mobilised, and the work isn’t always for lesbians, or written by lesbians. Some stories do wane, not everything here is my cup of tea, but that’s what you find in anthologies, the diversity of voices. It’s also deeply rooted in the real. It doesn’t sugarcoat at all. There’s sex, cancer, drugs, alcoholism, cake, driving, seasons, pizza, stairs and diabetes. There’s everything. 

Ultimately, to be a woman is to be in pain all your life. It’s chronic.  This anthology soothes and chafes these difficult wounds. 

Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking: Food for thought in the psychology literature of Adam Phillips. I like his hypotheses, and I enjoy his explanations. His writing is engaging and playful. Attention Seeking is about why and what we choose to pay attention to, why we seek attention for ourselves in four essays. He begins saying everything in life depends on what we find interesting. When we’re interested, we pay attention. 

This is an argument for attention-seeking in each of its facets. There’s no conclusions or set answers. Our selectivity makes up the very basis for who we are. And to understand this book you need to pay attention to it, and if you don’t, you’re only proving Phillips right. Now isn’t that masterful? 

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That’s all this week. Next Friday I’ll be reviewing Crispin Best’s Hello published very late last year. Hugs and snugs. Stay safe. 💕💁🏽