Where have I been? That’s a difficult question and here is the answer in several steps:
volunteered at a festival four hours away (really really fun)
tried to describe my newsletter to other volunteers, realised that I actually couldn’t do so succinctly, ended up being like ‘Wait what have I been writing’
agonised heavily over current essay (90s Madonna vs pagan debris), working on rewrite in fifty-something points rather like Notes on Camp or maybe Martin Luther’s theses
finally just wrote this, featuring only some of the books I have read and films I have seen in the past month
I came to The Rainbow far too late, after already reading Women in Love, which was supposed to be its sequel. I think that the two books would likely have had a greater emotional and circadian/rhythmic (?) impact had I read them in their proper sequence rather than going in blind at the library. More on rhythmic impact: The Rainbow is a slow and steady horse, Women in Love is a rat with arrhythmia, convulsing under the knife. The Rainbow is where Ursula Brangwen grows up and Women in Love is where she grows up again and then gets battered, at occasional intervals, by watery and icy acts of love and God.Â
The highlight of this unassuming prequel is its mixture (Madonna-esque) of religion and sexual ecstasy. At the book’s circadian height we go into raptures about the shapes and styles of a medieval church. I will write more on this. Â
The Fox by D.H. Lawrence
A short and strange novel - the lesbian couple from the encroaching outside, twin fetuses nestled in a womblike forest, female desire from the eye of a fox. Grey area between prey and predator. Murder and mayhem. Stilted, pointedly sexless. Barely worth it. Â
Apollo’s Angels by Jennifer Homans
The kind of gargantuan cultural history I live for, and often have trouble finding (only comparable book probably Richard Weight’s Mod, read last year). Epic space-time romp with dancers and choreographers, enough background information to fully understand trips to the ballet in nineteenth-century novels or in 30s films about courtesans. We chart the various rises and falls of ballet in Europe and America in sumptuous detail - steps, personalities, ideologies - and in simple but free-flowing language. Would make an excellent double bill if read with Paglia’s Sexual Personae (see the measured, shining Apollo, the periodic resurgences of tradition, the magic of the female dancer).
Birds of America by Mary McCarthy
This is not the book by Lorrie Moore but the one with only 300 Goodreads ratings, the tale of a precocious American boy on exchange in politically-turbulent Paris. More people should read it! McCarthy writes like a 1950s Christmas catalogue or Hindu shrine - excellent mise-en scene, almost a historical document. I feel privileged to have come across this novel before also going on foreign exchange for a year.Â
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
Watched due to being obsessed with Madonna, as is evidenced in previous newsletter and blog and YouTube history and my finger calluses from trying to play Secret on the guitar I have expropriated from my brother. Probably underrated as a pre-Sofia Coppola pastel feminist film - unbelievably pink and pastel, like a comedy version of Altman’s surreal Three Women. Madonna does not appear enough, but when she does she out-acts everyone else - especially the male leads, who seem to be written purely to prevent viewers from wising up to the obvious lesbian subtext. And you can dance - for inspiration!Â
Finishing this roundup with Mylene Farmer’s Sigmund Freud concept-pop…