Dust Bunnies
Reading and Shopping
• I bought Dave Hickey’s Dust Bunnies because I loved his Facebook posts. I have a diary from 2014-ish where I cut-and-pasted screenshots of his commentary into as I sorted out my own thinking against his. (Paul Schrader? I don’t know her). I thought Dust Bunnies would be un-abridged transcripts of all his Facebook posts but turns out that’s a different book called Wasted Words and now I’m pissed because wasted words is exactly what Dust Bunnies is to me now, seeing as it’s a sliver of a larger collection. Hickey died in 2021 and seems to be getting the Eve Babitz treatment, i.e., having every last corner of his archive scraped in order to push out one posthumous volume after another. I’m reviewing one of them now, Feint of Heart, just put out by Zwirner Books. It’s the final gathering of his work in museum catalog essays and I’m having a bit of a time with it. Catalog essays are the BDSM dungeon of art world publishing; where critics go to masturbate under red lamps and spectators are happy to pay for the privilege.
Look at Hickey being a nasty little boy over Robert Gober
As I exited Robert Gober’s ballroom, turning left into its crepuscular aftercourt, I found myself thinking that at least Gober’s abbatoir is clean… but its cleanliness is just as full of death… clearly no environment for children… those dissonant little red boxes of rat bait… although some puritan mom might think so… The aftercourt turns out to be a cul-de-sac; so now, like Christ, we been denied three times.
• I read Ariana Raines’ Wave of Blood while huddling at my boyfriend’s house during the LA Fires and highly recommend it (fire optional, but undeniable). There is chatter in the publishing world that essay collections or hybrid non-fiction is not the thing right now, but that’s only because people have been putting out BORING essays and hybrid nonfiction (divorce? groundbreaking). Wave of Blood is not about the genocide in Gaza, it’s a net of poems and diary entries and talks given by Ariana all around Europe in which she deals with the spectre of its cruelty and her own Jewish identity in real time. I don’t know how you pitch a book like this but I love getting into a weird non-sound-byte-able text and riding the crest of the author’s thinking. She has the heart to hit squarely on on the pain of being alive without sieving her sentiment through aureate theory-speak or psychological terms. I also like how Ariana’s diction simultaneously pulls from the ancient past and thirty seconds from now. Observe:
And I’ve noticed, in the art world, whatever, we like sex, it is allowed. And thinking is allowed. But people’s hearts are totally calcified.
• Immediately followed it up with Anne Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. Ann Patchett is my little mentos-and-coke writing sprite. I don’t know why. I’ve never even read her novels, but her nonfiction goes down like candy even when she’s talking about hard things or other people’s lives. Truth and Beauty is whole ass book about her best friend with disfiguring jaw cancer and a heroin habit who wrote one really good book about her own face and then fell off, so to speak. Ann is naïve enough to let her own “help” to turn into enabling, and even the narrator doesn’t know the difference sometimes. I am always encouraged by Patchett’s patent selfishness in owning and commanding anything that happens to her as subject matter, and her ant-like work ethic in pounding it out. She’s deeply religious and still likable and makes life seem like a wacky, endurable ride.
• I’m making my way through all of David Sedaris’s books. I just finished Calypso, probably his most serious one, as it deals with aging and dying, but he still handles his material like a comedian and the sentences whizz by. I’m in the middle of writing a book of essays myself and I require a media diet that communicates ease and humor and rhythm—it’s the only kind of writing that keeps me from getting bogged down in my own shitty little couplings of the English language. To that end I ordered Lucille Ball’s autobiography Love, Lucy, although when I had a friend over for dinner she picked it up and said “oh, I just read this. There’s a really fascinating history of the San Fernando Valley in here” so maybe I underestimated Lucy’s literary gravitas.
• I also just finished Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò because Ben Davis recommended it. Please follow his advice, get a group, and read it together.
• Recently doubled down on my conviction that outerwear is all that matters because I like wearing OUTFITS and your jacket / coat / cardigan / etc. is the only thing most people will see. I’ve never lived in an extremely cold climate so the idea of having one winter coat is abhorrent and sad. I’ve been all over the globe in the past five years and it’s alarming how similar everyone my age looks (elevated basics? groundbreaking). I went to Chicago last year to give a talk, sat next to a girl in a slick unitard and a giant hoodie that said LOS ANGELES on it and thought why the hell did I even leave the house? (money). I’m getting a jump on my magpie era and I plan to wear these things until I die.
• I love my apartment and have been going through a new kind of organizational phase. These usually never work because I am disorganized. I like shopping at The Container Store but nothing ever coheres into a system that makes sense. I just make piles and then shuffle the piles around. I finally resigned myself to being a Pile Person and bought a series of L.L. Bean totes as a fun way of marginally tidying my process while keeping everything visible. Forthcoming totes are labeled MAIL and READING MATERIAL because I never met a PDF I didn’t immediately print out.
• Thank you for letting me get all of this out of my brain.
xoxo
Christina