Girl stuff!
More surely than we fly towards death, we go to parsimony.
Oh wow, Animal by Lisa Taddeo. I picked it up at the library because I liked Three Women and was curious what her fiction is like. Super well-paced, great at revealing information, loopy story. After listening to so many Agatha Christie books, I was not disappointed. I am famously terrible at predicting the twists in mysteries and so didn’t see the obvious conclusion until I was in it. And Taddeo, to her credit, does not harp on it! She trusts the reader (shouldn’t have trusted me, I missed so many clues) and it makes the whole thing a lot more real. People have wild lives and convoluted backstories and there’s no reason that the wildness should be the time-stop big reveal in a story about them because they’re continuing to exist in the (story) world and that’s where the real mystery is. What comes next!
It’s definitely a woman book - I don’t know any men who seek out books about women’s experiences of sexuality and sexual violence (and maybe that’s a good thing, tbh). For a few years I have been working a book that addresses these topics so I’ve read quiiiite a few. (Off the top of my head if you’re curious: Little Scratch, Speak, Luster, Winner of the National Book Award, Beloved, Bad Feminist…)
If you don’t like blood and obsession and amoral women you will not like it.
Speaking of!!!!
I heard of Daisies ~15 years ago during an ill-fated collaboration attempt with a filmmaker I admire. I never watched it, though I don’t remember why. After the project fell apart and the relationship attenuated, I never wanted to seek it out because I was afraid I’d find out that it had been the key to the collaboration. I didn’t want to know how close we had come.
It wasn’t. Or, it may have been, but I was not the lock. I wouldn’t have been able to understand it, mired as I was in Charybdic self-regard. I would have felt too close to the women in it and too jealous and insecure, asking Is that the way to live life? (I took a lot of art very literally.) Anyway, NOW I found it delightful.
It reminded me of hanging out with my best friend when we were teenagers. She was (is) very beautiful and was (is) constantly, in word and deed, telling people to fuck off, but they ke(e)p(t) coming back to hear it.
Can (You) Tell: I did a cultural/studies degr(e)e?
The movie premise (loose, very much a collage movie) is two cutie young women being like OH IS THIS THE KIND OF WOMAN YOU WANT!?!?
They’re little gremlins, performing femininity in an exaggerated, affected way that reminded me of the girl who introduced me to the Weetzie Bat books. She did this cutesy giggle and had a way of squinching up her face and splitting her enormous lips over her buck teeth when she smiled.
I got even more drill bits stuck in the pendant
And so I modified the design quite a bit. I am treating this whole thing as practice; great information about how I must be drilling wrong. Or, just the volume of drill holes (~30) is too many for me to focus on at once.
I WOULD have a picture for you but I had to turn it in to get graded (hah) so I’ll just have to show you when it comes back with a nice, gentle C on it.