Oh hello
I’m writing here to you from my bedroom and hoping for a life that extends beyond it, a room that is not very large and centres around a 13 inch laptop screen from which I order books and read about them, watch movies and look at times for screenings, with gaps in between to research, for instance, a new duvet cover (stripes now) or a new shower curtain (after seeing one that looked like seaweed hanging to dry), or a skin routine to erase pores, dark spots, redness, under eye lines, frown lines, acne scars, and, finally, once and for all, my face (until all that is left are two eyes surrounded by a hazy glow of sexy, effortless, chic). From my bed, I can stretch out to plug in my phone, take a pencil from my desk, find a book, open a drawer. I can even write to you.
I will begin, because this is the first, with some kind of introduction about these emails: what they are about; what they are for. All I plan to do (said in that modern, carefully modest, aw-shucks style, expectations managed to obsolescence) is send an email out every three weeks about one book and one film. The particular shape that takes remains to me, as to you, a mystery: that is, after all, part of the thrill of an email. You never quite know what the next paragraph will say.
Following the tradition of many now defunct tinyletters, I am doing this because I want to get better at thinking and writing about books and movies. I’m also drawn to the confessional intimacy of correspondence, a quality that the form seems to maintain even when the readers grow or don't exist. I have in my head an image of Kate in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, who, believing that she was the last person alive, continued to type out sentences from a beach house in Long Island, and in the process, despite not having anyone but herself to read her work, writes herself into existence. Over time, through these emails about the books I read and the films I watch, which I send out to not really anyone at all, I can create myself.
Painting Time (2021, trans Jessica Moore) by Maylis de Kerangal
Ok, this book is good. It is about three friends (but particularly one, Paula Karst) who meet while attending an institute in Brussels to learn the art of trompe l’oeil, and then continue their life after as lovers of mimicry. I keep reading the opening sentence because it grabs me with its immediate movement, staccato narration and Homeric swirling detail. (In the novel, Kerangal shrugs to this by adopting the occasional epithet “Anna of the grey eyes” like Homer describing dawn as rosy-fingered.)
Painting Time offers a defense of replication. As Paula works to develop a replica of a prehistoric cave that is closed to the public and vulnerable to erosion and destruction over time, her copy becomes a tool to bring the cave back, to bring it to life, to flatten time: “It is also to experience it, the way we experience an aftershock a little while after a seismic shift.”
Painting Time is also about language. When asked to paint a marble for a film set, Paula remembers the colours she would have added to her palette at the Institute: “British racing green, ultramarine blue, Van Dyke brown, yellow ochre, and black”. Early on at the Institute when things begin to click for Paula, the narrator says, “it is in language that Paula finds her bearings, her points of contact with reality”. The language she learns becomes a way for Paula to identify the world and also place herself in it. This connection Kerangal makes between words and replication resonates I think because language can itself be a form of trompe l’oeil. It is a sleight of hand that allows us, as con artists, to commit to the bit and begin to bring to life, badly at first but over time with greater precision (closer, closer, closer), utterances that are like aftershocks of how we experience the world.
Microhabitat (2017) by Jeon Go-woon
Miso, the protagonist in Jeon Go-woon’s debut feature length film, wants to maintain a stillness to her life in Seoul. She would like to sit at her favourite little bar and drink her little whiskey and smoke her little cigarette. These repeated images of her alone are beautiful. They have a warmth and sense of calm curated by minimal dialogue, highly saturated shots, and Miso gazing, not at her phone, but into the distance or into her drink.
But life is getting more expensive. Her rent increases. The price of her cigarettes increases. The same happens to her whiskey. Microhabitat follows Miso as she struggles to maintain her lifestyle within the financial and social pressures of Seoul. Early on, when her rent increases, Miso decides to cut it from her budget and attempts to stay with friends and family. We are shown shards of their lives. One friend is now married, has quit smoking and seems docile, scared that Miso will expose to her husband what she used to be like. Another IV drips glucose into her arm because it is “better than rice”. Her boyfriend gives up his art to move and work abroad, asking Miso to come with him. “We can play with our imagination,” he says. Miso calls him a traitor.
While these options do make living easier, or at least, more straightforward, no one seems to be able to find fulfilment in their lives. The problem, throughout, is structural. The landlord only increases Miso’s rent because his landlord has increased his rent. Miso looks set to lose work as a cleaner from one of her clients, after that client, who is a sex worker, becomes pregnant and fears that she will also lose work. There is a profound sadness to witnessing the systemic difficulties of finding joy in contemporary life. It’s hard not to nod back at the screen and think with an over pronounced sincerity: Miso just wants a drink and a smoke. Is that really too much to ask?
Love
Anne
ever in awe of your powers of observation and synthesis!
Hi Anne, keep up the good work. I love hearing your thoughts!!! <3