museum of contemporary art monsters
I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel is 5 x 8 x 0.4 inches & 216 pages of red hot desperation. + Sheena recommends a beloved Purse Book of her own !
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There’s a bifocal quality that I look for in certain novels. These novels obsess on the microscopic and then, with no warning, sweep into socio-structural critique—and that’s I’m a Fan, which is fundamentally a story about obsessive crushing and also power disparity.
In I’m a Fan, a smart-bitter narrator fixates on her affair with a bad art man, but mostly fixates on another of his loves, an aloof tastemaker. The novel questions who’s allowed to be an aloof tastemaker, who’s allowed to be a bad seductive artist, and who’s simply allowed to admire from a distance. As the narrator drowns herself in every photograph taken by the woman she’s obsessed with and every two word text sent by her terrible crush, she also applies furious analysis about transactional social capital writ large. It’s so petty and it’s got the widest brush stroke. Above most things, it’s a damning book.
Something that I loved about I’m a Fan (and I loved: its jokes, its short sharp shock rhythm, its social-political inquiry) was the narrator’s forthright plunge into certain socially taboo qualities like: embarrassment, bitter jealousy, pure desperation. But for all the ways it’s unflinching, it’s also just like: so fun.
& welcome to the MIXED BAG portion of this letter, which has my notes on other culture & stuff that’s not, strictly, Purse Books:
Not to be deterred about admiring abstraction, I went to the Cecily Brown show at Paula Cooper and the naughty dreamy creamy pastels are just haunting me, but in a really pretty way.
Listening to “Angel of Business”, “Let Down”, and this clubby remix of “Heads Will Roll” that I did hear in a spin class.
I reported a story about Edith Head’s costumes for the Times last week and watched What a Way to Go for research purposes only. It’s a 1964 eye-popper with Shirley MacLaine (adorability incarnate) and her gaggle of men, which include Dick van Dyke (I have thoughts, they’re unpublishable), Dean Martin, Paul Newman (you won’t believe his deal), Robert Mitchum, and Gene Kelly. It’s frenetic and full up of adorable little matching sets.
Plus ! Wonderful news : Sheena Patel, author of I’m a Fan, recommends a Purse Book for us:
It looks like graceful and scintillating! I want it !