Point of Fashion: Books

Some questions: would I dress to match my Kindle as I dressed the other day to match Dodie Bellamy’s incredible The Buddhist? No, I would not, and it’s not just because I don’t own a Kindle. Kindles are ugly. I think that is the real heart of this back-and-forth about the death of books and the rise of KIndles – do we want to live in a fucking ugly world where beautiful, rich colorful things like books, things that contain mystery and are therefore magical are replaced by some utilitarian thing that makes my Android look rococo? I don’t. Neither does Karl Lagerfeld, if any of you care what he thinks about aesthetics and living well – he recently Tweeted Even a golden iPad (that exists) will never give the same pleasure to the reader as a beautifully bound book. Expensive books enrich us. This is from the man who owns 70 iPods, a man unafraid to adapt new technology when it is appropriate. And of course I’d like to chime in that even inexpensive books enrich us, as I have been deeply enriched this week by Dodie Bellamy’s newest, The Buddhist, maybe the most personal book I’ve ever read about her affair with a creepy manipulative professional Buddhist. It’s all about middle-age and sex and being female, having a body wanting sex, and love, growing older, being sad and depressed from this world and resisting the Hegemony of Happiness. Which I have completely capitulated to but I get it. It makes sense to be a mess in this world. The Buddhist is a total breakup book and you sort of want to send it to anyone who didn’t understand how to love you properly in your whole life, but more than that you want to send Dodie a bouquet of flowers for having the sanity to end a chapter with FUCK YOU, JONATHAN FRANZEN!!

Other books I got to meet this week:

Tao Lin started a small press called Muumuu House and asked me to blurb the forthcoming book by Megan Boyle, Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee. I want to have Dodie Bellamy and Megan  Boyle over for dinner together, a dinner I would burn and then we’d just sit in my bed with my cats eating ice cream and possibly crying. If you think this sounds awesome you will LOVE this book. Megan is in her early 20s and having a mad downward spiral that includes condomlesss sex, alcoholism, and bleeding ulcers. By Megan I mean ‘Megan’, the girl in the book not the girl who wrote the book. I’m not sure of their relationship – you know how that goes. Anyway, these sparse entries are blunt and poetic and jaded and emotionally astute, so sweet about people, the big faceless mass of them which we are all part of, and weird about love, full of longing but also intelligently bored and over it because you know, people are dumb. I really love this book and want to send it to people I know to be like – this book is so you! But I think they would be offended. They’ll find it soon enough, it comes out in November and people are going to be reading it.Tao also sent along Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs which seems stylistically  linked to Megan’s book and also to Tao’s You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am -can we name this literary movement? I don’t have the time right now.

Also:

MariNaomi (who will show new VAMPIRE work in honor of the 20th anniversary of Jewelle Gomez’s Gilda Stories at Intersection for the Arts on October 22nd) sent me Sister Spit Tour 2011 Diary and I got to relive the night I was forced to sleep at a motel so gross I took a shower with all my clothes on afterwards. She also sent me Not So Butch, a cute investigation of gender + desire. You can’t get that on a Kindle! Word.