What I've been reading this week (and ode to a genius, David Lynch)
17/01/25
Good evening!
We are finally at Friday! We made it. A strange week -- I was very busy and now I’m really tired, but I have some nice things coming up. All very vague I know but the ‘nice things’ aren’t hugely interesting so I won’t bore you with them.
Last week I talked briefly in this section about Ethel Cain’s new album Perverts, and would like to once again utilise this space to talk about Bad Bunny’s new album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Funnily enough, both Ethel Cain and Bad Bunny were my two most listened to artists in 2024, and they both made the top 5 in 2023, so I’ve been having a great time walking about listening to their new stuff. They’re extremely different artists but they have a few things in common -- their ages, for example, and how they come from backgrounds that people think they know, but really only have a cultural relationship with. They’re both trying new things in these new albums, and DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS explores slightly different ground than he has before -- even though this is by going back to his Puerto Rican childhood, and what shaped it and his family. Anyway I’m not a music critic but I really like both of them and think you should listen to them.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
My twitter/X is @jessf_white, my Instagram is @lunchpoems, my Bluesky is @jesswhite
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I spent the week reading The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (1987), which I suspected would become a favourite last week -- and I was right! This is so so so good! One of those where it’s annoying that I haven’t read it before, but it turned out to be the right time, because I felt like the death of David Lynch gave the reading experience a bit more weight. I was floored by the death of Lynch, a man I kind of thought would be around forever because he is so visionary, so huge in his outlook, that he seems spiritually larger than life. I feel like there are parallels to be drawn between his work and The New York Trilogy, because they both draw on dream-like landscapes and characters, as well as repeated motifs that confront their reader/viewer.
I just did a quick internet search to see if Auster and Lynch had ever spoken about or to each other in a professional setting. There isn’t anything I can find, but I’m happy to see that a lot of people have drawn the same conclusions as I have -- that they have a shared DNA, and there has been a great wish from their fans for them to work together. Something I didn’t even immediately pick up on was how they both subvert the detective genre, while also paying it the necessary respect. The New York Trilogy is made up of three novellas that are interlinked through their form and themes, and how they all take the scaffolding of detective fiction, especially noir detective, and populate it with the slightly strange and unnerving. The comparison that can be made to Twin Peaks is clear here, and thinking about it, Lynch is most likely the reason why I crave these kinds of stories. I love detective and mystery media that delves into the strange and absurd, making it especially artistic and thought-provoking, and I look for these texts everywhere. The last time I came close to something like this was Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain (1984), and before that, but to a lesser extent, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965).
The characters in Auster’s text(s) are looking for something or someone, or they are looking at something or someone. The psychological impact of watching is explored through all of them, especially in how this behaviour encourages paranoia and psychotic breaks. Other shared themes are jealousy, grief, the setting of New York and a sense of identity. Motifs and shared names abound through them, with red notebooks, post boxes, homeless people and long walks populating the character’s lives in ways that either do or don’t find significant. One of the blurbs describes it as ‘kaleidoscopic’ and I would agree, although this is a bit of a worn out phrase. It is entirely relevant here though, and should really be strictly relegated to Auster and people like him (like Lynch). Everything seems to connect, and then it falls apart, and then comes together and then…and so on. Images that are shared between the novellas are sometimes relevant, sometimes incidental, depending on what angle you’re looking at them from. Sometimes they contribute towards an exploration of what life and death mean, sometimes they are just an image in a scene. The thrilling thing about all of this is that we are the ones who decide what is significant and what isn’t, just like Auster’s characters who pick things up from the street, notice something in an unfamiliar room or buy on a whim. Sometimes it’s a passing thing in their life, sometimes it is the centre of their world.
There are a huge amount of paragraphs and sentences that I could pull out and type here for you to see how excellent Auster’s prose is, but I think it’s one of things that should be read within its context in order for you to fully parse how clever it all is. I found myself reading some paragraphs over and over again, not because I wasn’t taking them in, but because I was addicted to experiencing them, to fleshing them out. Truly, what life is about!
I’m now reading a gifted copy of There’s No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes, which was originally published in Italian in 1938, and is being reissued by Pushkin Press with a new translation by the inimitable Ann Goldstein. It’s out next month. It’s good, but I kind of feel like I’m in the mood for something else, so I might put it down for a bit and pick it up again later. We’ll see.
More next week!