Maybe you're happy, but I hope you're sad

[sovay]

I understand the entire point of this profile of 1980's Bennington is the writers who came out of it and that she herself went to the Catholic University of America, but by the end it really sounds like a Liz Hand novel.

After establishing that Norman Lindsay's Man and leopard-woman in a room (1900s–10s) which I first saw elsenet without sourcing was not the product of extractive AI, I particularly admire the naturally occurring gloves on the leopard-woman and I expect the next drawing in the sequence to have shown his dressing gown in shreds and no leopard-woman to be seen.

I am not any more pleased with this month after hearing that Joan Plowright just died.

Comments

[naraht]

She wrote a book all about being obsessed with Eve Babitz, and then another book about Eve Babitz AND Joan Didion, and granted she came to my attention because I got into both Babitz and Didion for the first time last year, but her particular brand of obsessed-with-star-author is (IMO) just on the verge of cringey, and it kinda leaves me unsurprised she's also into Donna Tartt.

On reflection I have no idea if my reaction and yours are at all congruent, as I've never read a Liz Hand novel.

[sovay]

On reflection I have no idea if my reaction and yours are at all congruent, as I've never read a Liz Hand novel.

An intensity of artistic atmosphere and hothouse relationships suffused with some degree of decadence in a charmed/cursed space of time that decades after the fact everyone is still processing is one of the recurring motifs in her novels, novellas, and short stories; sometimes it comes out as horror, sometimes as nostalgia, sometimes just as sorting, and frankly even the making of divisive roman à clef art out of this period of one's life would fit into a story by Elizabeth Hand. In full disclosure, I am almost a pandemic behind on the majority of her bibliography, but my previous experience was generally enthusiastic.