Ada James '23
If you haven’t heard of Sally Rooney or at least the 2020 Hulu series “Normal People” you're simply out of the post-covid-leaning-liberal-neoteric-romantic literature loop. I bought Normal People (2019) after *anonymous take-a-guess couple on campus* suggested it to me as their favorite book, but, as any good reader does, I didn’t pick it up until after devoting myself to Rooney’s first publication: Conversations with Friends (2018). That was advertised to me as a novel exploring the “intricacies of friendship” with a hint of romance could not have caught me turning pages that fast if it really had just been that. With its magnificent overlap of unconventional relationships and interpersonal decay, Roony manages to relate a darkly-quirky narrative with almost anyone’s interest. The inexplicit femininity of the novel only makes the taboo intimacy, euro-countryside scenery, and perceptual intricacies that much more bright and enthralling. Electrifying, demoralizing, beautiful, repulsive, friends, lovers, Conversations with Friends is boldly itself and definitely a must-read.
Just a thought but maybe the constant engagement of Cate doesn’t provide you (any of us) with the time for reading? A modest personal selection from EE Cummings’ Complete Poems 1904-1962 edited by George J Firmage might satiate your mood for love. My bookmarked poems: “let’s live suddenly without thinking,” “in the rain-,” “a thing most new complete fragile intense,” “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” “may I feel said he,” and my personal favorite “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.” With each poem sopping with the best, the worst and the riskiest parts of love and emotion, the argument over Cumming’s relatability, stupidity or genius might be the most heated you’ll have all February. You will surely experience him in Advanced English 12’s modernism unit, but why wait?
As for film, I was debating between French New Wave classic Breathless (1960), Norwegian, classified as “moving relationship stories” genre by Letterboxd, The Worst Person in the World (2021), and woefully beautiful Goodbye First Love (2011), but ended on neither of them. Instead I present Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (2006). You might have heard of Zigwoff from his relatively popular film Ghost World (2001) that was nominated for an Academy Award or maybe you think you recognize star Max Minghella from his groundbreaking presence in The Social Network (2010), but trust me you have never seen anything like this film.
Of course adapted from the alt underground comic scene like Zigwoff’s other work, Art School Confidential follows the story of a socially-inadequate Jerome on his journey to becoming a “great artist,” evading the school’s pretentious murderer, and . I have never recommended a film more times than I have with this one, and even more so I have never been hit with so much backlash. Every single friend and confidant has come up to me to let me know either “that was the worst movie I have ever seen” or “I couldn’t even get past the first fifteen minutes.” Aghast I remain to these responses as it stands as the film I have seen the most times in one year (7). A pretty disturbing, maybe philosophically stimulating, and (hopefully) ironically hyperbolized interpretation of the art school experience and the quest for love, I recommend Art School Confidential to the Cate School!
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