Pop Song
Adventures in Art & Intimacy
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- ¥2,000
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
"A warm and expansive portrait of a woman’s mind that feels at once singular and universal," this collection of essays interweaves commentary on modern life, feminism, art, and sex with the author's own experiences of obsession, heartbreak, and vulnerability (BuzzFeed).
Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go.
Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love—with a place, or a painting, or a person—and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss—from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde—Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.
Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed.
Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness.
"Each of the essays in this debut collection reads like a mini-memoir . . . in which the author reflects on her experiences of young love, trauma, and transcendence through discussions of art and music . . . with an intimacy that is at once tender and expansive." —New York magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pham reinvents the memoir in a stirring debut that explores the power of language, art, and love. As an Asian American woman who felt alienated early on in her life, she poured herself into studying art and poetry to reconcile her need for closeness. In 11 essays, she interrogates desire in all its forms, beginning with an evocative piece about finding solace in the act of running. She aspires to the "affable stride" of fellow runner and novelist Haruki Murakami, but instead she runs "as if trying to lose my mind." Throughout, Pham examines the emotionality of other artists' and writers' work and lives—from Barthes to Georgia O'Keeffe to Louise Bourgeois—as a way to better understand her own. In "Blue," she reflects on escaping mental burnout in New Mexico, and remembers the painter Agnes Martin's flight from New York, after a schizophrenic episode: "Agnes's voices and visions didn't inform her art-making process, but... dictated her actions—where to be, what to eat, what to own." Ever-present, too, is the haunting of past lovers and her own sexuality, captured in prose that's both beautiful and gutting. "If I could own it... become a woman with agency. It wouldn't matter if I still hurt. At least I'd be able to describe it." This is a masterpiece.
