Setting the Terms
I haven’t done a lot of book re-reading in the last 10+ years. Article re-reading, yes. Books, not so much. Before about 2007, I used to re-read Colette’s The Pure and the Impure once a year, Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps, too. I knew Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin’s letters to each other well, better her diaries, best his Obelisk Trilogy; in particular, I used to read “The Angel is My Watermark!” and feel seen by his experience of bursting with writing ideas while walking to the place he wants to write only to lose it all once he sat down. (Although now I am a fierce and maybe sometimes annoying thought-documenter, as I mentioned in a past letter.) I’ve read Georges Bataille and Jean Genet and D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Pynchon over and over again.
I don’t think I’m writing this to demonstrate where exactly is my threshold for the extreme, so to speak, but maybe to remind myself that re-reading is not a waste of time, is not disrespectful to other books I haven’t read yet or may never get to read. This is because I’m about to embark on a re-reading mission in service of what I’m currently working on while I take a break from it.
My list:
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Tampa by Alissa Nutting
Eileen and Homesick For Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker
Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds
How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman
Journalism mentors had told me to read nothing when writing criticism, the wisdom being that your opinions could get perverted by someone else’s. In retrospect, I would have ignored this advice. It’s good to see how things have been written. It’s good to learn from what other’s have done. My opinions about music have rarely been influenced by others. I could have gotten a lot more out of engaging with the writing and writers I love.
Vivian Gornick recently published a book called Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader about just this. For the unfamiliar, Gornick is an influential memoirist, essayist, radical feminist, and New York Jew. If you’ve ever taken a creative non-fiction class, her book The Situation and the Story was probably part of the curriculum. She’s published books on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, and American communism. She is a person for me. Unfinished Business is in my library queue and includes some of my old haunts (Sons and Lovers, Colette).
Yesterday I was listening to an interview with Gornick on the LARB Radio Hour and she said a lot of things I will probably keep with me for a long, long time.
On second-wave feminist writing:
“I wrote that women are sexual objects and a year or two later, someone said or did something to me and I said, My god, I really am a sexual object. It was like that all the time—first came the experience, then came the ideology, then came the re-experience in the light of the ideology.”
On writing personal narrative and memoir:
“My feelings are not a subject and my personal history is not a subject, it has to be in service to something, some idea, some engagement that’s beyond myself, the way a novel is engaged by an emotional insight… The best work is when you use yourself to illuminate something else.”
On the initial panning of The Romance of American Communism:
“I read those reviews [now] and I see their point. I see all the ways in which I let them make terms. When you do a good piece of writing, you’re making terms. Then you can’t be faulted in the usual ways. People can write and say, ‘This is not my cup of tea,’ but it’s really different when you haven’t done the kind of job that allows for that kind of criticism.”
She acknowledges that the phrase “haven’t done the kind of job that allows for that kind of criticism” is an abstract thing to say but at its heart, I think, it is a commitment to the truth. It means not rounding the edges in service of something other than the necessity of the work. I think this applies to writing of all kinds, say, for example cable television news scripts.
I’m not on Twitter, so I’m sure this has been unpacked in your feed so many times but I cannot stop thinking about it because I’m pained by its flimsiness. It’s not like I rate Rachel Maddow or anything but if you’re going to engage in respectability politics about Donald Trump contracting a virus that he has denied the severity of, used as a prop for racism and xenophobia, done very little himself not to contract, then make it bulletproof, babe.
Stupid things first: no one is addicted to not wearing a mask. Billions of dollars are not funneled into the No Mask industry. There hasn’t been centuries of money and power dedicated to convincing people you don’t need to wear a mask. When you put on a mask, your chemical balances do not shift into an alienating discomfort that oscillates between an unceasing feeling that your body is now a hallowed out shell and that you could eat anything, maybe even your own arm, actually if you ate your own arm you’d feel something different than the possibility that you are in the process of losing your whole mind. You do not forgo food when you’re broke so that you have only enough money to eat or not to wear a mask.
Unless the friend who got lung cancer is a high-level executive at Philip Morris working to obscure the reality of rat poison, et al. in his products and refusing to quit because his non-smoker or reformed smoker status would imply that cigarettes are not safe, then it is not the same thing.
Anyone who understands how power works knows Maddow’s metaphor is wrong. Anyone who has ever been or is currently a smoker knows it has an embodied subtext that makes it even more wrong.
As ever, Naomi Klein did it better.
Some things to read:
Emily Temple on the history of Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board (LitHub)
How Author Joan Morgan Raised Her Son to Be a Feminist (Zora)
I wrote about why disco revivalism is having another moment (NYLON)
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