where do my legs go
I’m lucky to have a number of good readers in my life: those driven with curiosity for the esoteric and generosity of spirit who scan dollar carts outside used bookstores and dusty thrift store boxes and anywhere really for something unknown with a pulse and beating heart.
The joy of reading this way is experiencing the strangeness of another person’s mind and with no hand-hold. You can’t do this with a new release. Every new book is either discoursed to death or even its lack of discourse creates another form of negative reputation for it. You receive the packaging of a new book as much as the content; it can flatter or pander to you before the first page or it can offend your sensibilities on sight too. When you read a new book you are reading with others and it’s impossible to fully inoculate oneself from prejudices and provincialism or praise that others heap on this work.
But I have these great friends, across generations and other otherwise vastly different contexts and experiences, who are driven like to me to find a book that is forgotten and to remember it; sometimes that means a book that is unloved and to properly love it. When they recommend something to me, something long out of print, inevitably “weird,” it feels like they are letting me in on a secret. There are just so many books that have been published throughout history. You can either look at this as a problem for you (“oooh noes my TBR pile is tooo big!!”) or a maze with various pathways to find respite, solace or joy or otherwise expand your world.
Also what I mean by a good reader is not like a good student of literature but more like a good listener. They read/listen for why something is on the page. They come to each work without a checklist of how to do something well, or what makes something a success or a failure. Their taste is unique and continually expanding with the work they turn to—and grow with.
It’s the opposite of typical internet cultural connoisseurship which seems born out of a perpetual impulse to raise your hand in class and show off to the teacher and your fellow students that you—you precocious ruby of a child—know exactly why Abigal turned on Goody Proctor, why Winston betrayed Julia, why everything happens because all books have right answers.
I like the idea of social media for cultural criticism in blips—for perspectives on culture outside of staid NYT reviews—but influencers on Goodreads or Letterboxed often sound professionalized like they are auditioning to be critics at the Times. Instead of personal taste and broadly dissenting perspectives, you’ll see these upvoted reviews composed in a self-consciously serious critic's voice: that such and such has "second act problems” or there's no “satisfying character arc." It's like they're checking off boxes on a handmade scorecard at a baseball game. That’s fine if you feel that way and want to share it, but I wonder where the impulse is coming from?
There is always a sense of judgement day looming over hustle culture. That after you take your last breath, the Harvard admissions committee in the sky will review all your achievements and failures. The ultimate verdict—the ultimate review—is in your hands right now. (“Sorry dude, no passing through the golden gates. You gave four stars to William Friedkin's The Bug (2006), when clearly it only deserved two and a half or—at most—three. Off to the the B minus aesthete afterlife for you.”)
Where I care about this stuff is, well, I wish there would be more good readers. That more people would turn to work with a sense of expansiveness rather than moral accounting. Art is created with work but our enjoyment and appreciation of it isn’t work. Well, it doesn’t have to be.
In science fiction, especially, the workification of appreciating it really kills me. In the 70s, you could write a novel that was like 40k words describing a woman’s ass and then 10k words about why the space program is a bureaucratic nightmare and then win a Campbell/Astounding Award for it (Ok, maybe just Barry Malzberg could do this and maybe these novels are indefensible. Idk I could probably make the case for them). The idea of showing up to that sort of novel like, “hold up, there are some serious SECOND ACT PROBLEMS here” is as absurd as it should be thought of any contemporary work.
I don’t think great art can coexist with fear of the unknown or fear of purposelessness. After all, many (most?) of the great pleasures in life are unknown and purposeless. All of this seems small and obvious to say; but I feel the seismic shift in all of culture right now—it worries me. Not since 2008 have I felt like things are slipping away fast but also there are silver linings too. I need to remind myself what I’m fighting for: what I want to hold on to, and what needs to change.
#
And what I have been reading lately: well, a mix of things. Normally I read one book at a time, I either finish or I don’t. But my focus hasn’t been with me this month, and I keep picking up and putting down this and that (in the current mix are Moby Dick and Wittgenstein’s Mistress, two novels that do benefit from this sort lazy susan-style approach).
I finally read Alan Garner’s Red Shift, a book I would have gotten to sooner if I’d encountered even a taste of the passionately bizarre dialogue between teenagers it begins with—or known that it’s largely set in a caravan (trailer) park. I scarcely understood what was happening half the time but I felt it, I sure felt it. It’s otherworldly, holy. If you find yourself in a state where every book delivers exactly what it promises to be, where nothing is unexpected and that is disappointing to you, well, you should read Red Shift because if nothing else, it is unpredictable and vibrating at a low-pitch that I can just barely receive.
I also read a few books by Magnus Mills, which I thought I might really really love but mostly really really liked (still, really really liked). I’m obsessed with this jacket art…look at these lads, just look at them:
I am almost finished with Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat, which is short but also a book I couldn’t read in one sitting—didn’t want to, I mean, in a good way. I’m usually a little wary of this style of book (a little too cool), what I guess what you could call quirky autofiction. But there’s real pain at the core of the novel and it refracts through what might otherwise be light comedic scenes.
I read Lorrie Moore’s new one. The title is a little gooey and put me off but the novel earns it, I think. There are all these references to modern life, Airbnbs and such, and never awkward or overly done, but the ultimate feeling I got was a pleasant reminder of the sort of books I'd find at the old Powell's Bookstore in Lakeview, when I lived in Chicago. It was open until 10pm, and what a luxury it was to browse a bookstore that late. I'd pull something off the shelf and read it that night. Usually books I bought there were remaindered titles, popular releases from two or three years before, Lorrie Moore was inevitably one of the writers I’d discovered there. This book reminded me of that sort of easiness, entry to somewhere unknown, and a possibility with no underling obligations. How I can I explain this, I love that the book feels like a “it’s 10pm in 2006 in Chicago” novel, but it’s not nostalgic at all (nor am I).
I read Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball. A New Year’s Eve novel I read on the holiday. Not quite to my taste but I finished it anyway. I guess I was hoping for that shot from Phantom Thread we all know and respond to on a cellular level but in novel form and instead got a book that is *witty* and full of somewhat belabored descriptions of icing and drapes. Honestly, I was feeling down on New Year’s and it’s entirely possible that I wasn’t in a place to receive whatever pleasures the book contains.
I also read the first of David Peace’s Red Riding series, Nineteen Seventy-Four. Ok, I was loving it, ready to speed through the other three but (a pretty major BUT with all the exclaimation marks in the world)…first person point of view, unreliable narrator, a scoundrel, sure I get it…. BUT(!!!), it takes a turn when the protagonist starts narrating, quite graphically, his sexual assault of a woman (including graphic depiction of her traumatized response). You know, now that I think of it I don’t miss the before times at all. Why, one of those good things about being here now, in 2024, is that we might demand that authors have a think on scenes like this before committing to them. Or at least think through how it reads in the context of the rest of the material. Haven’t given up on Peace and will read GB84 at some point. But arghhh….I have a high tolerance for most anything but(!!!) that.
The best book I read in a while—one of the best I’ve read in my life—is 1982, Janine. I love that it’s pathetic and stupid as parts to cohere as a brilliant whole. It makes me wonder if a book can only achieve this brilliance with a naked willingness to be stupid on the page. It’s so beautiful, needless, and batty. There’s nothing mannered about it, nothing straightjacketed to anyone else’s approval. It shouldn't work, a book of (mostly) sexual fantasies that are somewhat lacking in eroticism and instead serve to illuminate the narrator's many neuroses. It’s not just his imagination that intriguies, but the way he revises his fantasies in excruciating detail—you realize that only in his headspace does he ever feel safe and in control. It’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. It makes me proud of my Scottish ancestry. I could celebrate it every year like my uncles with their Burns nights. Oh my god what a great novel.
Next up for me is Katherine MacLean’s Missing Man and Terry Bisson’s Voyage to the Red Planet.
Because I’m reading Moby Dick, I learned about Charles Olson and that he was 6’8. It just blows my mind that there ever was a poet who was 6’8. There are practicalities here that people closer to the ground might not realize. I’m normal tall and the hardest part of the writing is I think where to put my legs at a desk. Probably all of my writing makes sense if you realize it is conducted in a constant state of thinking: what do I do with my legs? Do I sit on my right ankle and then switch to sit on my left ankle? Stand up? Hug my knees to my chest and curl my arms around to the reach the keyboard? Every fifteen minutes, at least, I’m thinking….where do my fucking legs goooo????
#
This newsletter has been incredibly long. Thank you for either staying with me or skimming to the end where I usually stuff all my personal update. Well, I’ve got a few!
Catch me reading from WRONG WAY at the Edendale Library in Los Angeles on Feb 10th (weekend/afternoon event) Or, if you are in Portland, Oregon, come see me at Bishop & Wilde on February 21. I’ve also got an exciting event scheduled in San Francisco on February 23rd with a bunch of people I admire and I should try to send another newsletter before then to properly hype this one. I’ll share the details on Mastodon and Bluesky.
I’m back on the east coast the following month, appearing at Red Emma’s in Baltimore on March 21st (there will also be something schedule in DC and—probably—Pittsburgh around then.) Please come out and say hi if you are able.
And as ever, thanks for reading.