Jan 23 // They feast on the abundance of your house
Jan 23 2024
weather: brighter
mood: brighter
music: Spoon, "Before Destruction"
Ahoy,
Unexpectedly soon to be writing to you, at least in my mind. I've been thinking, as ever, about the point of a newsletter / the point of semi-public thought. Having somewhat fruitful discussions with friends about Substack and the Parable of the Nazi Bar. Mostly just trying to wind my way through the early days of this most dangerous year, trying to start as I mean to go on while also acknowledging that very little about life is really a 'start' so much as it is an evolution or a continuation (except for birth, I suppose) and so why not embrace that temporal fluidity?
I've only got one real agenda item in this missive, but it is (in its way) big enough that it can sustain itself: I've recently finished reading Moby-Dick for the first time, in community with a bunch of other people on the internet.
Group reads are not new. It's so easy to be communal now, to meet up and share an experience with people all over the world. What is the Tournament of Books, really, if not an ~18-book group-read? And I was recently editing an upcoming episode of The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast where Mike Kelleher was talking with Yiyun Li, who organized an international Tolstoy read-along during the early days of the pandemic -- and the whole idea of that show is reading together, in that it does the So Many Damn Books thing (I know we didn't invent it but indulge my bending a teeny bit of glory towards myself) of inviting an author to suggest somebody else's work to talk about.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize that this idea of shared experience is one of the driving forces of my work. Certainly it is the thing that powers my writing -- "I want to tell you a story" -- but also my curatorial work is about... well, I'd say 'community engagement,' but that has a particular meaning that I often find restrictive. (I wrote a whole tangent about this but decided to take it offline to a text thread instead. Some thoughts need to be workshopped.) It's about sharing, though. About bringing people, ideally lots of them with differing views/backgrounds/experiences together to experience something together. I suppose that's why I'll never really let go of the theater, but it is also why my MO when it comes to putting together fully-realized events or panels or whatever is to put unexpected voices into conversation with one another. What happens when a chef and an author and a musician and an opera singer and an activist all get together to talk about death and Thornton Wilder? Cooler shit than if you got three actors and two writers together to do it, I tell you that from experience in both directions.
Anyway, January was deemed the perfect chance for "A Month of Dick" -- h/t to Emily Hughes for giving me the nudge to take the leap, as I was one of those people who thought Moby-Dick was some excruciatingly boring tome about whale facts. Turns out, it IS that at times but it is also hilarious, somber, experimental, strange, gripping, and oh it is very gay. Ishmael and Queequeg forever.
The schedule for the group-read has the conclusion of the book read on Jan 31 -- and for a while, I really committed to only reading the assigned chapters per day and this, this is what I come to you to talk about: the experience of slowing down.
I read a lot. And fast. It is unusual for me to take more than a week on any given book, exceptions being something like The Dawn of Everything, which I've been reading in small sips over the last six or seven months -- but it's always non-fiction or a collection that I read over time, because you can dip in and out of such things. Sustained narrative, though, is something that I find I want to surge through. Turn those pages and on to the next one.
And I don't actually think it is such a bad thing, to read like that. I'm sure I'm not giving books the best shrift every single time as a result, and some things that I love in the moment don't stick with me at all because I'm already halfway into the next thing, etc etc. But I read for the pleasure of the experience of present-tense reading, not for reflective posterity. I read to keep the well full, to keep the clouds at bay as best I can.
I should note: I did read some other things during the 20 days it took me to read Moby-Dick. I read Neil Gaiman's first story collection Smoke & Mirrors, I read Sōsuke Natsukawa's The Cat Who Saved Books, I continued to read The Dawn of Everything (which actually has some great resonances). But for the most part, I was stopping myself from reading on in Moby-Dick and the experience was so jarring that I talked to my therapist about it.
Slowing down is hard for me. When Dani and I were first dating and it was the beginnings of Hamiltomania, those passionate and urgent lines from Hamilton to Angelica -- about writing like you're running out of time, about never being satisfied -- pulled us together. We were hungry and wanted to do, to live. New York, the theater community, the arts in general... they'll encourage you to keep up that pace because of a fear that otherwise you'll be left behind. And for a person like me, already predisposed to both move fast and think a lot, it became my identity. I read a ton, I went to all the shows, I was producing this thing and playing in a band and acting in that thing and and and.
And then I got off the merry-go-round, pre-COVID but certainly much more so during the grinding halt of 2020 -- but it didn't stop my internal sense of rush, of urgency, of needing to move onto the next thing. I'm still feeling it, frankly. But slowing down set me free, or free-r than I might've otherwise been.
Dani can attest that I was rattling about more than usual -- but I also was writing, more often and for longer. I was doing other things around the house, I was trying to stay in the space of strong emotion for a bit longer (instead of shutting it out), and I was staring at / interrogating the 'reasons' for my feeling of rush. Did I need to move on to the next book? Why? Okay, yes: I missed some Indie Next nominating deadlines for some books I know I'm going to like and that I felt like I should be supporting. But I can still support those books, I told myself, through any number of channels. Okay, yes: I felt bored sometimes! But I didn't run away from that and instead tried to turn it into a feeling of ease. To convince myself that stillness is not danger.
I'm not sure how well it worked, although it clearly did at least to some degree. You may notice that it is not yet the end of January, and yet I've finished Moby-Dick -- but that's a testament to frankly the diminishing quality of Melville's novel. Where the early going was puckish and full of delights, wild scene after wild scene, the forward momentum of the novel utterly dissipates as the Pequod's journey gets underway. I read someone's consideration that you could skip essentially the middle hundred chapters of the novel and not really miss much story -- obviously you'd miss other things, and a lot of the whale-talk is genuinely delightful, but also there's a lot of shaggy digressive stuff that (in my opinion) takes away from the book's pleasures. And I'll confess that I started to feel itchy, not because I was desperate to read other things but because I was getting tired of the mess. I missed Ishmael, I missed Queequeg -- they were there, obviously, but they shifted from being people to being pieces on a chessboard. The novel aspires to such a Shakespearean scope that the language even changes as it goes along, beginning to fold in more and more of Ahab's grandiosity... but what, really, is the point? We live in times of logorrheic grandiosity everywhere you look, and never more so than in the middle of election season. Do we care about this monomaniac's quest for vengeance? Or do we care about the ordinary lives around him? This question gets at something I found wearying about the second season of Our Flag Means Death: yes, Stede and Edward are the famous leads... but I was more interested in spending time with the crew, and cared less about the leads (particularly as they fell into ever-more-predictable stories while their supporting cast got to stretch in ever-more-exciting ways).
I felt happy, reading the last ~200 pages (okay, reading some and also skimming some: yes, I skipped a bunch of the back-third whaling stuff because I was just DONE WITH IT, OKAY HERMAN?!? I GET IT WE GET IT JUST GET ON WITH IT -- ahem, excuse me, sorry about that) in about 48 hours. I recaptured some of the rush of the beginning, particularly in the last 20 chapters after Ahab dashes the sextant and they sail into the typhoon, drawing close to the whale and then finally setting off after it.
And when it ended, I exhaled. Turns out it is nice to take your time with something, but it is also nice -- and dare I say important -- to know when it is time to go. I feel no pressure to 'make up for lost time' on my annual reading, because I stopped tracking that years ago for this very reason. I'm very glad I spent this time reading this book, and that I did so with some focus and concerted attention. I was also very happy to then read the entirety of a stupid witchy romance novel in a single day, because that's what I needed and what it was asking of me.
Was this anything? It felt more rambling and diffuse than I intended it to be, while also being far more single-focused than these missives usually are, but perhaps that is all part of the point. Ah, well. Let's try something else new and exciting: not over-thinking it. Time to press send and get on with the day. I'll write to you again when things have begun to turn green once more. Til then, hold on tight and keep your eyes peeled. Spring will be here sooner than you think.
xo
D