currently reading: Little by Edward Carey
books bought:
The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend by Sarah Manguso
books received:
Liveblog by Megan Boyle
Little by Edward Carey
books finished:
Retreat by Jaakko Pallasvuo
Calypso by David Sedaris
The Guardians by Sarah Manguso
The Carrying by Ada Limon
Talent by Juliet Lapidos
Hey you,
Good evening, I just heard someone – or something – moving around outside my window and I thought, Oh, I can hear footsteps crunching in the snow, except it's June and there is no snow, I don't know what the noise was, I don't know if it was human. But if it were January it's possible I'd've started off this newsletter by writing, Outside my window, I hear a man's footsteps crunching in the snow. I wouldn't have given it a second thought. I wonder how many other times this has happened to me, the hundreds of times I was certain of something untrue, recorded it as fact, and never thought about it again.
Glad we are starting this week's missive on solid ground!
The first book I finished this week was Retreat by Jaakko Pallasvuo. I had absolutely no idea what it was about before I read it – I'd ordered it ages ago and I'm not sure I knew what it was about even then. I liked it a whole lot. I probably wouldn't have read it if I knew what it was about. That's why, when I was reading slush at literary agencies, I sometimes liked to read the first few pages of the manuscript before I read the query letter: I'll read anything that can keep my interest, but I can also be easily biased against a book based on its description, and I know this but still feel powerless about it. When I saw this bit in the middle of Retreat:
I said out loud, to myself, “Dude, same,” but I don’t know which one of the characters I was identifying with.
Then when I was finished I picked up The Guardians, where Sarah Manguso defined akathisia for me: it’s a condition where the sufferer experiences unbearable restlessness, mental and physical. It’s usually a side effect of antipsychotic medication.
I don’t have hypochondria, exactly – what I have is a different sort of OCD – but immediately I became convinced I had akathisia. Aha, I thought, an explanation for the boredom I’ve been feeling all the time, never mind that I can go all day without leaving my apartment, never mind the urge to move isn’t unbearable, that I spend a lot of time just lying down. And honestly? Right now I’m lying in my bed and looking at my laundry bag and I feel like, no way, there’s just no way I can do that, what am I, a superhero? A god? Someone who can just get up and do laundry?
OK, so I don’t have akathisia. I think I was looking to have a reason for the boredom other than: my life is boring. But boring isn’t too bad. There are worse things a life can be.
A few weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night and at some point during my insomniatic spree (4:43am, according to my notes app) jotted this down: Sometimes I feel like I am just pilfering through the pockets of good books, looking for lines I can steal. (I probably do this because my own life is too boring to pilfer through.) So I felt very called out a few days later when I read this in Juliet Lapidos’s Talent (out 1/22):
The point [of underlining] is to mark territory: Remember this place! Later, you come back to the underlined passage and twist it in support of an argument. Reading as a means to an end: an essay. Underliners beget essay-writers.
That’s me, I thought, horrified, reading as a means to an end. I felt very guilty about it, like my reading was tainted, somehow, by underlining. And then a few hours later I was like, Bitch, what would that end be, exactly? (Does this newsletter count?)
Anyway, I didn’t underline that passage, I highlighted it.
Talent succeeded in doing something pretty astonishing, which was: keeping my attention. Lately I have been abandoning books all over the place, literally and figuratively, sorry and you’re welcome to those of you in the Boston area. I am bored by everything and feeling unforgiving and Talent still had me. It was a strange and funny and clever book. Sometimes a little too clever for itself, maybe, but I liked it regardless:
“O. K.,” she said, pausing between syllables…
Modern writers sometimes put periods between words where they didn’t belong to communicate dramatic or affected pauses. Got. It. Shut. Up. Screw. You. Up. Yours. But if a writer wanted to convey that a character paused while saying “O.K.,” he’d have to do so explicitly because of that word’s peculiarities.
I realize now (hindsight, 20/20, etc.) that the quotes I’ve chosen make it sound really douchey and unappealing, but it’s one of the funnier books I’ve read in a long time. I’ll be interested to see how it does.
This afternoon at the bookstore a woman was talking to her friend and said, “We could do salt, pepper, sugar,” and her friend, very reasonably, said, “What?” at the same time I thought What?and then I listened as the friend tried to figure out what the first woman was attempting to convey. Eventually the first woman realized she meant “rock, paper, scissors.”
Later, a man in a suit pulled Less by Andrew Sean Greer from the staff picks shelf and then he couldn’t quite figure out how to put it back. The books are stacked horizontally and we have a display copy that rests in front of them. Here is a photo (that I stole from my coworker EB) for reference, as I did a really bad job explaining that:
Instead of trying to put the book back in front of the stack he kept trying to put it on top of the stack and it kept falling over but he kept trying. (We had sold a bunch of copies of Lessin the time since this photo was taken, for you pedants out there, so there was room on the shelf to balance a book on top.) Eventually I looked away because watching him felt overly, undeservedly intimate. I thought about saying, “I can put that back for you,” but I always worry about sounding patronizing and anyway, it’d gone on too long for that.
In the end he bought the book. I wanted to give it to him for free, but of course I did not do that.
Your friend,
Smalls