currently reading: Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, & Leanne Shapton
books bought:
Break.up by Joanna Walsh
Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton
Double Bird by Bud Smith
books received:
Inappropriation by Lexi Freeman (e-galley)
Northwood by Maryse Meijer (e-galley) (technically a word doc)
Sweet & Low by Nick White
books finished:
The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Motion by Lucy K. Shaw
hey you,
Last night I woke up and when I looked at the clock it was 2am exactly and I was so upset about being awake that I wanted to scream. I don't think that's ever happened before – during the day I'll sometimes be mad about my insomnia, but never at night, never in the middle of it. I usually wake up calm, or occasionally I'll be scared, but the anger was brand new. I tried to read Marina Benjamin's Insomnia but I couldn't focus. I tried to read Women in Clothes but I couldn't sit still. Then I got up and walked around my apartment for a while. I thought about taking a shower but I felt overwhelmed by the thought of having to dry off. Eventually I walked over to my bookshelf to see if there was anything I could distract myself with and there was: The Motion by Lucy K. Shaw, which I bought when I was at Powell's in March. It's a little thing, a novella or a chapbook, and I remember really liking it last night although at this moment I couldn't actually tell you what it was about. Some of the sections were like lists and one was set at Sylvia Plath's house, another at a museum. I underlined a lot. I thought about the museum today when I was walking to work and I thought it was a dream I had. It's only right now I'm realizing it was just a scene from a book I read in the middle of the night.
(How interesting that you signed up for a newsletter about books and reading them and now you're part of a project where you get to see insomnia drive me crazy in real time!)
I think I'm reading Women in Clothes the wrong way, which is to say straight through. It feels more like a book you're supposed to leave on your coffee table and flip through when you have the time, but I've been bringing mine on the T to work with me. I've just thought about what that makes me look like and the answer is probably crazy. (Although if I saw someone reading a coffee table book on the T I think that would bring me a certain level of joy, so maybe I am doing the world a public service.) But the book is just so interesting and it asks all these questions I never would have thought to ask. I'm always impressed by people who can ask good questions.
The only fashion "rule" I've ever followed wasn't even supposed to be a rule. I got it from a book, obviously – Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck. In one essay she wrote about how she hated purses and instead carried around a reusable plastic tote emblazoned with an image of a MetroCard – "it matches nothing at all and therefore, on a deep level, matches everything." Instead of an MTA-issued tote, I have a bright pink bag. Like, shockingly pink. I've had several iterations of the bright pink bag, and there's always one somewhere in my rotation even if it's not the bag I'm using most often. I always think of Nora Ephron when I look down and see how badly hot pink clashes with whatever I'm wearing. It matches on a deeper level. People are always so surprised to find out pink is my favorite color.
I've been wondering all week what fashion anecdote or tidbit I'd have been able to contribute to Women in Clothes and that's all I could come up with. It's not even my rule! More likely they would include the fact that I still wear the same jean shorts I wore in high school, and then everyone would make fun of me.
But I have been trying, at least, to pay a little more attention to the aesthetics of things. It only took me one full day to realize it probably wasn't a coincidence that the covers of The Folded Clock, Women in Clothes, and Motherhood all featured watercolor, that probably they were designed by the same person (and they were – Leanne Shapton). Ordinarily this is a realization it'd have taken me months to come to. Possibly I'd never notice. Sometimes I worry that I have a fundamental lack of curiosity about the world.
I almost let this go without saying, but: Circe was a pleasure, exactly as good as everyone is saying it is. It was so engaging that for a while I was successfully distracted from the fact that I had to spend a night in Connecticut over the weekend. The best part of the "trip" was the bookstore we visited, Bank Square Books, where I bought Break.up. I purchased it for the following reasons: 1. I liked the title, and 2. I noticed it was published by Semiotext(e), and I recently read Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter, which Semiotext(e) also published, and I liked it. Sometimes it doesn't take a whole lot, is what I'm saying. There have been times I've bought a book from the bookstore just because it didn't fit on the shelf as easily as I'd have liked.
Yesterday at the bookstore there was a customer who said she was looking for a book called Citizens. I asked if it was possible she meant Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, and I grabbed a copy to show her. She looked at the cover and said no, that's not it, she's looking for a book about race relations. I said, "You should really take a look at this one," but she asked me to check the computer to see if we had anything by the title Citizens, and we didn't at the moment, though we had at one point – a 900+ page book released in 1990 about the history of the French Revolution. Then she asked me to hold on for a moment while she called her friend and asked who the author was, which was a conversation she inexplicably put on speakerphone, and he said Claudia Rankine.
She did not buy any books.
your friend,
Smalls