reading log #3
Before we get started, I want to put news about SQUARE WAVES events right up top, since they are coming up so soon! Please come see me IRL:
June 24 - in LA at the Rachel Comey store on Melrose, in conversation with Maurene Goo. More details & reserve a spot here!
June 26 - in NYC at McNally Jackson Seaport, in conversation with Mary HK Choi. Details & preorder here.
June 30 - also in NYC, at Casa Cipriani. Details TK but you don’t want to miss this— the space is unreal.
July 17 - back in LA at my beloved Skylight Books, talking to Traci Thomas of The Stacks. Details n tickets here.
Okay, onto the show.
I had dinner with my parents and some family friends the other night. At one point the conversation turned to screens: whether we remember much of what we see on them, and also, whether the things we see can really make us feel anything. The consensus was a qualified yes to both questions, the usual it’s complicated. But it lead to us talking about experiences of art that we remembered viscerally, that had spoken to and stayed with us.
I got in my car to go home and put on The Shins’ first album, Oh, Inverted World. I’ve written before about the first time I heard it, specifically its opening track, Caring is Creepy. I associate that song with the world opening up to me; my adult life, or at least the very very beginning of it. Which is funny because lyrically, the song is about looking backwards on something that’s just wrapping up. I think I’ll go home and mull this over ‘fore I cram it down my throat / at long last it’s crashed / its colossal mass has broken up into bits in my moat.
What did I think that meant, at sixteen? One of the things we talked about, at dinner, was how art and life inform one another; how you have to go hang out with people and feel things in order to have something to bring to the art you take in. But I hadn’t felt anything yet that justified how much I loved this song. One day I’ll be wondering how / I got so old just wondering how / I never got cold wearing nothing in the snow.
My melancholy was completely anticipatory. I was only getting ready to feel it, making a groove in my mind.
—
You’d think that the melancholy I was rehearsing at sixteen would feel hollow to me now, false or silly, but that’s not the case. After Caring is Creepy I switched over to Kissing the Lipless, the first track from the band’s second album, Chutes Too Narrow. It’s also about the past, about checking in on an old friend, or maybe an ex: called to see if your back / was still aligned and your sheets / are growing grass all on the corners of your bed.
The following lyrics are really what strike me now, though. You’ve got too much to wear on your sleeves / and it’s too much to do with me. I’ve been thinking a lot about high school, recently, and college. Girls who hurt my feelings, boys who broke my heart. I always thought I was happy then, or pretty happy, anyway, but lately I look back and— phew.
It was intense, that time. Deeply concentrated, dense with sensation. So much so that, even though I understand the songs better now, I still feel them exactly the way I did when I first heard them. I guess that counts as experience, too: just being sixteen, eighteen, and all the way in it. Letting your heart crack open so hard that you can still feel the aftershocks, even decades later.
What makes this a reading log entry, you ask? I often feel embarrassed by how much those old things still affect me. I am completely aware that I don’t think about you at all is the most powerful dismissal you can offer (or, if you prefer Taylor, I forgot that you existed) but I have never been able to say either with a straight face. I remember and I stew and I’m still deeply hurt by absolute bullshit nonsense from ten and fifteen and twenty years ago.
So it was a relief to read Scaachi Koul’s latest, a memoir called SUCKER PUNCH. It’s sort of a revision to or commentary on her first book, ONE DAY WE’LL ALL BE DEAD AND NONE OF THIS WILL MATTER, the author returning to a story she’s told once before in order to admit all of the ugly truths she was evading the first time around. Explaining the complicated things she didn’t want to have to explain.
Scaachi has talked, in the book and on the page, about how she literally tried to over-write all of that, to tell a version of the story where her wounds hurt less and the endings were all happy. But it made her crazy, and miserable. So instead she says, here’s everything I’m still carrying. Here are all the reasons I’m still mad.