January Distractions & Reads
Rax King, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Borges?
DISTRACTIONS
I deleted Spotify, or someone used my bank card at a Walmart in Arizona (was it me? I’ll never know and I refuse to find out) so my bank card froze and then my account got suspended. Still, I’m happy I was hacked because now I’m done with that robot bullshit that ruined the music industry.
I had the absolute luck of being in Puerto Rico during inauguration week for my friend Chris’ 33rd birthday. We stayed at this family’s house with four other couples and took a bunch of adorable photos where it looks like we’re in a DEI sex cult.
Tiff, Michi & Me I feel whiplash from the bombardment of executive orders and swift changes to reality. My friends text me about potentially losing their jobs because of the federal funding freeze. Others are relieved they changed their passport information as soon as Trump was re-elected. I feel horrified by how many people are reassured by the fact that Trump’s “only deporting criminals.” I’ve always bought expensive eggs.
My Spanish has been rapidly improving thanks to Miguel and spending time in Latin-American countries Should we move to one ha-ha, just kidding, unless. So much of getting better is talking to other people and asking what certain words mean and being okay with sounding like a moron. Still, I think about how much more time it’ll take to truly be funny or understand when somebody is full of shit. At the very least I don’t sound like a certain pop star in a certain cursed musical-movie about a drug lord who wants a sex change. Penis to vaginaaaaa.
The other chair was abducted Have a question for me? Email readingsucks67@gmail.com
Miguel and I took a day trip to Jayuya, determined to see some sites and learn Puerto Rican history. Actually, Miguel was determined to do that — I wanted to go to the beach. The road to Jayuya was through the mountains on a treacherously narrow two-way road. Every time we turned a sharp corner I closed my eyes and imagined my New York Times obituary. We learned we had to beep at the corners so cars would know we were there. I would lean over and beep for Miguel, which I’m sure he loved.
The first museum we wanted to visit was closed, so we ended up spending time at this waterfall that had a historical rock called La Piedra Escrita. Most of the etchings have been eroded by water and feet and time, but this one still had Taino scribbles: stick figures with their mouths and eyes open, lizards crawling among spirals. It was a magical place. The leaves on the trees around us seemed to be clapping in the wind. We made friends with a tiny white street dog who very graciously brought me a Pringle — I didn’t eat it. We wondered if he was a spirit. He escorted us all the way up the wooden pathway and to a trash can, where he happily leapt away with a bag of Burger King.
Miguel & La Piedra Escrita We wanted to try a museum dedicated to the martyrs of a Puerto Rican revolution. Again, Miguel wanted to. At this point I had said 3-5 times, definitely not passive-aggressively, “The beach would’ve been so nice.”
At the museum, we were greeted by three giant dogs, two of which had bandanas around wrapped around their necks. One was “Draco” and the other, “Patria”. The third was nameless and brown and had deep matts in its fur.
Miguel called out a buenas tardes! to no response. The dogs panted and ran around us in circles. I don’t like big dogs like this, for the same reason I don’t like driving down a narrow road on a mountainside — I like being alive. We walked around to the back, where all these white chairs were propped upside down on tables. I didn’t like the quiet that met us here.
I watched Miguel disappear through an unlocked entrance. I could see that none of the lights were on. I heard him faintly call out buenas tardes? alo? No one responded. I was alone with the chairs. I watched the dogs chase a grey cat. The cat won. Draco kept following me around with his tongue out. “Leave me alone, please.” I said to him in Spanish, like it would help. A flea bounce off his ears. I really needed to pee. I walked around the property and found nobody, only the green landscape of Jayuya and some chickens who had found their way up the mountainside. “Miguel?” I called out. I picked at my nail. I started regretting the summer I went to a sleep away camp while everyone was getting their driver’s license. What if I needed to drive us out of here? Draco panted next to me. Finally I made my way to the front of the house again, where I saw Miguel inside, opening a fridge. “What are you doing!” I called out. I couldn’t see his face, just the shadow of him. All this smoke was around him. I wondered if we had rolled off the mountainside earlier and died (I had just finished LOST). My eyes adjusted and I realized it wasn’t Miguel at all, but a Puerto Rican man with a shaved head in a tank top, smoking a joint. “Hello,” he said to me, in English. “Hi,” I said, in English, instinctively. He came closer. Draco ran up to him and showed him his belly. The man rubbed it. “My Dad is asleep,” the man said, “Nap time.”
Tiffany & a street dog I watched Nickel Boys, not knowing it was based on a book by Colson Whitehead or anything it was about. I think everyone should go into a movie like that. It’s important to be washed away by something. I’m tired of knowing what anything is about. The first person POV and the Civil Rights-era racism made this a really anxiety inducing experience. This film showed me lengths of visual language. The camera flickers, like an eye, self-consciously to a pair of shoes, or anxiously at a magnet on a fridge that can’t bear the weight of a brochure. Even though I called the twist about halfway though I was still gutted and couldn’t speak for a bit after I left the theatre.
I’ve decided this is my year of boredom. I’m not letting myself look for stimulation. I want quiet and I want frustration and I want to revel in the godliness of feeling stuck. A book needs to be written, Melissa!
WHAT I READ
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
I’ve heard that having read Borges is much more enjoyable than actually reading Borges. Had to read this bitch three times and I’m still confused. It was like eating a handful of raw spinach after not having a vegetable (binging LOST) for a long time.
The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges
Same thing going on here — what’s going on with this. It’s a what, now? Who is that.I got scared because he’s the kind of intellectual who seems to open to different dimensions so I regarded everything he was saying here as truth.
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I have never read this book before even though I’m half-Colombian and like to play with reality in my work. I obnoxiously needed to read it before I watched the TV Show. Yes, I needed a TV show to motivate me to read— I’m broken. Why do you think I started this Substack.
I listened to half of it on audiobook, a little pissed off at the way this British guy was pronouncing everything (Santa Sofia de la Pee-eh-Dahd, my good chap!). I was at my mom’s house and trying to get my steps in, and even though the pronunciation and cadence were annoying there would be times, walking with my mom’s dog along the ice (heh) that a line packed with wisdom and truth would floor me and I’d have to stop walking and hit pause and just think about the devastation of time. One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the Buendia family over the course of a century in a magical coastal village in Colombia named Macondo. It starts out with two cousins, Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendia, marrying and trying to avoid this incest curse involving pig-tailed children that bring on the end of the world. Throughout the century, family members are continuously drawn to one another and sons can’t help but act according to their namesake. All of them are doomed to their solitude by way of war or forbidden love or being so beautiful you float into the air, a scene that haunted me because it made me think it was a metaphor for femicide. Which is all to say that Latine writers are perhaps drawn to magical realism because it is the only ways of explaining the traumas of our world and retaining our souls. Or perhaps the idea of “magical realism” is merely a way of translating Latin-American reality into English (stole that from Miguel). Zooming out, I realize that this is literally a book about generationally, cyclical trauma and how much we ache for the past without knowing what the future holds. It ends like a Borges story.
I forgot how good an essay by a brilliant person can be. I loved reading about Rax’s bad habits and her incredible sloppy life. She’s plagued with the same follies as the rest of us but has been bestowed a gift by the bored gods and the lush dogs to be able to craft a perfect essay, one that helps us untangle why the hell we’re still like this. It is the kind of book people will imitate because it’s so original and the kind of book that will be fundamental for young writers and women, or people who are both of those things if you can imagine something as wretched as that. And look at that, I got to interview her for this little newsletter.
READING WITH RAX KING
Rax King is a James Beard award-nominated bitch. She is the author of Tacky (Vintage 2021) and co-host of Low Culture Boil. She lives in Brooklyn with her toothless pekingese. She isn’t sure how to make this photo of herself less embarrassingly huge without jacking up the page formatting, but she wants you to know she knows it’s too big. Her second essay collection Sloppy is forthcoming from Vintage in 2025.
Okay, the first question I ask everyone is what was your relationship to reading and books like as a kid?
I was one of those little readers who's rude as shit to people because she doesn't want to put her book down. I would've read my books straight through dinner every night if I'd been allowed to. Sometimes people would try to be friendly to me by asking what I was reading and what it was about, and I'd just, like, angrily show them the cover of the book instead of answering, because I didn't want to interrupt my reading for some kind of stupid "conversation." (And in my defense, I can't think of a single satisfying conversation that's ever begun with someone asking me what I'm reading and what it's about. We both know you don't actually care what I'm reading or what it's about!)
Your book, Sloppy, is about habits you can't shake. Has your relationship to reading changed in recent years and do you find it a habit or a hobby?
I only just started reading for fun again, after years of being unable to focus on a book or else just not having the time. Sometimes I read to find interesting stuff to share with my students, which isn't exactly "for fun" or "a hobby," but the rest of the reading I do is just for funsies. I can't not do it, though. When I go too long without reading, I start to feel all cramped and tense inside my head.
Can you give me an example of someone reading something you wrote, be it a post or an essay, and tragically misinterpreting it?
I wrote this essay for Glamour about how I used to cheat on my abusive first husband, and the powers that be at Glamour gave it the very provocative title "Cheating Is Wrong. I'm Still Glad I Did It." That led to all these incredibly sad family court guys on Twitter sharing the link, obviously without having read the essay, just enraged by that title. They had all this commentary about how this is just like a woman, always taking from men, always wronging men—tragic stuff, man. It went on for like a week! It wasn't even upsetting. I just felt so sorry for these guys, so wounded and fragile that even the mere mention of a woman cheating on a man is enough to send them into a tailspin for days.
Talk to me about the importance of boredom.
When I take the train these days, or wait in any kind of line, I try to do it without looking at my phone. I tend to describe this as, like, trying to reclaim a little boredom in my life, and not have to be entertained every second. But now that I'm really thinking about it, my phone doesn't even entertain me most of the time! I get in line, I take out my phone, I stare at some app or other, I feel totally dissatisfied. What is that if not boredom? What I'm trying to reclaim, I guess, is generative boredom—the kind that forces your mind to wander, rather than the kind that forces your mind to latch onto something it doesn't even care about. I don't think a writer can write worth a damn if her mind doesn't wander.
When does reading suck and when does reading rule?
Reading rules when I'm really locked into a book and I'm dog-earing every other page, finding all kinds of thrilling quotes that I'll remember forever. Reading sucks when I have to do it on any kind of deadline.
See you next time!xoxoxox