Reading Sucks
Woodworm, FROM, Rejection, Luigi, Molly Mcghee, the Shadow of the Wind
DISTRACTIONS
I did my duty as a red blooded American woman and had a hit tweet about Luigi Mangione, and like all great works of art watched derivative versions of it appear. This is the original:
Everyone I know who is mildly annoyed or upset about Luigi Mangione is a straight man. They are threatened, girls, and it’s understandable. Every girl with access to the internet is thinking about the lengths Luigi would go for them, perhaps forgetting that he’s unable to have sex because of his back injury and was probably driven to this because he was convinced he was gonna spend the rest of his life alone. Of course, I’m adding to a fictional narrative here, but what else am I supposed to do? Overall I find him a net positive because the public now understands the real enemy is health insurance companies. Additionally, we all needed the indulgence of fantasy: of a domestic life with a hot outlaw who can’t do anything but go down on you (I know that’s what you’re all thinking!!) and a world where we don’t have to “claim” anything on our health insurance. Free Luigi!
Dude I miss my cat From… FROM!!!! From… The television show known as From. From :) Since starting From I’ve convinced 5 people to download MGM+ which is a streaming service that sounds fake. The good news is that it’s now streaming on Paramount + so maybe more people over the holiday will find god in it as well.
From is about a sundown town that traps its travelers. At night, the townspeople keep talismans by their doorways to keep monsters from ripping them from head to toe. From the producers of Lost, it’s part survival show, part horror mystery menagerie. The show begins with the Matthews family on a family road trip before a big divorce. Tensions are high because the youngest family member, baby Thomas, rolled off a bed and died a year ago. As they arrive in town another car does too, crashing into them and setting off the most anxiety-inducing episode of television I’ve seen in a long time. The crash sends a stick through their kid Ethan’s leg, pinning him to the ground. But it’s the late, late afternoon, which means the monsters are about to come out! Sheriff Boyd, played by an unmatched Harold Perrinou, comes to the rescue with a third year medical student and the town’s only doctor, Kristi. Sheriff Boyd hangs the talismans in the crashed RV while Kristi performs surgery. The monsters knock on the RV, imitating the voices of their loved ones, begging to be let in. I won’t tell you what happens but every episode I’m standing up and pacing and peeling off my nails because I care so much about these people trapped in this town. As the episodes go on, a number of mysteries emerge: why does a young Victorian boy in white only appear to a few people, why is there a skeleton woman in a Kimono, are the monsters intelligent, is this all a simulation, who are the creepy malnourished children exclaiming “Anghkooie!”, why do the cable wires in the houses lead nowhere, when will anybody make out?
The allure of the mystery and the jump scares aside, the show is a surprising meditation on trauma and grief. The first season feel so post-pandemic to me. The families keep saying they don’t know how long they’ll be here, mothers and fathers develop toxic hobbies like literally digging a hole or building a tower to keep their anxiety at bay so they feel like they have control over the situation when they really, really don’t. As Sheriff Boyd helplessly watches a beloved towns member be mauled to death, he tells her, urgently, “I know, I know. You’re so strong. You’re so strong.” Later, he clutches her mangled body and he weeps and apologizes. Obviously I can’t help but think of Palestine and the bodies and the body parts and the people left to collect them. The cruelty of the monsters is senseless, and the townspeople can’t do anything except mourn their dead and keep living. The importance of horror, as I’ve said many times before, is to remind us of true monsters of the world. In order to survive in the world, a part of you inevitably scabs over and grows a little numb. It has to. While grief descends upon us all it still feels impossible to catch and define, dissolving on our flimsy words and evaporating. Horror is a way of re-defining the trauma in your brain. When somebody leaves forever it feels impossible, or supernatural, and anyway, sometimes you need to watch a fictional character’s head be scalped and her the skin on her leg get peeled off to remember you’re a person who misses other people.
Peeing the bathroom of the book store I used to work in. I teach creative classes through the public library in Red Hook, or Jemima Kirk’s beach town. I spent most of election night there with my students. We brought food and wine and only talked about writing. I hadn’t really processed the election all year because I feel tired of living through gigantic cultural shifts. I’m tired of remembering exactly where I was when it happened. We keep being that group of gay friends in the late nineties discovering in real time that Princess Diana died: one of us shrieking, the other trying not to laugh at the drama of the shriek, the initial shock turning into collective grief around a screen. I’ve recalled the moment Trump won in 2016 so often with new people, at bars and in cars (Okay Taylor Swift lyric) because it has felt so historically significant. I was working at a book store in Cambridge. A crestfallen customer came in around 10:30 with a Hilary button and he told me “This is my happy place.” After I closed the store I sat at the bar next door with my friends and watched Trump win a battleground state. The bartender threw this towel at the television. I got really drunk and sobbed and slept in my friend’s bed. I tweeted “I am latinx and queer and in danger” then deleted it. All of it so cringey and innocent that I almost look at the moment with tenderness. Was that really the worst thing that’s ever happened to me? This time my boyfriend and I went home early. I woke up at 4 AM to see that Trump had won Pennsylvania. At 8 AM I saw “President Trump” as a headline. Then the day had started and the world had changed again. I decided to turn on the Opal app (which I really recommend to anyone addicted to their phone) and work on editing my short stories at a local cafe. I met up with my friend El and we sat in a garden and processed how upset we were. I interviewed Layla Martinez at Books are Magic and I asked her what her biggest fear was and she said “Fascism.” When you passed someone on the quiet street, they gave you a little defeated smirk or were on their phone talking about the election. As a writer I feel tired of always recalling exactly where I was and how I felt, the way my expectations were thwarted. I understand that getting older is kind of just saying, “I don’t feel like doing that anymore.” When I was younger I would swear I would never get tired. I would keep going because I always cared. I felt so upset at people just “giving up.” Now I get it. I am tired enough to give into all of that. But I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t want to let that distract me. I refuse to.
MOLLY MCGHEE DISTRACTION
Molly McGhee is from a cluster of small towns just north of Nashville, Tennessee. She writes fiction, essays, and teaches in the undergraduate creative writing department at Columbia University. Her debut novel, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, is forthcoming from Astra House in late 2023. Her work has appeared in publications like The Paris Review
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What was your relationship to reading and books like as a kid?
I was a voracious reader. My dad took me to the library biweekly, I believe. If my memory is accurate I would go through about twenty books a week. My dad worked on a rich man’s farm, and smuggled me to work with him. I often spent days in cow fields, hunkered beneath big oak trees, reading in their diaphanous shade. At home, after making dinner, my dad would read to us nightly, often for hours. I probably grew up crooked and strange because of this, but I don’t regret it. When I think of my childhood, I think of books and open skies.
How do you find the same sense of wonder in reading as an adult?
I don’t. I don’t think I will. The closest I get is reading reference books like encyclopedias or academic surveys of niche, historical topics. I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s the firehose of information. The relentless deluge of the knowable and unknowable and the assurance that I’ll only be able to graze it in this life time. When you’re a kid every book is full of things you never knew. As adults we trick ourselves into thinking we know everything, despite the fact we often know nothing at all. Occasionally a novel will elicit that same feeling, but it is rare for me to come across one that contains such heady magic. I think the last time I felt it with fiction was reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Within that book there is a world.
How do we combat literacy issues in the US?
We fund public education, and resist the movement to turn public schools into prisons for working class children. We encourage exploratory learning rather than the cold, standardized method we have now. We shrink classroom sizes so each student can receive individualized attention. We also, and this is incredibly important, fund our teachers with livable wages and hire more of them. Right now the profession of teaching is atrophying. We pay our educators—especially our public educators—pennies on the dollar. We do this because we look down on them. It’s no wonder our kids are struggling. We have invented misery machines modeled after penitentiaries and called them schools. The quickest way to do this is to audit police departments. All unaccounted funds should be cut and channelled instead into local public schools. In this way, some of the lowest funded schooling districts—which also happen to be the most heavily policed regions—will be able to catch up to their wealthier counterparts. It is no mistake that there is a correlation between education, wealth, and police oversight.
As a writer, how do you make reading fun for the reader?
Ultimately reading is a trick of attention, and the question you have to answer as a writer is how can you hold the attention of a stranger? How can you convince them you won’t waste their time?Humor helps. Clarity helps. Rhythm never hurts to push things along. Personally, I prefer a strong and slightly off-putting tonic of honesty and directness, mixed liberally with a dose of charm which is a word we use to describe someone’s ability to know and manipulate where their understanding of the world stops and when another’s begins. One must know when to be gentle. Sometimes a kiss is more effective than a scream.
What is something about a novel that a movie or TV adaption cannot replace?
When you read a novel, it’s you who collaborates with the writer to create the work and subsequently the effect it has on you. When you watch an adaptation, you are observing the artist and the adapter have that experience. Ultimately I am selfish, and want to work directly with the writer to create my own understanding, rather than have a mediator show me how I should interpret the work.
Lastly, when does reading suck and when does reading rule?
Reading sucks when you are engaging with a self-absorbed blow hard whose insecurity causes them to create works where the only existence validated is their own.
Reading rules when the miraculous happens and the writer pulls off their silly little spell of cadence and meaning to reveal a prism of reality you otherwise would have never noticed.
WHAT I READ
A great book for those who love We Have Always Lived in the Castle and are fueled by class rage. A nameless grandmother and daughter hide out in the haunted house they inherited from the grandmother’s father, who made a living off of women. In Woodworm, the violence of the past fuels the vengeance of the future. Descendants pay for their ancestor’s sins and justice is served.
Jonathan Abernathy, You Are Kind by Molly Mcghee
I recently confessed to Molly that I lied to her about finishing her book last year. Molly, once again, I’m sorry. I had the best time returning to it, switching between the audio book, brilliantly read by Macleod Andrews, and the galley I had on hand. Jonathen Abernathy is an earnest dumb-ass devastated by debt. He enrolls in a government program designed to auditing working people’s dreams. If there are any signs of anxiety, like a drowning child for example, he reports it and then a coworker comes in with a vacuum and cleans it up. As time goes on Jonathan, desperate to succeed, puts his job above everything, even the person he loves. Molly’s characters are so gorgeously molded that you root for them to kiss and slam the book shut when you can sense something bad’s about to happen. It’s a devastating book because you want happiness for everyone and it makes you realize how cornered and trapped we all are by the systems at play. But I think the devastation provides a lesson: we don’t have to give up our lives in order to live. Cheap wine with somebody you love tastes way better than champagne at a work event. The system wants us to believe we don’t have a choice by making us forget that we work alongside people with the same ailments as us. It’s actually so much harder to choose love.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
I think Tony is the only person who understands our modern affliction, and it might be because he’s not afraid to be part of it. In these interconnected stories, absolute losers attempt to find love and self-actualization in the most absurd, deranged ways possible. Each story starts off relatively normal: a self-proclaimed feminist can’t get laid, a single white woman in her 30s gets rejected from her best friend she just slept with, a genius shut-in doesn’t want to be labeled as any race or sexuality. Then they spiral into realms of the fantastic that still have their unclipped toe nails gripping our spurned reality. The single white woman decides to adopt a raven. The kink virgin writes a request to a cam boy that turns into a mad-cap sci-fi hero’s journey about the power of his cock (it becomes imperative to keep the cock hard because of its impact on the environment). While the books delves into the fantastic it’s the echoes of realism that hurt me the most in this book. Ordinary text messages I know I’ve sent, quotidian greetings between millennial friends, assembled in Tulathimutte’s perverted frame that he may have nailed his own hand into, make me gasp in horror.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Eight years ago my manager at the Harvard Book Store told me this was one of his favorite books. He read three a week, so I trusted him. I also wanted to impress him, so I bought it used. Since then I’ve shuttled it from apartment to apartment through my twenties, arranging it on Facebook marketplace shelves or hammered together wooden Home-Depot crates. I’ve felt it staring at me from year to year, and wondered if I would ever read it, or if it was just something I bought to make someone happy. A few months ago my friend Angeline showed up at a bar with a copy and it struck me because I actually had never seen the book before outside of my house. I felt that this was a sign to finally begin so I packed it with me as Miguel and I set ourselves to leave New York City for the month. Obviously, I loved every single sentence. It made my heart soar. It made me love reading and people. It has everything that a novel should: beautiful prose with metaphors you can feel, a mystery that keeps you up late and makes you cranky when people interrupt you reading, and romance.
The Shadow of the Wind is about a young bookseller named Daniel in Barcelona. When his dad takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten books, he adopts a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by one Julián Carax. He devours the book in one night. When he tries to find more books by Carax, he discovers that somebody has been going around destroying them. A frightening figure without a face (I would say this is a Latin-American trope but the writer was from Spain) approaches Daniel and warns him to stop. What follows is a gothic journey throughout Barcelona to discover the truth behind Julián Carax. Reading it I was reminded of the reasons I loved Harry Potter, which is perhaps to say, the reasons we all used to love reading. It’s just FUN to read about loveable characters untangling a mystery and just hanging out, going to the same cafe and debriefing about the day’s discoveries. It just ROCKS when a book lets characters fall in love and then fuck. JK Rowling didn’t have her characters fuck, but I think she would’ve if her editors let her, and maybe then her sexual frustration wouldn’t have turned her into a TERF. A great novel should, as the novel itself often states, show us a mirror of ourselves and teach us that there is no fate or coincidences, that we, like the characters, are merely “puppets of our subconscious desires.”
That’s all for now. See you next year. Send questions to readingsucks67@gmail.com