What I Read This Week
DISTRACTIONS
-Working is the ultimate distraction from reading, unless you can read on the job. I started working as a barista at the Center for Fiction. Would I rather be working towards tenure at a prestigious university or teaching graduates in Paris? Yes, and if you know of anything like that opening up, let a bitch know. Until then, I’m making lattes for people working on their lap tops and on my days off I go into a cafe and become a person working on her lap top.
-Miguel and I walked to Prospect Park to watch the partial Solar Eclipse. I was feeling antsy because I kept seeing on Tik Tok to stay away from the Eclipse because of it’s shadowy energy. Puloma and I kept texting about all that could happen with a mass of people standing outside, how the side effects would only come later when worms would burst out of people’s eyes. All that happened was the rare feeling of remembering you are small and being completely in awe, combined with the modern sentiment of is this it? Is this happening yet? Has it already happened? I know this has already been said, but it was really beautiful to see everyone outside with glasses, their heads directed at the sun. We are so puny and I think would be a lot happier if we returned to paganism. How can we not think of the Sun as a god? It’s literally the reason we exist and are still alive. In the park, when people cheered, I wasn’t sure if it was for the sun or for the moon or just about the two of them being together. I cheered along anyway. Also, I was absolutely freaked by how the weather changed and how much darker it got. Next to us was a white couple blasting tantric music and doing yoga while also playing with a puppet.
- I officiated my friend’s wedding after I introduced them seven years ago. I kept saying that this one one of the biggest honors of my life and my friend Samuel was like, “You write books, dawg.” It’s true, but I don’t think I’ll ever experience the magic of introducing two soul mates and then with the power vested in me by the Monestery Dot Org, marry them. I did write the date down wrong on the official document, so actually they are technically not married yet.
-I got to visit the Botanical Gardens multiple times and see the cherry blossoms bloom and die. Multiple proposals happened. So many pregnant women? The Cherry Blossoms honestly stress me out but I think in a Tortured Poet’s Department way. Is nobody else freaking out about the ephemerality of beauty and also how that will be effected by global warming? Anybody?? The way they change the sunlight into this pink blush!! It is enough beauty for a lifetime.
-Waiting for Puloma to arrive from the airpot, Miguel and I listened to the Columbia’s Public Radio, where student journalists described their peers being arrested and became tearful when they realized police would be present on campus until graduation. I am manifesting a great, humiliating bamboozle on Mayor Adams. I hope somebody scams him so deeply we never see him again. The amount of police present and the violent arrest of students is absolutely crazy-making. I feel in awe of these students and so proud.
-I’ve been teaching creative writing classes at the Red Hook Public Library. But since the Red Hook Public Library was demolished (soon to be built up again, provided Mayor Adams doesn’t slice the budget in half again) I teach from a record store near by. I walk from Borough Hall to Red Hook while listening to Radio Rental, a podcast with creepy stories. It’s been lovely watching the spring unfold this way.
-I was in conversation with Julia Alvarez at the Harvard Book Store which was also a monumental moment in my life. She didn’t remember that I had made her a decaf cappaccino two weeks before at the Center for Fiction, but actually that’s okay. In our talk, she said that even the most evil characters need to be treated with love, otherwise they are not whole. She told me that all writing is autofiction because we put our biological print in everything we write. I also started to cry because she talked about how when she started out, there were no Latinx writers, and it was really, really hard. I told her thank you for being part of breaking the ceiling and she said, “Ow! It hurt!” Truly a remarkable woman.
Movies
-CINEMA IS BACK, BABY! I watched Challengers and was heavily entertained and deeply aroused. Did you know men are hot? I also watched La Chimera, which I don’t think you should know anything about, not because of spoilers, but because it’s really magical just finding out what it’s all about in real time. I Saw the TV Glow, was, as expected extremely my shit. When we left my friend said that the difference between horror and gothic is that in gothic stories, you never get out. For example, Haunting of Hill House ends with Eleanor crashing her car into a tree, and forever becoming part of the house. Or in Wuthering Heights, two lovers haunt each other til the end of time. Is that how it goes? I’ve never read it actually, I’ve only heard the Kate Bush song. Anyway, TV Glow keeps being described as horror but I think it’s gothic. I can’t stop thinking about it.
TV
I also watched Baby Reindeer and all the work I did about not being attracted to weird looking white men is now undone. I liked Baby Reindeer because of it’s honesty and approach to sexual assault. SA changes one’s sexuality, and that’s not a good or bad thing. Also, when something awful happens to you, it opens up a bunch of weird shit to follow. You become a door weirdos keep opening and can’t find the handle yourself. I loved it!
DISTRACTIONS AS LUCAS MANN
Lucas Mann is the author of Captive Audiences and Attachments: Fatherhood and Other Performances. He is also the co-owner of Riff-Raff Books in Providence, Rhode Island. I asked him about reading and when it does and doesn’t suck.
What was reading like for you as a kid?
I'm super lucky and had parents who are book lovers. For a lot of my childhood, my mom wrote nonfiction kids books about the Wonders of the World, like the stories of how these structures got made, and I would serve as her child test reader, so the idea of reading as something good and also omnipresent was drummed into me, even when at times I was like fuck that, leave me alone please. There were always books around, and I could grab them, and nobody told me that anything was too old or inappropriate for me. I would read things that I wanted very badly to get, but didn't get, but the idea of reading as this cool, aspirational challenge was exciting, even though I had genuinely no clue what William Burroughs or whoever was going on about. Perhaps as a weird mode of reverse rebellion, I was a jock kid -- all I wanted to do was play sports, memorize sports factoids, etc. But that also became another vehicle for reading; I would get obsessed with these various sports books, and read them over and over. There was a book called The Last Shot by a great journalist named Darcy Frey, that told the story of this high school basketball team in Coney Island, and it literally was at my bedside table for years. If I couldn't sleep I'd turn the light on and read it. I pretty much memorized the way he described everything. It was oddly comforting.
What is something that is reading that is not actual reading?
You and I have discussed this before, but walking. That might be a cop out answer because I think walking is actually everything. Like whatever it is that you could be doing, if you replaced it with going for a nice walk you wouldn't really lose much. Walking and reading are the only two activities where, if I'm having anxiety, or am too glued to my phone, or feel overwhelmed with childcare, whatever, if I'm like hey can I have half an hour to do this thing, I will always feel better and a little more connected to both myself and the world. This sounds like I'm talking about reading as though it's self care, which is not the take I want to have, but...maybe that's what I mean? Go for a lil walk! Read a lil book!
Memorable fictional father?
Oooh, probably Reverend John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. He feels like a best case scenario, but also fucked up in his own ways because he is a dad and dads are people. That book makes me cry, I love it so much.
What are you nostalgic for, as a reader?
I'm an embarrassingly nostalgic person, so maybe everything. I'm particularly nostalgic, and always searching for, the experience of reading in a way that feels disconnected from my life/identity as a writer/person having an opinion about books online. And I think that dynamic exists beyond people who identify as writers, too -- it's the overall inability (at least for me, often) to stumble upon something with no frame of reference, with no sense of what others think or what I should think, with no desire to like keep up or weigh in, and just fall into it. I constantly feel like I'm thinking of/talking about books in the same way that Netflix shows function when conversation breaks down at a party -- have you seen it yet? Oh, you have to! Everyone is talking about it! Just the worst kind of medium-anxious life-filler.
Over the pandemic, a neighbor with chickens had a little free library, and when I'd take my kid to see the chickens I got into the habit of grabbing the most random things I could find. So I ended up really loving this novel that was I think the only novel by the poet Jim Galvin -- it was a Western from the early 2000s. Never heard of it, not some classic, not theoretically my thing at all, but delightful! Beautiful descriptions of the west! Horses, and the men who love them! It existed entirely out of any conversation I'd be compelled to butt my way into. Like all nostalgias, I'm sure this one is partly bullshit -- maybe the literary conversation has always felt this immediate and thirsty, and often empty. But still, it's worth trying to hold space for the experience of an arbitrary, totally untainted reading experience. As someone who sometimes works at a bookstore now, the best part is when you sell someone a book who is like, eh I haven't been reading much lately, no idea about any of these things you're suggesting, sure I'll take it and see what I think. The isn't much opportunity for that experience in our curated lives these days, and books can be a place for that. Ok, end of rant.
As we think about the future of reading, what should we be realistic about?
This is another thing you and I have talked about recently, but the internet is not helping bring cool, new writing to our attention in the same way anymore. Not that long ago, it felt like I could always be reading something new and interesting that the algorithm delivered to me, and that writers could find their ways to careers through that dynamic, and that was lovely but ultimately short lived. I say this not to be an old, cranky guy (or not just to be an old, cranky guy), but to emphasize that I more and more believe that the future of reading is social and IRL. Folks meeting up to read, starting book clubs, going to open mics to hear new shit, going to readings from authors passing through their community. I'm obviously very biased -- this is my life now -- but you see people at literary events or book clubs feeling invigorated, engaged, often shocked that there's this cool stuff being written and it exists in their orbit. Reading, loving words, talking about books -- this is a thing that real people do, it's a part of our lives and identities, and the communities we choose to surround ourselves with. For me, the future of reading (and books as an enterprise) is leaning into that.
Finally, when does reading suck for you, and then, when does it rule?
Reading sucks when I can feel myself getting distracted as it happens, and then the experience becomes as much about hating myself for not getting into the experience of reading as the actual words that I'm theoreticallt reading. Like when I realize I have my phone in one hand and a book in the other and my head's been bopping back and forth like I'm watching tennis or something. Awful. Reading rules very often, but it rules most on a beach in the summer with my kid playing in the sand next to me, and she's having a nice enough time on her own that she doesn't need me, and I'm a little buzzed. That's the greatest shit in the world.
WHAT I READ
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell
I listened to this on audiobook, narrated by Amanda Montell herself, while on the Amtrak to Boston. Sometimes I have this really intelligent though that’s just like, “A non-fiction book is just a podcast,” and that’s when I know that the brain damage I have from being online is irresversible. But! I love my little mind and how hard she works, even if I commit some of my cognitive energy towards sending memes about Drake and Kendrick to my boyfriend, who was kind enough to pretend he hadn’t already seen them. In this book, Amanda Montell goes through various biases - overconfidence bias, zero-sum bias, survivorship bias, to name a few. She shows us how our reaction to a nonsensical modern age is to try and think our way into being good people and success. I loved her analysis on Over Confidence Bias, and it’s relationship to imposter syndrome: how the two are sides of the same coin of thinking about yourself too much (Jemima). I also loved her emphasis on the importance of not knowing anything, in allowing room for discovery. If we let go of trying to control our lives with our minds, we make room for awe and remember what it means to be alive.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
I had only a few days to read this before I interviewed Julia Alvarez and I loved every minute of it. Something I realized is that Latin-Americans love a certain kind of third person narration that reminds me of novelas and the Bible. This novel is about an aging Dominican author who decided to turn her inherited plot of land into a cemetery for her unfinished stories. She hires a groundskeeper tend to the land, telling her to listen to each story. The book works like a Russian doll: stories emerge within stories and you gasp discovering who everybody is. There is a murder. There is infidelity. Like other Alvarez stories, the plot centers around a writer and her three sisters, though they are different from the sisters of Garcia Girls or Yo!. I admired that she returned to this, as I am a self-conscious about being predictable, about people knowing what I’m going to do next. But instead of thinking of it as being predictable, why not think about it as simply, your thing. Alvarez isn’t done excavating sisterhood, infidelity, or morality, and I hope she won’t be for a long, long time.
Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood
I hope you one day get the pleasure of seeing chapter drafts throughout a span of 5 years of your best friend’s novel and then finally see it in it’s true form, finished and ready for the world. Olivia is so good at zooming in on every moment so that you’re transported. At one point she describes ballerinas as having “pearl-onion” heads. Can’t you just see that? Reading it I thought about how much you can manipulate metaphors: sometimes things are like roadkill, sometimes people have a roadkill smile, sometimes you drive by a dead deer while talking about marriage. It all changes the image, the tone, the mood. This bitch is so good at that. How do I summarize what this is about? A woman named Mitty with a troubling past lives with an old lady named Bethel. The two are a funny pair and keep to themselves, hating the rest of the world in their shared house in Santa Cruz. Then, one day, a tech bro and his unbelievably beautiful girlfriend move in next door. What starts out as an erotic thriller turns into this contemplative, knowing novel about women’s desire, loneliness, and the perils of beauty and fear of aging. You’ll love it.
See you next time (I read a book) xoxo