McCormack, Reed, Anonymous, Cervantes, Williams, Hilst, Hohl, Coolidge

On finding time to read, reading many things at once, reading things you don't identify with or understand, and reading and thinking in discontinuity/over time/under duress

I’ve been struggling with reading lately. Too much going on, too much consumed brain bandwidth, less clarity of focus, not enough time. It’s a common complaint, of course. Who has time for reading when everything else feels up in the air? Where do you fit in space for thinking when you’re so tired you want to collapse?

In general, I haven’t let this bother me as much as it might have once. Haven’t I already read enough? Do I really need to stay abreast of every entity that hits my radar with any pull? Quickly, the feel of reading itself can begin to feel like treading water if all you’re doing is counting what you wish you’d do if you had time, or if you approach the possibility as a responsibility and not an opportunity.

Used to be, I read continuously because I needed to be able to write reviews and other texts as part of my job. An increasing lack of non-commercial forums for that appears to have curtailed in general the reading-as-processing part of the act, especially in a landscape where everything that comes out, no matter how large, feels like a flash in the pan—here, then gone. Even the reviews that do come out often feel like sales pitches all their own, likely forked by the pressure from what forums do continue to exist requiring timeliness.

Near the end of my column at Vice, for instance, everything changed when they brought in the new management that would eventually tank the company into the drill hole it became. Whereas before I’d been allowed to write about whatever I had enough interest in to bring to life on the page, suddenly any angle had to have a landing spot—particularly click-based. Why are you writing about this now? my editor began asking, prodded by his new superiors. Traffic—not content—had suddenly become the rule of law, as if there is a window in which anything should land on a consumer.

But real reading—by which I mean reading that means something more than junk food—isn’t meant for such consumption, especially when the perceived window for publicity is so tight. Major publishers in particular seem to act like there’s only one week, hell, maybe one day—OH BOY PUB DAY!!!!!!!—to get anybody to pick up the other end of the line. Again, because all they’re counting is how many do it, how much it costs to keep the window open even that long. As if anyone reads with an exploding necklace ticking on their neck, the book about to disappear into thin air of the same commercial fuckhole that governs TV, medication, travel. Given that frame, it’s no wonder the takeaway feels more and more like no one’s reading, we better find a way to trick them into playing along with our shell game before they lose the last strands of their will. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. You’ve got the cart before the horse and the horse isn’t interested in going where you think it is. So, eventually, we all collapse.

Back when I was reading the most voluminously, I had more free time, and would gladly spend entire evenings on my own at home trucking through pages any night. I still get into that mode when something really engrosses me beyond all else—like The Garden of Seven Twilights did recently—but more often now I tend more toward finding little bits of space and fitting the reading in where I can: on the toilet, in the bathtub, at my desk, just before bed, or really in any random 5-20 minute window where a clearing appears—or where I need a clearing to appear. Even back when life was simpler, I got the bulk of my reading done while on a recumbent bike, combining a 45-60 min aerobic workout with consuming 30-50 pages of a novel, or multiple books of poetry all in one sitting. Double-tasking in this way allows a less efficiency-biased attitude to the whole process, like taking samples until you either finish the whole plate by bites alone, or you find yourself so hungry that you just plow through. It allows you to look at the experience of reading not as a luxury, under so much pressure to perform it’s doomed to fail, but as an experiment. It makes an 800-page book look less like a commitment and more like a more sustained experience over time, which itself is a relief in a world where suddenly it seems everybody is insisting that the only way to keep people reading is to chase the tail of their attention, keep them quaint.

While a world full of exclusively 40-80 page, fully timely and mostly relatable/accessible novellas designed to spare you of themselves sounds fluid and efficient in one way, in another it sounds like the beginning of the end.

In lieu of pounding out another 10,000 word Substack post ranting about the ruin of the publishing industry here, I’ll switch hats and stick to the reason I’m writing this post: to share some of the many books I’m “currently reading” in what is for me a different fashion—no longer each a marathon, but spread out together over time. I used to be one of those people that once I read the first page of something, I had to go all the way to the end to see it through, even if I found it ultimately boring. Maybe it’ll pay off at the end? While more often than not that isn’t true, it has been enough that sometimes lately picking books to read is less about recency or buzz but looking for books that I’ll be glad I read at the end whether I love them or not—personally neglected classics or cult titles, sure, but also works in translation, philosophy, and nonfiction, or texts otherwise so all themselves that having an idea about them in my brain feels worth the push.

It would appear I’ve kind of become one of those “I’m reading 15 books all at the same time” people, who I never trusted, mostly because I couldn’t imagine what the results would be of such endpoint-sparse pursuit. It sometimes feels like I’m reading less than ever in that fashion, but also I can sense now how that’s a product of my consumer-driven brain; needing results, ticks on a list, in order to feel good about my efforts. I’ve always loved keeping a list of what I read (running back to 2001) and even sometimes storing them in order on a specific shelf throughout the year so I can look back on the spines the way I would a book of memories. That’s not all wrong—it’s good to hold yourself accountable and read outside your comfort levels—but also, your experience of reading is for you, not anybody else. What would be the point otherwise, besides a paycheck? Reading and reviewing and writing books don’t pay good, in case you hadn’t heard. Playing ball to help the system milk itself in exchange for peanuts is not the look.

In that mind, as much for my own sake as any else, below are some brief thoughts on the various books I am ‘currently reading,’ listed in reverse chronological order from most recently begun to the longest still in-progress.

Castle Faggot by Derek McCormack [Semiotext(e), 2020]

Funnily enough, at 98 pages including a lengthy afterword, this is one of those books that most people would consume in a single sitting. It’s thin and full of white space, lots of stage direction and dialogue and concrete poetic style. If you’ve ever read Derek McCormack, though, or maybe if you notice the novel’s title, you know his prose isn’t for chugging. Like Gertrude Stein, his lines are often rhythm or tone-driven, playful in unexpected ways. And though on its surface, the subject matter might seem fun and wild—it’s literally about a dark theme park for gay men called Faggotland, populated mostly by cereal cartoon creatures—it’s simultaneously extremely sad, extremely pissed, extremely turnt. “Faggots! kill yourselves!” reads the entirety of page 13, before launching into what feels like a cross between a sales pitch, a workbook, a board game, a musical, a nightmare, a funeral, a guide to Disney World. Like sugar cereal itself, it makes you sick knowing the pain and terror and yes, deep extreme empathy for suffering, that must have brought someone to write a paragraph like: “What’s Castle Faggot? Imagine a castle that’s been fucked. Imagine a castle that’s been flipped ass-up and fucked. Imagine a castle that’s been flipped ass-up so that the crap from the crypt—the bats, the rats, the cocksucker corpses—drops down through the rooms and adorns them.” I’ve found, despite how fun and twisted and hilarious this text is, that I can really only stand a few pages at a time, up late at night shocking my system with a taste of a world that only McCormack could have the nuts to put on paper. It’s a serious feat, and one that jocks and click-counters would turn their nose up at like, destroy this piece of shit, get it out of my sight. That’s power. This book also happens to maybe have the best blurb of all time, from Edmund White: “This is what it felt like to sit in a crib with another baby and to play blissfully with your own shit while your mothers sat downstairs drinking cocktails.” Go in.

Juice! by Ishmael Reed [Dalkey Archive, 2011]

Megan asked me to read aloud from this to her on our way home from the Ivy bookstore where I bought it after noticing the cover, reading the first page. I think we were both in awe of the tone of the book immediately—at once very frank and very chill, mixing all sorts of political and cultural entities (mostly related to the O.J. Simpson trial, thus the title) into what sometimes feels satirical, cartoonish, and other times feels so deeply earned, full of wisdom and anger Reed seems to move about with a resilience that makes you want the story to never stop. The book’s intentional absurdity in diction and association mixed with an associatively analytical approach to unpacking bias, prejudice, and bureaucracy in mass media feels so alive, reshaping rage and satire and personal experience into a kind of phenomenon all of its own. Like McCormack, it is hilarious and sad, but also episodic and so free-flowing in its texture that each sentence feels like a surprise. I’ve been reading a chapter or two aloud to Megan before bed each night, transforming what might have been another personally constrained experience into something that we share, and in that way the book feels like a timestamp in our lives. Unforgettable both due to the novel way of opening the text that we stumbled into, and how insanely brilliant Reed is at mixing reality with imagination and political commentary so honest it can’t help but make you feel like kin, right from Chapter 1’s first sentence: “None of my Rhinosphere buddies, Snakes60@, Rabbit64@, Bat68@, or Otter73@, would have ever predicted that by June 2007, I’d be sounding like Shaquille O’Neal of 2004, because up to that year, I was like Rasheed Wallace.” We’re only 50 pages in and I’m already planning to get my hands on more of his work ASAP. That’s another nice thing about stumbling into bodies of work you’d long been aware of and never found the time to get involved with—a gift that’s waiting for you to open when you’re ready, always leading to more.

Conspiracist Manifesto by Anonymous (trans. Robert Hurley) [Semiotext(e), 2023]

I love weird little black books like this. I love that it is anonymous, and apparently written by a European collective. The style of the book feels like it changes throughout, as a result, waxing and waning in different ways of approaching the subject at hand—an unpacking of the nature of conspiracy theories and how and why they persist, and why they are necessary as resistance to the amorphous and confusing state caught in a mixed grip amidst the struggle between liberalism, neoliberalism, fascism, and reality, particularly as it relates to big data, surveillance, and the mass mind. I’ve been reading this on and off for a couple months now, after feeling addicted to it throughout the first 100 pages or so, wanting to understand what it puts forth. “The resources of the present are childishly simply, really,” the manifesto states early on as a kind of central pinion to the apparatus. “To claim them, we only must not forget what we already know. Not wait for the declarations of the governing authorities to authorize our perceptions.” Anybody who might read this book could agree with this, I think, and it is at the heart of the issue here that part of the problem with the current world we live in as a lack of reliable information on any level—especially from those most willing to dole it out. I love how this book calls into question major gray areas that arise in the pursuit and maintenance of personal freedom in a world where we are concurrently being asked to think of the Other first, and simultaneously to figure out how to trust entities we have little choice but to acknowledge and interact with whether we’d prefer to or not. Though the result here isn’t always something I’m on board with—certain of the authors veer near anti-vax talk, while others focus more on the malfeasance of corporations and political entities that harvest disillusion and paranoia in lockstep with what they’d present as obvious human values—and thus the result is sometimes nodding my head, totally agreeing, and other times thinking this is too affected, too theoretical. At its heart, though, it’s a compendium of facts that intends to rip the veil off of the theater of the Wizard of Oz; reminding you that corporations aren’t your friend, and that they’ve learned to speak out of the side of their mouths enough that sometimes we conflate common sense with jargon installed into us through sales. Whether you agree with every line in here or not, I think it’s always worth the effort of exposing yourself to a wide variety of thoughts, thereby allowing yourself access not only to the preaching to the chorus, but to part-truths and necessary suspicions of the many kinds of hands working the puppets, so as not to become one. Plus it’s also just nice to read shit like: “The unreality of the world of governmental fictions into which we are inserted forms a pair with the very real increases in control.” Are you mad? Are you going to make it? Shouldn’t you rest? Do you want to? What do you want? Stirring the bee’s hive, laying out the possible facts, tracing lines in sand to see what appears—it’s all a much more healthy, vibrant palate to expose yourself to than simply reading what you know, or what you already know you want to know. I lost the vibe from streamroll reading this somewhere near the middle and now find places to read 2-4 pages at a time, until maybe it jumps back on me.

Don Quixote by Cervantes (trans. John Rutherford) [Penguin, 1605]

My mom read this to me serially at bedtime when I was little, before I could really understand it. I’ve carried it with me my whole life in that way, a thing I feel I understand emotionally without remembering most any word of it, until finally deciding to sit down and read it directly, by myself. Despite the thickness of its spine, the chapters are mostly short and episodic, lending themselves nicely to a habit of reading before bed, like a little nightcap. Funny too to read something you know is in you somewhere, discovering all sorts of little fragmented ways it’s worked its way into your consciousness. I felt surprised how much I remembered in that way, in a way more like muscle memory than comprehension. I’ve felt surprised, too, at how contemporary Cervantes still feels, incorporating surprising metafictional elements in a narrative bedrock 400 years past. In a much different way than I would read anything else, this feels like being led through a museum, sort of, listening to someone narrate the icons on the walls, marks cut so deep they can’t help but connect to everything else. Cervantes is really hilarious too, and brave in how much he trusts the reader to see past the literal; to really feel for Quixote, even as he prances about his world thinking he’s something that he’s not; being seen by others in his unknowingness that make you want to protect him, and for him to learn. Homie reminds me of Michael Scott. I’m glad I’m reading this now before some farthole corp hires some fake aesthetic director to pretend they’re making fresh new art out of cheap IP. I like that it’s so large and so simple that I don’t have to wonder how long it’s going to take me to get through; that I can just live here with it for a while. That I can come and go, and it persists. But yeah somebody go back in time and tell Cervantes that no one has time to read this much so please cut your novel down to 100 pages or something

Harrow by Joy Williams [Vintage, 2021]

I began this on a 12-hour plane ride, then got distracted by the Pixar movie Megan was watching, and started watching it with her too. For some reason I haven’t been able to detach Harrow from Up since then, which oddly has a kind of nice texture to it, in that I’ve always found it hard to pin down Williams’s tone. Like somehow she is able to write so relatably and succinctly about people going through shit in their lives in a way that feels warm and funny as much as it does heavy and silken. Every sentence in this novel thus far feels chiseled from stone in that way, elegant and efficient in the same breath. I love how rich the wider world-building (a term I almost always hate to hear but that feels actually honest in her hands) behind the characters and situations in the book come through here—a decimated landscape that reveals itself not as backstory or other formal traps for storytelling, but through the nerves of the sentences themselves: “The school was an old sanatorium surrounded by beetle-ravaged pines and staffed with nervous self-regard by arguably the cleverest minds in the country.” Williams sometimes seems like bullion in this way, containing an essentiality even as it variates between borderline absurdity and understated tragedy—all part and parcel with the underlying heft of the book. Reading Williams always inspires me to slow down, to build sentences one by one like some strange set, rather than flying forward on the lyrical or image-driven. I do find it harder to take breaks from this type of novel and come back as willingly—there’s something necessary about momentum in a novel that depends so much on stacking its ideas while also furthering the narrative toward its end. Sometimes it seems like even the best writers feel pressured to hold their audience’s attention in a meaningful way, which can be slippery in resulting in the feeling that there’s something needless in the sway. I thought about that a lot when we saw Lorrie Moore read here recently—how astute and self-assessed her prose felt, while also needing to maintain the threads that gave way to allowing an audience in and holding them there. I can’t always care about that, and sometimes I wish shit like the conceit of ‘world-building’ itself could be erased from every mind. Other times I’m thankful there are people who can walk that line with a finesse that comes only from experience and expertise. There’s no one way.

Fluxo-Floema by Hilda Hilst (trans. Alexandra Joy Forman) [Nightboat, 2018]

The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation by Ludwig Hohl (trans. Tess Lewis) [Yale University Press, 2021]

A Book Beginning What and Ending Away by Clark Coolidge [Fence, 2012]

I’ll wrap this up with the 3 titles currently stationed on top of my toilet. I take turns reading from them when I’m not reading something else, and I like the way each of them lend themselves precisely to a discontinuous approach. Like it actually almost feels better in a way to eat them piecemeal, over time, letting the fragments and confusions sink in and rummage around, rather than getting run over by the next. Strange to see them listed together like this and notice how each brings something very different and all its own to that conceit: the Hilst like an absurdist, brain-damaged monologue spilling its guts all over the floor while I’m taking a dump, wrapping Beckett-like fragments in their emotions, giving what seems zero fucks for who stays caught up. Hohl feels quite the opposite, if equally unbridled, as The Notes contains a multitude of aphorisms, experiences, treatises, inquiries, reflections, quotes, and other fragmentary detritus gathered from his mind between 1934-36 in a state of ‘extreme spiritual desolation,’ as the copy notes. It’s often dense, but also tight and compact, in a way that forces the reader to either stop and chew the cud a bit or otherwise blank out—the kind of book specifically designed to exist and be returned to in various moods, ages, and modes on the reader’s part. Like writing, the reading becomes a companion rather than a product, leaving eggs that might stay whole or might get crushed and ooze, depending on what you do with them. Lastly, I think I’ve been basically ‘perusing’ the obscure bookstop that is Coolidge’s opus, by which I mean actually reading every page in order, despite the free jazz word salad feel that comes on in a text so consumed with itself that it’s sometimes more like sculpture or action painting than literature—thank god. Each of these books, especially drawn out as I am with them, serves as reminder that a book is always not a story, nor even an immersion, nor even necessarily animated by a point, a theme, or a style—but, rather, like life, riddled with pathos, madness, abjection, beauty, desire, horror, hunger, fury, poise, as well as a whole bunch of other words.