Readings for January 29, 2023

Jenny Diski was very good at sleeping though she had occasional insomnia; I have had insomnia frequently and have since I was a kid. It usually doesn’t stress me out too badly, and it’s one of the reasons I work alone and have a sofa in my office. Afternoon naps are key. But I agree with Diski in this London Review of Books essay from the archive that falling asleep and waking up, the twilight and daybreak of the brain, are the best parts.

The hinterland between sleeping and waking is what compensates for having to start and get through the day, blocked writer, besieged schoolteacher or sullen secretary as I’ve been in my time. If you must have an alarm clock, don’t get a flying one, but set it to wake you early enough to give you all the drifting time you need. Between getting extra sleep or drifting, drift wins.

This is the same part of the day favored by Xavier de Maistre in Voyage Around My Room. He describes the delicious feeling of watching the patterns on the curtains as the sun rises until his dog wakes him up and his valet starts making coffee.

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Arnold Roth has maintained freelance creative career for decade, and he talked about it in on interview on the Creative Independent. He also talked about the tools he likes as a cartoonist, his grandmother’s candy shop, which had the only phone for a two-block radius, and getting to do five-page spreads of cartoons and writing.

I feared having a job. This was when I first started out, and I had absolutely nothing. And because I didn’t want to be caught in the villain’s clutch. I see life as being lived that way in some cases. And so having freedom, the looseness of being freelance, where you do the picking and choosing.

Of course, you know, have to make a living. Pay the rent. But I liked that whole feeling. I didn’t mind the chance that you’d get some real tough times. Because it happens. But it was worth it to have the fun of the really good times.

Kit Wilson writes on the reasons for reading in The Critic - and it’s not, not, not to check off a list. There’s also an exquisite Nabokov quote about the spine being a candle wick for the flame of the brain.

We read for pleasure, for joy, for wisdom, for insights that can’t be gained elsewhere. It’s a uniquely rewarding experience.

Italo Calvino’s unrealized proposal for a literary journal gives readers tons of fodder for considering different aspects of literature. Take the house, from the category on symbolic places:

the house

house from outside

house from inside

familiar house

hostile house

familiar house that becomes hostile

Are these writing prompts? Fresh angles for critical thinking about literature? A guideline for the lit journal you, an independently wealthy person looking for a project that does not and will not be profitable, have always wanted to start? I think it’s all of these things. This proposal is part of The Written World and the Unwritten World, newly translated by Ann Goldstein, who also translates Elena Ferrante. I haven’t picked up this new Calvino collection yet, but it’s on my list.

Anne Enright writes a kind of book review, a kind of criticism, a kind of personal essay in the London Review of Books on rereading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye after thirty years, though she’s taught Beloved dozens of times over the decades. When I opened this issue, it was the first article, and I was excited: Oh, Anne Enright! Then I saw that it was a review and was a tad confused: Oh, Toni Morrison? Ah! There are new editions being published. There is nothing in this piece to not like.

Boygenius loves literature, and I love everyone in this band. Read about them in Rolling Stone, listen to them, and take this quote from Phoebe Bridgers as your mantra for 2023: “I made something tight. Shut the fuck up.”

Boygenius like to read, and I do not mean that in a casual sense. A majority of our lunch is spent discussing literary fiction, where they ping-pong across the table with their recent reads. Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch.  C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.  Jenny Offill’s Weather.  Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues.  And Rebecca Rukeyser’s The Seaplane on Final Approach,  which Bridgers gives me a copy of the following day.

If that’s not enough, Literary Hub combed through interviews to find the books boygenius members Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker have mentioned over the years, and it makes for a stellar reading list. I put one on my Bookshop.org wish list (Michelle Tea’s tarot book), borrowed one from the library (Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch) and placed a hold on another (Olivia Laing’s Lonely City). And I learned that Dacus is also a person who writes in books. Marginalia forever!

Don’t Be Fooled. She’s Illiterate.