It was a book I stumbled upon in grad school; I don’t remember exactly when or why but it was around the same time as I was reading Coover’s Spanking the Maid and a book called The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents. It must have also been around the first time I’d ever read Gertrude Stein with any real feeling, since, according to notes I’ve pulled back up, I was reading Ida and a bunch of essays about her prose. But maybe I had been reading Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text before that. Maybe that’s what led me down the third-rose lined avenue in the first place. But then, maybe not. And in any case, maybe it doesn’t so much matter.

I didn’t read all that much last year. There were reasons, sure. And frankly I’m not sure that my "number" will be much higher this year either. In part because I’ve decided to read a "big book," (i.e., Proust), and maybe I’ll want to read another "big book" after that, but also because I began the year reading like a bird: a little of this, a little of that. I was feeling bad about my fictions and thought it might be good to reread some things that I was reading when I started the novel I’m (still) working on. This included a number of different things — essays, poems, Leonard Michaels stories — and also Barthes. I remember really enjoying the book, and since was so slim and manageable-seeming, that’s what I opened on the first or second day of the new year, whenever it was I first sat down to write.^[1] I was giggling. Enjoying myself. Going slow. I thought that it might be good to go slow. A friend on a bike ride last summer told me to take my time and I told him I don’t think I’d ever taken my time but maybe I should try it. And so, months later, I did go slow, albeit in a more readerly way, and thus I finished the book only a week ago, spreading a scant 80-odd pages across nearly three months. It was lovely.

The first time I read it I was reading it for school (this, I’ve confirmed via a "paper" that appears to have been something more like a reading guide…​ I think I would often choose the non-paper option in my lit classes in grad school, since they were there, and I was not a lit student (but wanted to do the reading anyway)). I wrote:

I was, at that time, much more interested in politics, or at least politics as the primary lens. Still: not a bad summary of the book, I think.

Reading it again across and against a number of other intervening books (texts), the political import shouted less at me this time than the playfulness of the text itself, and rereading it in the context of writing (as opposed to a critical context in which a supposed-aspiring writer was merely playing), the "materialist subject" hits different; this is evident in the quotes I wrote down in my little scrapbook this time than what I’d put in the handout last time (though in this, the quotes are intermixed).

Of course, the first time I read this book was before the pandemic, and the second time, after. Time has changed a lot in the intervening years (I have changed a lot, too, I think). I have both more and less of it: more, in that I am doing less "things" that I used to, my schedule is ostensibly more open and less full; less, in that the intersections between the lines of the energy and unaccounted-for time feel fewer and farther between, that what had been minutia, small, quick things, have ballooned, and my ability to transition from the one thing to the other feels like it has diminished in due proportion. Though perhaps this could be explained, too, by my being a few more years older.

The reading slowly, then, in short spurts, becomes a kind of antidote to the dread of expectation: I ought to be getting through more pages of reading, of writing, more things. I am not the prolific artist I imagined I someday would be. I am beyond the age of prodigy; I have missed the window to be young and brilliant. I was young but not brilliant, or at least I could never get it together enough to be brilliant long enough for it to be noticed. And now the excuse is that I am too tired, I don’t have time. I have chosen to spend more of my waking hours working a job that pays fine and has good benefits and I have always know that this was the deal: the other stuff would necessarily be fit around it. And so reading a passage here, a passage there, provides the requisite engagement with the thing, reminds me that though my primary work-in-progress is an attempt at a long, sustained, breathless fiction, the shorter, intermediary work is valuable, too. That "big" does not necessarily mean "important" and that all binaries or oppositions are mostly bullshit anyway. In other words: I ought just shut up and do what work I can.

The thing about being reasonably well-read is that you’re always aware of the fact that someone else has beaten you to it.

By which I mean: the idea, then, might be that by reading more slowly, I am able to more fluidly integrate this "false opposition": the text, half-remembered, stays beyond the stolen fifteen-minutes or half-hours and mingles in with the dishes, the laundry, cleaning the cat litter box. It is an attempt at luxury: I am not "ripping books apart for their arguments" any longer.^[2]

There are downsides, of course. And I am sort of turning (in this reading) the book’s actual thrust toward a target more of my choosing, but then: what else is criticism, appreciation. There is certainly value in sustained work, sustained reading, endurance. I mean, I do believe in endurance. But. This helps in the ongoing negotiation, the split between doing the work and thinking or writing about the work, and this (this essay) is, perhaps, part of doing the work. Perhaps.

Our Saturday walk was to our local library and we checked out (among other things) M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating (since How to Eat a Wolf, what we were actually looking for, wasn’t available, but included). I read a little of it while we sat choosing cookbooks. The prose was lovely and on the walk back we got to talking about subject, about how Alia’s been writing essays and about how I never think to. I write things here, I suppose, but rarely even in such a sustained way as this thing I am typing against now. How I, for whatever reason, don’t feel such freedom: to make assertions, to explore, to research. (Though: the research might just be laziness on my part; this is almost certainly the case).

And things do require sustained attention sometimes. Still: you might as well get your kicks where and when you can get them.