1. October Reader's Digest/Digress
I like to read, and I like to be involved in reading. And for me, writing is part of what it is to be involved in reading - Fred Moten
Welcome, welcome! Thank you for allowing me entry to the inner sanctum of your inbox. Though, if you’re anything like me, an email inbox is less sacred than it is anxiety-inducing. But a newsletter offers up a break from all that. It comes with zero expectations for us to do anything except read, click, frown, laugh, and think. That’s all I ever want to give you each month: a break and a think. So. Time for a tangled expedition into my recent for-pleasure reading diet. ‘Pleasure’ is a relative term. Anything pleasurable could turn out to be ‘work’ when your work involves some element of writing. The filtering, frenzied brain sifts ceaselessly for examples, theories, or turns of phrase that might lend some light to the project at hand: an ever-expanding collage of textures and timezones. Though maybe that's more an argument for work being pleasurable? Yes, I like that, I can work with that. Anyway, here’s some of what I’ve been reading:
Anne Helen Peterson's 'the collected ahp' newsletter.
Peterson has a book on the phenomenon of burnout set for release in 2020, off the back of the wildly resonant reach of her Buzzfeed article back in January. I just love the largesse of her style. She uses none of the harried, cramped logics that could be so understandable given the strictures of her subject matter. Some of her points are things you might know or feel already (VOCATIONAL LIVES ARE SCREWED UNDER CAPITALISM!), but seeing someone give book-length space to the exhaustion and existential disappointment of millennials hopped up on student loans and high hopes is, well, a relief. It’s high time that we de-romanticise education for the benefit of the upcoming generation. Peterson's newsletter on her digital ‘reading hygiene’ routines put me on to Pocket, which has transformed my reading experience. No hyperbole, I now have a much healthier relationship to reading longform journalism and essays online. Gone are the heady new-tab opens from Twitter that languish guiltily in a clogged tabs graveyard. Gone, also, are the days of mindlessly opening social media apps and unwittingly committing to the infinity of alternating refreshes — the digital equivalent to the trip from fridge to pantry to fridge to pantry. I try to divert that app-cycling impulse into some semblance of 'mindfulness' but, like most people, it's hard to resist when I know I have these huge, ever-refreshing feeds of photographs, micro-blogs, and links waiting behind each tap. Enter Pocket. It's a place to save all those Twitter links and IG swipe-ups and open tabs. It syncs between phone and desktop. The best thing about Pocket is that it it makes a great replacement for the social media scrolling impulse. Bored or anxious? Simply resume one of the longform reads in the app. It reduces anxiety by slowing down the rate of newness; you simply stick with one article until its done. Of course the very best way to increase attention spans and slow down the rattling rate of newness is to read a damn book, so here we go.
Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces (1996)
The fragmentary story of Jakob Beer, a Polish boy who escapes death at the hands of the Germans, finds refuge on a Greek island, and later lives as a poet in Canada. My quick plot description here is jarring and incompatible with the experience of reading the book itself. It was a joy to read something so unabashedly lyrical and beautiful. I highlighted my way through the entire ebook (daggy, yes; inconvenient, no) and now have the most beautiful collection of quotes to return to. At one point Michaels' narrator says that, “when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh.” These words transported me back to church pews and their rhythm of instructed genuflections and please-be-seateds. Or the more recent downward dogs and baby cobras and breathe-in-breathe-outs and corpse poses. Having said that, my critical inner backseat driver couldn't help but make a few insertions as I was reading. What does it mean to write lyrically about genocide? I felt queasy, at points, to read Michaels' beautiful lines about the ugliest events of the Holocaust. For instance, "a camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they’d once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude." I don't know if I can stomach putting words of gratitude in the mouth of a Holocaust victim, however much grace each person may have brought to bear during their dehumanising [death] sentences. But maybe it is worth risking romanticism to try to represent the unrepresentable, for the sake of the ongoing memory of those that perished. Maybe I’m just not used to this much sincerity in an age of irony and rebuttal (our next writer below would definitely have something to say about this). I also squirmed, a little, to read the male narrator's metaphorical invocations of the female body, "reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil." What does it mean to be a femme writer writing a male character? Is it worth sacrificing 'authenticity' to sidestep the constant sexualising moves of the male gaze? Hopefully this isn't so much a problem for writers in 2019 as it was in 1996. Maybe things really have changed. A femme can hope.
Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror (2019)
Okay, brace yourselves, I didn't think this book was all that. In fairness to Tolentino, I may have ruined the reading experience for myself by listening to so many of her promotional interview podcasts that by the time I finally borrowed my sister's copy there were simply too few new trick mirror self delusion bubbles left to burst. The prose was fine — and I mean that in the old-fashioned sense of the word — filled with uncluttered, flexible, quick-fire thoughts to send you into the spin of the writer's wash cycle: clean, fresh thoughts on so much of what ails us. Tolentino is a wonderful, zippy writer — I just don't think this book is going to be a classic. The ‘Seven Scams’ section felt flat, like a re-hash of existing exposés — especially on the tired topic of Fyre Festival. The marriage essay’s non-conclusion felt like a cop-out. But I loved Tolentino’s insights on religion, where, “the fact that everything feels like God to me ensured that I would not remain a Christian.” I loved her move to call out the conflation of expression with action, where the internet diverts our energy, “away from action, leaving the real-world sphere to the people who already control it, keeping us busy figuring out the precisely correct way of explaining our lives.” Gulp. And I loved the absolute ecstasy of reading someone who loves to think but who somehow manages to avoid over-thinking. But don’t worry, I can introduce some over-thinking for us.
One issue that keeps coming up right now is the problem of the writer's morph into influencer status. Maybe it's time to rescind, in part, my earlier note of fairness. What if all the hyped-up, multi-media writerly promo puts the pedestal self above the work? What if the writer has become the product to consume? Tolentino has done the full rounds on radio shows and in print, even answering questions on her skincare and beauty regimen for Into the Gloss (I’m stubbornly not linking to that one but I know you'll look it up, I sure did). For a writer that talks about the perils of feminine optimisation, isn't this all a bit too optimise-y? Tolentino wards against charges of hypocrisy by naming her biases and implications and limitations throughout her book. And, let’s be clear, this is more a case of industry programming than personal choice. I simply wonder if we’re too credulous in jumping on the promotional juggernaut, treating all coverage as good coverage (oops, now I sound like a makeup spokesperson, don't I). Why does the writer have to sell so hard? I know the answer. We all do. It has a little to do with that old (new) attention problem I mentioned at the top — all of that newness and all of its gaudy exhaustion. We churn and burn through so much stuff that writers are understandably fighting for their moment in the sun. We all want to be seen. We all want our efforts to amount to something. We all want our words to shift the dial. But how can we extract writing and reading and learning from the clutches of capitalism’s sell, sell, sell and the accompanying centrality of the self, self, self? I’ll let that wanky question thunk back down to earth with no clear answers, as of yet.
Esmé Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)
Okay, brace yourselves, I thought this book really was all that. I've been following Wang's work for years, having signed up to her email newsletter, 'With Love & Squalor,' back in 2014 (its title taken from the 1950 Salinger title, 'For Esmé—with Love and Squalor'). What I love about her email persona is just how little credence she gives to being cool and aloof. Wang gives subscribers practical little gifts like advice on how to set up a daily planner, stretchy new vocabulary lists, and a generally buoying presence for people undertaking creative pursuits while living with health concerns such as a mental illness or chronic pain. As for the book of essays, well, it was understated, and for this I was glad. I never got the sense that Wang was selling herself for the sake of the book (or the promotional juggernaut). In terms of subject matter the book is not a ‘schizophrenic's tell-all.’ In terms of tone it is not a sentimental ‘trip to the edge and back.’ It's subtle, it's measured, and it's very now, as in, Wang is living with and through her illness(es) now, without some neat or saving teleology. Wang touches on the politics of diagnoses, “some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them boxes and labels, but I've always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that I'm not pioneering an inexplicable experience.” She also touches on the mess and maze of the diagnostic process, the discretionary foibles involved, and the absence of clear empirical tests — not a great combination for people that tend to bend toward paranoia. "Is my diagnosis right?" is a legitimate question for someone caught up in the voluntary and involuntary medicalisation of the mind. I love the way that Wang plays with the insider-outsider considerations of being ‘high functioning.’ Wang talks about enjoying fashion and experiencing others’ disbelief that she, a careful, classy dresser, could possibly be living with a mental illness. The mastery of the prose, like her high end clothes, dares us to feel shocked that someone with schizoaffective disorder could ‘pull off’ a triumphant book-length work. I don’t resent Wang for these brief moments of quiet triumph. She deserves them. It just makes me realise that we need to spend more time on the intersection of class and mental illness. Who, currently, gets a book deal and who is relegated to the ‘unsavoury’ sidelines?
Ruby's Porter's Attraction (2019)
A trio’s road trip from Auckland to Whāngārā to Levin, told in perfectly parcelled passages. This is a poet’s novel, after all. Each section, separated by tiny crosses (more the urgent medical care kind than the prayerful benediction kind), ends with a line so pleasingly mic-droppy that we are forced to surrender and give ourselves up to the next passage. For a book so ripe for thematic interpretation — colonial sins and legacies, the politics and speaking rights of te reo Māori, queer and menstruating bodies on the line — I was first and foremost drawn to the psyche of the narrator. We are at the mercy of a narrator that shows herself very little mercy. The elegance of the narrative concision lets our main character say, at arms length, I don’t need you; I don’t need to create soft, round, rolling accounts for you to get comfortable in; I don’t need to be happy, I just need to be admired. It is a formal restraint so self-controlled yet so helplessly exuberant. This mix of control and release mirrors the narrator’s pendulum-swinging ability and inability to communicate with the complex subjects of her attraction. Instead of saying the thing she wants to say (if she ever even lets herself access that knowledge of want) there’s defensive wit, limp surrender, financial frustration, mis-placed (always mis-placed) trauma, the spectre of the New Zealand Wars, settler-colonialism’s forever-twinned guilts and desires on stolen land, a suicide in the family, parental separation, emotional abuse at a formative time, discarded and resurrected utensils of a life of art, and that all-too-familiar want to be seen to be finding the words, or else wanting to be seen to be unaffected when failing to find the words and, instead, licking those wounds of failure in private. Some people describe great books as ‘unflinching’ but this one definitely flinches in all the right places, and I absolutely love it for that.
Well that’s it for this month! The newsletter’s shape and focus won’t look the same every time, especially while I’m experimenting with the format. Sometimes I’ll have longer idea-fleshings or book/film/podcast/essay reviews; other times I’ll offer more quick-fire bites. I’m open to feedback, too! Substack allows replies. It also allows you to ‘heart’ a newsletter, which is pretty cute.
If you’d like links on where else to find or contact me you can go through this about page.
Until next time, thinkers!
x Hannah
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