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(SUPPOSEDLY) FUN FACT: My dad refers to me as “the miser.” Today I treated my cheapskate ass to something nice. I intend to defray my costs by reading every word either very slowly or twice. Why do I expect great things from an issue of n+1? This. Click for high-res photo

(SUPPOSEDLY) FUN FACT: My dad refers to me as “the miser.”

Today I treated my cheapskate ass to something nice. I intend to defray my costs by reading every word either very slowly or twice.

Why do I expect great things from an issue of n+1? This.

“
Part of Affenlight felt peeved at Owen for interrupting or dismissing his bliss. Because it was bliss, he felt, to be here with Owen and to read to him, even when he was reading dry-as-dust sentences from a poorly xeroxed course packet. Of all the activities two people could do together in private, Affenlight had a special fondness for reading aloud. Maybe this was part of his instinct for solitude and self-enclosure; a way to reveal himself while hiding behind someone else’s words.

- from Chad Harbach’s novel, The Art of Fielding

I’m with Affenlight. Whether or not you’re hiding behind someone else’s words, reading to a loved one is bliss. So is being read to.

And when I say “a loved one,” I mean that broadly, to include everyone from your lover to your own infant, whose brain detects no story but only the song of your voice.

One of the most comforting deathbed scenes I’ve ever found myself imagining involves a late-middle-aged version of my daughter reading to an old-man version of me as I fade and fade and finally am no more.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit. There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks:

I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit.

There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.

“

I couldn’t put it down, and when someone advertised the other seven titles in the series for sale, I convinced my parents to buy the lot. They were used hardbacks with lavishly illustrated dust jackets, plastic-covered, meticulously kept. I lined them up in order, and I started to feel … odd. I was breathing fast. My neck was flushed. There was a taste, buttery and warm, in the back of my throat. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was unfamiliar and I didn’t have a word for it. It would be six years before I felt that way again, in a very different context. And by then I knew the word.

Since that first encounter with lust, I have always thought of literature as a physical matter.

- from guest editor Geraldine Brooks’ introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011
“
I am not looking for a quota. I do not have a checklist. But I do want more. I want to no longer feel like too much is missing. I want writing that is more vibrant, more interesting, more challenging, more daring, more unexpected, more reflective of the world we actually live in and the people who populate that world. I want to see writing that takes chances and makes me uncomfortable and that makes me think. I want to read books and stories that are memorable and that don’t become part of the incoherent blur of things I once read. All I want is everything.

- Roxane Gay, who adds “There are always so many prescriptions for writers about what they should or shouldn’t write about, about what they’re failing to write about, and about what they’re writing too much about. … Perhaps, we should offer prescriptions for readers, editors, and critics to develop a more complete measure of excellence, and a more responsible, risk taking, and inclusive way of reading.”

The root of this — her frustration with the most prestigious of the best-of-2011 lists — deepens my appreciation for what Longreads is doing. For instance, Jeremy P. Bushnell’s 12/27 contribution to the Longreads potluck steers readers to Rachel Levy’s “Becoming Deer,” which appeared in PANK Magazine, where the aforementioned Roxane Gay is co-editor.

finance and flames and Lewis and Maclean

Today, while reading “California and Bust” by Michael Lewis, I reached a passage that felt familiar, a kind of echo that at first I couldn’t place but eventually traced back to 1992’s Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean. The echo amounts to this idea: If a big thing is incomprehensible, try to get much much closer and look for small things that explain it.

Here’s Young Men and Fire:

… they ended with a definition which, when reduced to its main simplistic terms, says that a spreading fire is a series of little fires.

… Therefore, when Dodge spoke of a solid “wall of flame” behind him, 250 to 300 feet deep, he was speaking figuratively as a poet, as most of us do. What was behind him were hundreds of thousands of little fires multiplying so fast that only a computer could keep up with them.

… If a spreading fire is a bunch of little fires becoming many more little fires, then a lot of counting has to be done to make a study of it. Think of what a lot of counting of a lot of pine needles had to be done …

Here’s the Lewis passage, which comes from last month’s Vanity Fair and reached me thanks to author David Dobbs’ “Top Longreads of 2011”:

What Meredith Whitney was trying to say was more interesting than what she was accused of saying. She didn’t actually care all that much about the municipal-bond market, or how many cities were likely to go bankrupt. The municipal-bond market was a dreary backwater. As she put it, “Who cares about the stinking muni-bond market?” The only reason she had stumbled into that market was that she had come to view the U.S. national economy as a collection of regional economies. To understand the regional economies, she had to understand how state and local governments were likely to behave, and to understand this she needed to understand their finances. Thus she had spent two unlikely years researching state and local finance. “I didn’t have a plan to do this,” she said. “Not one of my clients asked for it. I only looked at this because I needed to understand it myself. How it started was with a question: How can G.D.P. [gross domestic product] estimates be so high when the states that outperformed the U.S. economy during the boom were now underperforming the U.S. economy—and they were 22 percent of that economy?” It was a good question.

“
And in Paris, I read so many great ones. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, which I found in the $3 bin outside Shakespeare & Co. The copy was disintegrating, so I paper-clipped the pages together and read them while sitting on the bench outside the store. The Children’s Hospital**** by Chris Adrian (oh, and I read A Better Angel****** and The Great Night this year, too), which was probably my favorite reading experience. I spent thirty minutes or so every morning reading it, before the city woke up, sitting on the Seine and eating a pain au chocolat. There are probably still crumbs in my copy. I also read The Great Gatsby and A Moveable Feast and reread Wuthering Heights.

- from a year-in-reading post by Kelsey Ford, who had me at pain au chocolat.

And Paris.

And Gatsby.

(this post was reblogged from kelsfjord)
“
And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library.

- from Ian McEwan’s “Christopher Hitchens, Consummate Writer, Brilliant Friend” in the NYT

(via Hal Espen)

Also this:

Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton.

Whenever people talk of Christopher’s journalism, I will always think of this moment.

Consider the mix. Constant pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, Christopher’s head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line.

Do click here and read it all for yourself.

(this post was reblogged from halsf)

remix

Convergences seem to snowball when I read to myself while my kids listen to an audiobook.

Just now, through my ears, this*:

“Amortentia doesn’t really create love, of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room — oh yes,” he said, nodding gravely at Malfoy and Nott, both of whom were smirking skeptically. “When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love …”

And this** through my eyes:

“Shush!” I clamped my hand over her mouth and pulled her down next to me. Our knees rested uncomfortably against the large ceramic pot. The green stalks growing out of it were plastic.

Paul and his friends reemerged. He was chewing gum, and wearing shorts. This is what he would be like, I thought, if we never had anywhere to be, if we were always on vacation. I didn’t care what Laura thought. I wasn’t even in the mall anymore, I was somewhere else. I was in my forties, in my fifties. I was in the grocery store and bumping into Paul. We were exchanging phone numbers, two grown-ups. It happened all the time.

————————

* from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

** from Emma Straub’s Other People We Married

“

Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in. They speak to us like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence. They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them. They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again. They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, give us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape.

Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them. They teach us to know ourselves better by recognizing ourselves in others.

Books that speak like the noise of multitudes reduce us to despair by the sheer weight of their emptiness. They entertain us like the lights of the city streets at night, by hopes they cannot fulfill.

- Thomas Merton, who I decided to read today because his name comes up repeatedly in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot

This got me thinking about which category The Marriage Plot would belong in: a book that speaks like God or like men or like the noise of the city. This could be wildly misguided since I don’t know what it feels like to need lithium or to need lithium and take too little, but there’s a scene involving a bipolar character in a saltwater taffy shop that left me wrung out and “recognizing ourselves in others” — a book that speaks “like good men,” in other words.

“
Even now, at bed-and-breakfasts or seaside hotels, a shelf full of forlorn books always cried out to Madeleine. She ran her fingers over their salt-spotted covers. She peeled apart pages made tacky by ocean air. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine’s heart. Her friends might be calling her name on the beach, the clambake already under way, but Madeleine would sit down on the bed and read for a little while to make the sad old book feel better.

- from The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, which I started today.


“

Yet I can’t help but remember that reading — both the careful selection of books and being given enough privacy to quietly read them myself — was among the first freedoms I had. Those early choices, and being trusted to make them, seem like foundational experiences now, decades later. That’s how my brothers and I found those Tintin stories, in fact, wandering the stacks of the library unhindered until we happened upon a whole box of Hergé’s books in a cardboard box on the very bottom shelf in the very back corner of the collection. They may have been stuck there as an afterthought or an embarrassment, forbidden from mingling with “better” books, but to me they were buried treasure. And now, as a father and author, I want my daughter to find treasures of her own in the stacks, and I want a girl like the one I met in Maine to find books that are hers, only hers, and to find them all on her own. I can’t think of a better honor than to have something I’ve written be that book for someone.


It’s a mistake to rarify reading and put books out of reach.

- from “Making Room For Readers” by Steve Himmer.

I liked this essay very much and on many levels.