january reads (Patreon)

hello..i'm not a summer person but must admit this time of year, the jan/feb cusp, is when i start to have visions of it..in one vision i'm lying in a field on a soft sun-warmed blanket..in another i wear silk pajama shorts to bed..oh well. february first

here's what i read in january:

death valley by melissa broder

an author goes to a best western in the desert to hallucinate...her father is in the hospital..her husband has a mystery illness

hm! hm

it is fun for a novel to so obnoxiously mirror the author’s life (idk auto-autofiction?)…metareferences to her own career…funny

but…ok….

i like when broder writes about like..degenerate sexuality. imo she is naturally inventive in that realm and i think that is the promontory where our minds find each other. i haven’t experienced what she is writing about yet and so maybe that is where there is a distance..but how odd for what is really an introspection novel to feel so emotionally far away!! shallow, somehow…only few toothy sensory details..random-seeming fantastical elements…symbols deployed as plot points…that is what i felt :( bummer. i wonder if we have drifted apart. did not like the prose

pale fire by vladimir nabokov

hahahahaha

uh, idk how to explain it, ask your da

when i mention pale fire to my read friends they always say something like ‘oh yeah. great book. great book. great book’ like almost performatively and before i read it i was like ok….whatever dorks…but listen: it’s a great book

felt genuine frustration at first..even once i’d found the story i was annoyed at the language, was rereading everything. but then..runner’s high? it is incredibly funny. i was hooting and hollering like a chimpanzee

ridiculous. tragic. narrated by the world’s worst homosexual

thinking of it as the first hypertext fiction is so funny perhaps true. what an insane idea!! genius!! the kind of brave you get to be when you know you are the best writer in the world..

the last line of the index..oh my god..debilitating chills. full body reaction

(p.s. it doesn't really matter but i definitely think botkinbote killed himself)

four quartets by t.s. eliot

a group of four long poems about time and spirituality…eliot’s masterwork indeed. super religious. here he reads it in the fashion of a haunted grandfather clock 

read this because michael sugrue quotes it often in his lecture series (he just died like last week..consider paying your dues) and wanted the context for ‘the door we never opened into the rose garden’ i.e. grief for the people we do not become..’distracted from distraction by distraction’..

it’s a sermon, you know..almost feels silly to comment on it in this way...an eternal sermon..from a man who’s been tortured into seeing the afterlife and is sharing urgent knowledge before he dies for good..

(in the first quartet there’s some lines where he just lists a bunch of neighborhoods in london and i was like yeah!!!! fuck yeah!!!!)

someone left this comment on the video of eliot's reading: ‘this isn't poetry....its a stream of consciousness ragtag bag of free associations that frequently spills over into the ridiculous.......John Lennon's I Am The Walrus is a much more entertaining example of the same thing’

...makes you think...

the infinite fury by ian macartney

short story collection full of ‘dispatches from a digital apocalypse’...edinburgh alien invasion..literal retail hell..universe gets worldsquished..

ian macartney is my friend. he is also a fantastic writer..hypno-futurist..scottish..bi..

comprehension sometimes sacrificed for beauty and mind games..read them like poems..

‘tender, geometric prose’ ..so true, i think this is why i like ian's writing so much, such sharp edges and speculative schemes which often return to and are grounded in tenderness and awe. wonderful. am so happy to know him'Book. This is where you work during colonial rule. This blob hovers like stray cotton candy, magenta flotsam over a private garden in the city centre populated by twelve yurts. In the centre of each is a pop-up gin café. Western tents sell books. Eastern ones, conversation. Public debate. Topics include: How do we cross the political gulf between the centre and the far-right? And, Is this book cover gorgeous, or really something?'

a martian sends a postcard home by craig raine

found this in the greenwich oxfam, liked the title, bon appetit

short, the stand out by far was the title poem, which feels so open and modern..alas the collection never quite hit that sweet spot for me again..

craig raine's wikipedia page revealed to me something called martian poetry, a 'minor movement in british poetry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which everyday things and human behaviour are described in a strange way, as if by a visiting martian who does not understand them'. well!!!! i'll be.

reminds me of silicon valley which is one of my favorites of rhiannon'sAt night, when all the colours die,they hide in pairsand read about themselves–in colour, with their eyelids shut.

i am starting february with lacan! tell me about what you've read and what you're reading, would love to hear.

sav x