Writer, editor, translator
Alice Munro
Fanny Howe
Toni Morrison
Joan Didion
Renata Adler
Julio Cortazar
Adrienne Rich
Grace Paley
Susan Sontag
Ralph Ellison
Simone de Beauvoir
Clarice Lispector
Marguerite Duras
Elizabeth Hardwicke
Elizabeth Bishop
Sylvia Plath
Marianne Moore
Borges
Virginia Woolfe
Dorothy Parker
I tried to flatter myself into extinction; tried to bury alive in a landslide of disparagement ego and subjectivity and the first person singular pronoun. I ran identity to ground with the dogs of irony; I tried to kill, bury, burn, embalm, and erase the outlines of me, mummify myself in the damp wrappings of surrealism, sever and rearrange me with Stein’s cubisms, break, buy, bribe, drive a stake through me; tried to whip to death the whole frumpish horse-and-buggy, essentialist, runs-in-the-blood notion I had of who “I” was; like Stein I tried to bleed the bloody paragraph to death, killed the semicolon with the machete of my wit, tried to censor and edit, rewrite and emend me, my belief in lifeblood, marrow, core, and fiber; tried to swap my DNA at the DNA supermarket I read about in Philip K. Dick. So what is I still doing here? Why is I having to keep its eyes peeled? Its eye on the ball? Trying to steer by some dim star, that small, raw planet of self-loathing hammered into the night ahead? Why is I hauled forth over this choppy terrain like a tug on the rough boulevards of a black river? And by whom?
Lynn Emanuel, from Noose and Hook
The stirring conclusion to my 2013 round-up. I read 21 books, here are Nos. 1-7 ranked not necessarily in order of literary greatness, but in terms of my enjoyment of the book, whether it dazzled me with language, or made me think new thoughts, or made me want to make things, or made me feel something, or all of the above.
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1. Speedboat (1976) – Renata Adler (NYRB Classics, 2013 reprint edition. Purchased at Spoonbill & Sugartown. On the Permanent Keeper shelf, signed by R. Adler.)
New York in the 1970s, a peek into the insomniac consciousness of a journalist, a woman. Fragmented into perfect paragraphs. Paranoia, travels, anecdotes, affairs, drinking, childhood, politics, seen through sharp eyes and vulnerable soul. Brilliant.
2. How Should a Person Be? (2012) – Sheila Heti (Picador, 2013 reprint edition. Purchased at a bookstore. Loaned to a friend.)
Ballsy. I admired Heti’s lack of fear in writing about art & wanting to make art, about sex, about obsession, about being petty, even. Very funny, sometimes. Sometimes annoying, when it aimed for grandiosity, but it annoyed me in the ways I annoy myself. It had the feeling of a graphic novel, maybe because so much of it was written in dialogue.
3. Just Kids (2010) – Patti Smith (Ecco. Purchased at a bookstore. On the Permanent Keeper shelf.)
Second time I read this. A comforting book for the winter. She makes me want to draw, write, make collages, dream, with unabashed enthusiasm. A gentle book, gentle handling of Mapplethorpe’s hustling, episodes of lice, freezing winters, getting jeered on stage, etc., seen through the burnish of nostalgia. She recognizes this aspect, though, that the book is an act of love and therefore gentle about the difficult times. This time around, I noticed many more allusions to rock lyrics hidden in her text, and I admired the writing style – spare & elegant.
4. Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (2001) – David Bayles and Ted Orland (Image Continuum Press. Passed on to me by a friend, who found it in a book box on the street in Brooklyn. In the art book shelf.)
A second read. Like a voice of common sense in your head, a good talk with a friend: focus on the process, not the final criticism or adulation, keep making stuff, if that’s what makes you tick.
5. A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome: Daily Life, Mysteries and Curiosities (2009) – Alberto Angela, trans. Gregory Conti (Europa Editions. Purchased at B&N, USQ. Kept on the “will possibly re-read or loan to someone” shelf.)
The author worked in documentary TV, and the book gives this feeling, in a good way. Cinematic in its descriptions, a friendly narrative voice takes you on a tour of Ancient Rome from dawn until midnight, taking you through the homes of people of various social classes, the markets, the Senate, the Coliseum, the communal bathrooms… A social history I’ve always wanted to read: instead of focusing on battles and emperors, it brings the daily details of existence to life. A charming translation that retains the feel of Italian.
6. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) – Michael Pollan
Wow was this book good. A lasting contribution. It felt so fresh, even 7 years after its initial publication and all of the hype surrounding it. I like that he went beyond taking an activist, awareness-raising perspective regarding American production, consumption and attitudes towards food (although there are shades of this) and assumed a bigger point view, which includes human evolution, philosophy, ethics and his own personal perspective, which was so open and touching.
7. Tender Is the Night (1934) – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Glamorous, escapist stuff… The French Riviera, Switzerland, Paris. A golden couple with a secret. Americans must have been so obnoxious, actually, taking over struggling post-WWI France. It was the first time I thought this reading Fitzgerald. Laughed at his digs at the British, they are always duds in this book.
Better late than never, my round-up of 2013 reading. I read 21 books. Here are Nos. 8-14, ranked in order of my preference. Not necessarily in order of literary greatness, but in terms of my enjoyment of the book, whether it dazzled me with language, or made me think new thoughts, or made me want to make things, or made me feel something, or all of the above.
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8. 2500 Random Things About Me Too (2012) – Mathias Viegener (Les Figues Press. Purchased as a result of submitting work to this press, via their website. Kept in the poetry shelf.)
I think this was born out of Viegener’s commitment to a conceptual art aesthetic: find out what will happen via repetition; the most important part is the commitment to that repetition. I’m often skeptical of the products of conceptual art (which only make you think about the process), but the repetition works in this case. This is a book based on that Facebook meme from 2011 or so, where people posted 25 random things about themselves. Viegener wrote 100 of those lists.
There is something so compelling about a list (as the Internet has proven). Because there is a clear beginning and ending? Because the whole comes in digestible parts? Because it gives us a mini-puzzle to order (put together the things that look alike, separate the things that are not like the others)?
But Viegener is not just working randomly, he even admits to this in some of the later lists… The lists become a slow revelation of his life, with the death of his mother and his friend, the writer Kathy Acker, as the emotional threads. He sprinkles it liberally with funny and lurid stories about sexual encounters, conclusions and questions about art, his fascination with plants and fruit…
It would be interesting to write an essay comparing it to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which is similar in form and substance in some ways. I enjoyed this book so much more, maybe because he has a more generous sense of humor… Great bedtime reading – read a list & turn the light off.
9. Blood, Bones and Butter (2011) – Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House. Purchased at B&N, USQ. Passed on to a friend.)
I enjoyed Hamilton’s voice: tough, honest about her own vulnerabilities and failings, sometimes sarcastic, not afraid to be a bitch. I liked being in her head. Particularly appreciated her account of her complicated relationship with her mother. Gorgeous descriptions of cooking and of food (to be expected in a celebrated chef’s memoir), rekindles the romance of Italy.
10. Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (2011) – Lisa Chaney (Purchased at Posman Books, Grand Central. On the “will possibly re-read or loan to someone” shelf.)
I liked this book best for the historical and cultural context it provides on Chanel’s life. Most fascinating was the description of the socially codified role of courtesans in France as well as prostitution generally, all the way down to the shop girl or seamstress who would occasionally have sex for money to make ends meet.
The view of Chanel is an external one. It’s hard to get a sense of her personality, her relations with the people closest to her, though, admittedly she sounds like a difficult subject as she didn’t like to write (allegedly because was embarrassed by her writing style and lack of formal education), and because she told so many different versions of her life, herself.
Chaney devotes a bit too much time to defending the ways her positions and opinions about her subject diverge from other biographies, as if the reader had some knowledge of them all. She is also perhaps sympathetic to a fault with Chanel, including her Nazi sympathies, though I prefer this to a biographer who is judgmental of his/her subject.
11. Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007) – Janet Malcolm (Purchased at St. Mark’s Bookstore. On the keeper shelf.)
Reading this is like sitting down and having a long talk with a really smart and entertaining literature professor about her research. More thoughts on this book here.
12. Pitch Dark (1983) – Renata Adler
Reissued by NYRB books in 2013. A slow read about heartbreak. Wordplay is at its core. Certain sentences weave throughout like a variations on a melancholy melody . I saw Adler read and she said this was her favorite of her books. That’s why I wanted to like this better than Speedboat, but its scope is narrower.
13. Wild (2013) – Cheryl Strayed
What remains of the academic snob in me wants to take an academic snob position on this memoir, but the truth is that it made me cry twice on a long plane ride across the country, and it’s not often a book makes me more than tear up,. “Honest” seems to be my favorite word to commend books I read in 2013; that’s especially the case here. Refreshing to read a Great Adventure sort of story from a female perspective.
14. The Voyeurs (2012) – Gabrielle Bell
Comics. Honest and depressing memoir-like graphic novellas. I liked the art.
Better late than never, my round-up of 2013 reading. I read 21 books, here are Nos. 15-21 (plus scattered other reading and 4 abandoned books), ranked in order of preference. Not necessarily in order of literary greatness, but in terms of my enjoyment of the book, whether it dazzled me with language, or made me think new thoughts, or made me want to make things, or made me feel something, or all of the above.
****
15. LIT: A Memoir (2009) – Mary Karr
Absorbing account of her trajectory as a writer and recovery from alcoholism. Tough & funny. Maybe too coy about her friendships with literary heavyweights (for example, she had a relationship with David Foster Wallace, but only ever refers to him as David & glosses quickly over the affair), though it must be hard to decide what to include if you’re writing about your whole life. An unflinching account of her spiritual/religious development, a touchy subject if there ever was one.
16. Bluets (2009) – Maggie Nelson
This is labelled a memoir, but is its own made-up genre of numbered sections, which made this compulsively readable and added to the detached, cold quality. I liked how it was philosophical and wandering. A person dissecting her own pain. But maybe, ultimately, the coldness is what kept me from loving it? We get the sex with the beloved, the depression following the loss of the beloved, lots of blue, but never the beloved himself – why he was beloved. I also was averse to the voice’s awareness of the book itself, didn’t seem necessary (i.e., “I had all of these scraps I’ve been working on, I ordered them randomly, here they are”).
17. Self Help (1985) – Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore’s first story collection, not really fair to judge it against her later collections (all of which I read before this) because she just gets better. “What Is Seized” was my favorite in this collection. Didn’t like “A Kid’s Guide to Divorce”, & I couldn’t read the one about the woman with breast cancer, because the first paragraph made my heart stop.
18. Anywhere But Here (1992) – Mona Simpson
Novel. This seemed to me a keen portrait of mother-daughter emotional abuse, though I didn’t see that addressed in any of the reviews I read. It was raw & disturbing in that sense.
19. Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002) – Phoebe Gloeckner
Graphic novel. Intense, intimate, difficult. Especially enjoyed the dark view of San Francisco in the 1970s, when the 60s grooviness gave way to something more frivolous and destructive.
20. Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women – Nora Ephron (1975)
Essay collection. More involved in the specifics of 1970s politics and perspectives than I had hoped, though her view of Gloria Steinem, the women’s movement as it was happening was pretty fascinating.
21. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) – Milan Kundera
Crankypants Kundera in full force here, particularly the second half, in which he performs a Lars von Trier-esque extended torture of his heroine. I wouldn’t call it magical realism…. Though I did enjoy the scene among the Russian poets. Good quote here.
PIECEMEAL READING
Short stories, but not entire books by Grace Paley and Clarice Lispector
Susan Sontag essays from Against Interpretation
POETRY
Didn’t read much poetry this year, a bit of an exile year. I don’t count these as “books read” as I dipped in and out of volumes of: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rilke, Adrienne Rich, Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini, and David Lehman’s New and Selected.
ABANDONED READING
The Idiot (1869) – Dostoevsky
I spent two months reading this novel and made it over halfway through. I will return to it!! Need more uninterrupted time.
No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood (2013)
The writers are mostly comedians, so a lot of the essays started sounding the same. I read maybe half of them.
Black Paths (2013) – David B.
Just couldn’t get into this graphic novel, even though I bought a beautiful full-color hardback edition. Oh well.
Heroines (2012) – Kate Zambreno
In theory, I’m the ideal reader of this book, which is, ostensibly, about the women of modernism, in particular those relegated to the wifey role (Zelda Fitzgerald, Viv Eliot) or struggling with mental illness (Virginia Woolf). But I couldn’t stand the humorless narcissism of the narrator and her conflating of her 21st-century life with those trapped in much more narrow historical circumstances. Muddled arguments and muddled thinking under cover of l’écriture féminine. I actually returned this to the bookstore, which I don’t think I’ve ever done.
A great mind must be androgynous
As a collective visual statement, fashion is about the appearance of the individual and of the group. It is at once about self-presentation and conformity. Like music, it is improvisation within a structure. As the human condition doesn’t appear to respond well to too much repetition, fashion could be described as one of our antidotes to boredom. It must be new, but not too new; novel rather than radically different. A kind of planned spontaneity, it is applied art, making use of potentiality. Clothes can change more rapidly than other artifacts; although they are functional, they are statements too. Fashion could be described as the cultural genome of clothes.
–Lisa Chaney, Coco Chanel: an Intimate Life
Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.
Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it’s not–it’s luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.
Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?