Four Books For Your Friday
I’m surrounded by texts.
Stacks and stacks of books at every turn in our house. A Kindle that’s always packed to the gills with rentals from the Los Angeles Public Library. My computer with so many tabs open it’s impossible to see the little icons at the top of my screen anymore. Folders full of PDFs, some open and some waiting to be opened at all times.
I move through these texts all day long, dipping in and dipping out, a little snatch here a little snatch there, a brief interlude with this one, a little longer moment with this other. Flip, flip, flip. Skim, skim, skim. Jot down a phrase, a thought, an idea, a quote. A sentence here, a sentence there. A podcast in the shower, an audio book when I need to close my eyes. Words and words and words everywhere.
As a writer, I’m constantly working with words, seeking out new arrangements of words, absorbing words, spending time with words, conversing with words, creating arrangements of words. As well, my day job as a professor requires me to read and write and think about reading and writing and talk about reading and writing every day.
So it’s impossible to quantify my reading experience. How many books did I read in January? I have no idea. I’m awash in books. It’s so woven into my daily experience at this point, it would be like trying to quantify the amount of blinks I blink or bites of food or breaths I take each month. Simply impossible. I am connected to one text or another for almost every waking moment of my life. A constant experience. Never finished, always in the middle, forever ongoing.
This January worked no different. I encountered countless texts. Some book-length examples sustained my attention longer than others, and so I thought I’d share four of the ones that did. Four intense experiences worth sharing. Hopefully one of these four might tickle your fancy or expand your consciousness in just the right way. If you’ve already experienced one or more of these, let me know in the comments! I’m always curious to hear about other reader experiences with works I’ve spent important time alongside.
Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve (translated by Thomas Bunstead, Catapult, 2019)
For those of us who yearn to spend time with someone who thinks passionately about visual art, Optic Nerve delivers a captivating perspective. It’s like art history meets art criticism, all bundled in an “autofictional” narrative. In terms of my experience with it, I often found myself doubling back and reliving the moments dedicated to the discussion of artworks and the artists who created them, and then skipping like a stone across a lake in those moments of “autofiction” where the personal memoir aspect came to the foreground. A whole book that foregrounded the art and artists and omitted the personal narrative would’ve commanded more of my attention, but that’s in part because I tend to care less about personal character development in narrative writing in general than I do about other aspects afforded by the genre. I recognize that pattern of behavior as a mark of my personal prejudice rather than a fault of the text itself. In fact, the way Gainza moves in and out of these modalities constitutes a huge part of what makes this text unique and valuable. It resists any one genre category and in so doing presents something unfamiliar and new. Very excited to get her next book, Portrait of an Unknown Lady, which comes out in March from Penguin.
Christa Noel Robbins’s Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
For those of us who crave a conversation that takes place at the intersection of art history and literary theory, this book delivers a valuable contribution. Such an exciting find! The introduction sets the stage by creating a constellation of ideas that brings Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” into conversation with art critics and theorists such as Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster to demonstrate the need for further discussion about the role of authorship in mid-to-late 20th century art. Robbins focuses her attention on two specific moments: the “New York School” in the 1950s and the “Post Painterly Abstraction” of the 1960s. But part of what makes this book so exciting is the way that Robbins insists on rethinking the relationship between the individual artist and the group affiliation. Juicy insights, sharp analysis, and new ways of thinking about topics which have already accumulated so much conversation. I’ve learned a bunch from this one, and I’ve taken a heap of notes!
Michael McDowell’s Blackwater: The Complete Saga (Originally published as a series of six volumes in 1983, reprinted by Valancourt Books in 2017)
I heard about this one from the fantastic writer (and all around great guy) Ben Loory, who called it one of the best books he’d ever read in his life (here), which made my eyebrows go up. He went on to describe it as “much more than a simple (or even complex) haunted house novel — […] — it’s like a Depression-era small town Alabama family saga version of Twin Peaks; no FBI and no diner, but possible river monsters instead.” That’s all it took for me to immediately track down a copy. I’m a sucker for anything that even remotely conjures the aura of Twin Peaks. So glad I got it. Can’t thank Ben enough for (unknowingly) introducing it to me. Having lived in the south for six years, amongst the swamps of Northern Florida and in post-Katrina New Orleans, I felt an instant affinity with the world it created. From the opening scene where a couple of guys are floating around a creepy flooded city on a little boat — unaware of river monsters! — and find a mysterious woman in a house that should’ve been evacuated, the tension squeezes you and doesn’t let go. I should say, the horror isn’t in your face though, it’s subtle, hidden, hinted at, haunting. I think I’ll likely wander around inside this book for many more nights to come.
Anthony Reed’s Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
For those of us who constantly strive to expand the scope of our knowledge and awareness within the field of avant-garde/experimental art, especially within the realm of literature, this book delivers a much needed intervention. As we know, perhaps most provocatively argued recently by Cathy Park Hong in her much discussed essay “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” the field of avant-garde/experimental studies has historically lacked diversity, to put it mildly. And what little bit of diversity that has gained central traction in the field has tended to focus on a specific type of representation, social activism, and politics. Reed breaks that all down and offers a radically different approach that draws our attention to writers such as N. H. Pritchard, Suzan-Lori Parks, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, and Nathaniel Mackey, in order to offer a fresh perspective on how black experimental writing functions. If you’re putting together a reading list that includes Evie Shockley's Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Fred Moten's In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Anaïs Duplan's Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture — all fantastic books that I adore and absolutely recommend — then Reed’s book would make a perfect fit. While inside this text, I find myself constantly taking notes, jotting down research items I need to learn more about, and admiring the way Reed constantly challenges my assumptions. Very captivating work.
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I enjoyed reading this issue. Your words jumped off the page and I could tell how passionate you are about words and writing.