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felinejumper) wrote2019-05-16 12:08 am
a multi-week reading wednesday
Hello, hi, I have been so absorbed by Real Life Stuff: work has been very busy but very productive and good, sample cross contamination be damned, and my social calendar has been...obscene in its busy-ness; can anyone explain how to have friends and hold down a job and do creative work and cook yourself meals? But in honor of it being 20 minutes into Thursday, the collated drafts from 3 weeks of Reading Wednesday Official(TM).
3 weeks ago I finished Middlemarch!. I cried a lot; extremely well worth it, everybody from 1850 onwards was correct. In what is likely an unpopular opinion, I hard IDed with Lydgate -- he is, I think, the only character that expresses a particular flavor of "love is hard work, and to no longer love this person is too terrible a prospect, even if they don't love me"; he also carries the loneliness of the technical worker, and as a scientist I definitely recognize that. His internal processes felt so very, very familiar; perhaps this is a commentary on my own misognyny?, as misogyny seems to be the main character trait I see mentioned online. ("K, does any of this have anything to do with your break up?" Shut up, no, I never.)
That said: obviously I also ID with Dorothea to the absolute max, and I chanted "KISS KISS KISS" for 50/72 chapters, and I love her and hope she is happy with the beautiful boy.
I've also been feeling a particular but small loss over finishing it. I read fast enough that I almost never get to spend serious time with a book. But Middlemarch I got to read and live in for a long time, over several different topsy-turvy life moments, and now it's done. I suspect lots of people feel this about lots of things, it just...is very rare that I get to invest so much time into a story, over so much time.
2 weeks ago to this week, I've been reading tender meditations on the world; or, if not "tender", all very much in the genre of "boy howdy, living as a person sure is complicated, huh?"
(1) Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks. While not as wrenching or, frankly, as good as the astounding (and later in her career) Lost Children Archive(SO GOOD), I nonetheless quite quite enjoyed. I was particularly attached to her essay on biking—the cycleur as the modern update to the flaneur!—and there were a few quite breathtaking passages in other essays. A long excerpt from an essay that was about names, because I am nothing if not aggressively predictable:
Men at work
If the cranium were what it seems to be—a hemispherical receptacle, a cavity, a reservoir—learning would be a way of filling an empty space. But that’s not what actually happens. It’s possible to imagine that every new impression digs another hole, bruises the unformed material a bit, empties us out a little more.We’re born full of something—gray matter, water, blood, flesh-and in all of us, at every instant, the slow alchemy of erosion and loss is at work.
Language breaches our direct relationship with the world and words are an attempt to cross the unbridgeable gap: “Mama” cements a fragile bond with the now unattainable breast and “Me” is a mere echo of that face of mine on the other side of the mirror. In prelinguistic infancy, when the shadow of syntax hasn’t yet eclipsed the radiance of the world, the rumbling of *r*s and the murmuring of *m*s are enough to say everything.A child, before it can talk, speaks the world—speaks it to himself—with a pointing fmger and babbling. But one day the soft sound of the m becomes attached to the a, and is repeated--mama.Then, something snaps. The moment we pronounce the name of that bond, our first and most intimate one, some link with the world is broken.
Names are the glove covering a prosthesis, the wrapping of an absence. A child who learns a new word acquires a bridge to the world, but only in compensation for the chasm that opens up within him the moment that word is imprinted there. Almost all of us have heard the story about our first “Mama” (and we know that the interest of the person hearing it is usually inversely proportional to the enthusiasm of the one who relates the anecdote) but I imagine that very few of us have firsthand memories of our initial unsteady steps through language. Some people compare this initial learning experience with the ecstasy of a creative force inventing a universe. Children, they say, are like poets of Esperanto: their words exist in perfect correspondence with the world.
Hooked on the biblical myth of Paradise, we’d like to believe that the names of things are precise and imperative, that there’s a word in the core of each thing and that pronouncing it is equivalent to unveiling the very essence of the object; that the act of Speech is similar to the fiat of the Creator.There may be some truth in this, but the fact is that the process of acquiring a first language is as involuntary as stuttering or aphasia. Rather than a memory of Paradise, learning a language is a first banishment, an involuntary, silent exile to the interior of that nothing in the heart of everything we name. Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything. (bolded mine)
I keep absolutely bowled over by writers obsessing with writing and words—I know it's not a new topic and yet—and the failure of words, and names, and their inevitable failure as well—I mean, Anne Carson, right. This is the piece that I'm pitching (!!) later this month, about names, but I think it's because no essay (this seems absolutely nuts but true?) has managed to thread the needle of describing the promise/peril of the spoken identity-name in he way I understand it.
Anyway, Luiselli just goes right for my jugular.
(2) I also finished Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable. Disclaimer: Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, believed in God; I emphatically do not. Nonetheless. The first set of essays is extremely good, and then tails into some sort've incomprehensibility; the illustrations remain beautiful and I love the introduction, where Merton gives advice to his new book on how to go into the world. Some shoutouts: "Letter to an Innocent Bystander" is spectacular, and overwhelming—is innocence a real defence, or even a possibility, for us intellectuals? I also absolutely lost it—like, sobbing on someone's couch unexpectedly and in a atheistic-way, at this passage on Prometheus:
The Promethean instinct is as deep as man’s weakness: that is to say, it is almost infinite. Promethean despair is the cry that rises out of the abyss of man’s nothingness—the inarticulate terror man cannot face, the terror of having to be someone, of having to be himself. The fire Prometheus thought he had to steal from the gods is his own identity in God, the affirmation and vindication of his own being as a sanctified creature in the image of God. The fire Prometheus had to steal was his own spiritual freedom. In his own eyes therefore, to be himself was to be guilty.
(3) AND I am working my way through Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. She touched my hand and told me not to amputate parts of myself for science when I saw her speak (I did cry instantly!), and every page of her writing makes me also sob with how beautiful she makes the world and knowledge and naming things (I...cry pretty easily, I'll admit). I don't think there's an essay of hers that I haven't absolutely tried to absorb into my soul; reading her is just like coming into a warm home over and over again.
Annnnndddd I finally read Nimona—or finished it, technically. V good. <3 Noelle Stevenson.
I am currently starting Becky Chambers' Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is SO MUCH FUN and I am going to go read it way too late into the night and then be tired for work, oh well, so it goes.
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I don't think Lydgate was misogynist as much as someone who, in spite of his critical mind towards so many things, had never interrogated his own sexism and unthinking acceptance of societal assumptions about women?
For Eliot doing real spine-chilling misogyny, see Harold Transome in Felix Holt or Henleigh Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda.
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And thank you for additional Eliot recs. I hadn't, actually, realized how many other books she'd written besides Middlemarch and Mill on the Floss, so off I go to Project Gutenberg.
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I really need to reread Middlemarch one of these days.
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And yes! Re-read! I am so excited to do so in a few years!
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Possibly literally my favorite book in the world. Quietly life-changing. How wonderful that you got to hear her speak!
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Incidentally, if you have any other Kimmerer-esque writings, please please send them my way, I will be forever grateful!
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Let’s see... well, it’s not really like her in some ways, but David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous gave me many of the same feelings and felt the same way to me as I read it, and spends time with many of the same topics. I really love it.
And after I read Braiding Sweetgrass for the first time I went and looked for other indigenous writers talking more about the practicalities and found Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who writes incredibly encouraging, lovely, loving, educational books on reconciliation and decolonial activism. I like Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back in particular. It felt like a good way to learn more on the framework Braiding Sweetgrass helped me build.