Early in January, I declared 2016 an Orgy of Reading. For me personally, I mean. I don’t care what the rest of you jokers do. For years I have worked as a freelance book reviewer, which is a kind of writing I find useful and enjoyable to do, but it meant that at any given time I was reading a book for work, which had a way of interfering with my “personal” reading, as I call it. It was a bit like being in school that way. Last year I stepped back from reviewing books quite so regularly, and I felt a resurgence of my old passion for reading that was so pleasurable, it was almost sensual. Hence the word orgy. I was choosing books with titles that felt good to say, or ones that had beautiful covers. And even though I get most of the books I want to read from the library—cuz I’m cheap, and because I love it there—for a little while I treated myself to books that I had to buy because they were harder to find.
For starters, I indulged the morbid curiosity I’ve always had about the artist Tracey Emin by buying a collection of the columns she wrote for The Independent newspaper, and found I dislike it, and her, more than I expected to. I’ve been devoted to the artist/writer/poet/musician Billy Childish for a long time, which is how I learned about Emin, who’s a much more successful and better known artist than he is. After they broke up, she mocked him for staying in the small town he grew up in and revisiting the same subjects over and over in his paintings and writing. Childish wrote a poem that quoted Emin telling him, “Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck. — Stuck! stuck! stuck!” and a movement, called Stuckism, was born. Basically, the Stuckists were about upholding the value of painting and were down on conceptual, modern, and postmodern art, which is a view I don’t entirely share. I find lots of conceptual art interesting and worthwhile. (And I understand that Childish himself dissociated himself from the movement early on, and may never have been too seriously invested in it.)
REGARDLESS, I deeply admire the kind of work Childish does. Reading his novel Notebooks of a Naked Youth broke me open in a way I hadn’t been since I was a teenager and everything was new. His writing, paintings, and woodcuts are stripped-down, honest, and tough, but intellectually muscular at the same time—and he’s done it himself all these years, without much in the way of institutional support. Not to play THIS game, but he strikes me as a real punk. I … I kind of love him. Still, I thought Emin’s columns might interest me, since I also enjoy short-form memoir, especially when it’s written by women. But nah. I couldn’t stomach those essays at all. They’re just braggy chronicles of all the cool famous people she finds herself at parties with. Next!
(Well, next I might have to try her memoir, Strangeland. It seems like she might get pretty real in that one. I’ve enjoyed some of her artwork, and I want to like her. I’ve had a picture of her with Billy Childish on my desk for years. In it, she’s wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit and heels, and she’s laughing her gap-toothed laugh. Billy has on baggy trousers and is smoking a cigarette, and he’s smiling too, which—google it—he’s rarely shown doing. It’s the 80s and they’re in someone’s kitchen. I could look at this picture every day for the rest of my life and never get tired of seeing it.)
Anyways. A couple weeks ago I paid a visit to my new favorite Philly library, the Joseph E. Coleman Northwest Regional branch. It’s a bright, bustling, modern library, with a good collection and a dragon. I nosed around in there for a while until I found a few books that interested me, including Morvern Callar. Do you remember that one? I saw the film adaptation when it came out a million (fourteen) years ago and remember liking it, and its quintessentially 90s bleakness. I’ve read a few stories by Alan Warner—he’s a Scottish writer who writes in local vernacular, which is a style choice I really enjoy—but somehow I hadn’t gotten around to this novel, which was very well received when it came out. So I brought it home, and let me tell you, it’s good. It’s so strange. Morvern Callar is the name of the young woman whose story it is, and she’s an unusually compelling character. Every synopsis of the book tells you this much, so it’s not spoiling anything to let you know that when the novel opens, Morvern’s live-in boyfriend has committed suicide (in a really gross way, too). Her response to the tragedy is fucking weird. Though she tells us her every thought as she proceeds to do strange and dark, yet strangely life-affirming things, I’m drawn forward by trying to understand her motivations, because she doesn’t seem to have any. She’s totally self-contained and, in her secretiveness, very powerful, and I refuse to believe she’s empty-headed and nihilistic, which is what seems to be the consensus on what this book is about: The nothing generation that came of age in the 90s.
But I have to be honest, my orgy of reading is on hiatus this week. I have hit a wall of mental exhaustion, and all I can think about doing in my down time is, like, bodily stuff. I want to go for walks, drink coffee, and slather myself with the patchouli hand cream I got for Christmas. I want to help Joe dig up our garden out back and try starting beans and corn from seeds and, like, listen to the radio. I do NOT want to go to your party or meet you for drinks. Don’t take it personally, I’m just so wiped out. I think it’s from writing. For the last two months I’ve spent part of every day writing a new book, and though it hasn’t been an especially difficult or frustrating process this time around, I think it’s drained me. Rummaging around in my memories, dredging stuff up—both sweet and sad stuff—and laying it to rest—that’s hard work. Even though I’m not quite finished writing the manuscript, I need to take a break from it. And as far as reading goes, I think I’ll keep up with Morvern and maybe see what else Alan Warner has written recently. But for today, tomorrow, the next day—I don’t think I’ll feel all that hungry for a good book.
What do you do when you need a mental rest? Or a mental kick-start? I’ve gotten pretty good at taking care of my body when I’m tired or sick or sad, but I’m not as sure how to replenish a tired mind. Your suggestions are welcomed.
Love, Katie
Indicative Mood 