A reading rut
And getting right out of it. (hint: go for the skinny ones)
Last week, as I was tapping away at my computer, I became overwhelmed with a sense of frustration. Frustration at the fact that so far this year, I had picked up 6 different books and not finished any of them. Things had been flowing pretty nicely in all other areas, but for some reason, I found myself in a reading rut. So when I finished what I was doing, I picked up one of Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiographies (the second one — The Cost of Living) and read it cover to cover.
I love that whole series of Levy’s and have read the other two (Things I Don’t Want to Know and Real Estate) multiple times as well. It had been a few years since I had read The Cost of Living, and picking it up, I realised that I had pretty much forgotten the entire premise. It’s about recovering from the shipwreck of her marriage ending, settling into a new life and way of living, finding space to write, and making a home for herself and her daughters in a block of flats in North London.
What I love about her writing, apart from being funny and thoughtful and basically just brilliant, are her astute observations and her ability to make connections between her own life and the world around her, to see patterns and correlations and repetitions which all accumulate to form a greater meaning. I also love that she’s an eavesdropper — an affliction I am also blessed or cursed with, depending on how you look at it.
When I finished the book that evening — it’s very slim and the writing is quite big. I am actually a pretty slow reader! — I felt such a sense of satisfaction that I picked up another skinny book and did it again. This time it was Bluets by Maggie Nelson whose memoir, The Argonauts, I’ve read three times, so it seemed like a logical next step since I was apparently looking for familiarity. Bluets is only 95 pages long and quite experimental in terms of form. It’s almost poetry but not quite, exploring her love of the colour blue written in numbered paragraphs. It’s about blue but it’s also about life — a love affair that seems to have ended, an injured friend that she is caring for, conversations with colleagues, lots of sex.
She manages to merge the personal so seamlessly with more structural observations and I love the way that she incorporates theoretical and literary references throughout, from Marguerite Duras to Thoreau, Judith Butler and Giles Delleuze . It’s a tool she uses in The Argonauts as well, allowing her to observe wider systems and relate them to the intimately personal.
By this point, I was on a bit of a roll and didn’t want to lose momentum, so after some lunch, I scoured my shelves again…
“Don’t you have a job?!” you might be wondering, and to that I say that a writer can’t do their job without reading, so that’s my excuse.
Anyway, I noticed that my John Berger collection was all right there, safely in its ranks, not hidden away somewhere like I thought it was for some reason. Finding his books all lined up on my shelf had a certain symmetry to it since I had just been talking to Margaux about him a few days earlier, so I picked out Confabulations and set myself up on the sofa.
It’s a book of essays from 2016 and like much of Berger’s work, the central theme is looking but here he also focuses on language — visual language, connecting images with words, connecting feelings with sounds and movements in the form of music and dance. He writes to old friends and comments on the circularity of time. I loved this quote and the little drawing that went with it:
We are not points on a line; rather, we are the centres of a circle. The circles surround us with testaments addressed to us by our predecessors since the Stone Age, and by texts which are not addressed to us but which can be witnessed by us.
It reminded me of some illustrations I drew for an essay I wrote during my master's for a visual research methods module that I loved.
When I finished Confabulations that afternoon, my head felt heavy with other people’s words so the only thing to do was take the dog for a walk. With a few days’ distance though, I can see that what I took from each one of these books was how important it is to look around.
By observing and connecting and finding patterns as Levy and Nelson and Berger all do, you can form a bit of a map that guides you through life. Points of reference that help you understand why people say and do certain things, to solve problems, find joy, and realise that an idea from another time might lead to a word or an action in this one.
Not to be pretentious, but it made me think of that line by Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living, and it felt like a reminder to be awake in the world, to embrace its texture, idiosyncracies, irritations, and humour. And most of all it reminded me to re-read things that I’ve read before because there is always something new to take from them.
Some other things.
— You’ll be pleased to know that I am now safely on the other side of my reading rut and very much enjoying a less slim book by a writer I’ve never read (and borrowed from the library, no less), The Idiot by
, another master (mistress?) of observation whose other books I can’t wait to sink my teeth into. It is so funny that I cried with laughter on the train down to Devon on the weekend. Proof below:
— The song Paint the Town Red by Doja Cat. Not my usual but damn does this song get me pumped.
— The Sargent and Fashion exhibition at Tate Britain. I went to this yesterday with my friend Holly and it was all very lovely. We were particularly impressed by how he paints faces. They felt so realistic and almost modern despite working mainly in the late 19th and early 20th century. Also, the way he captures fabric (lace, silk, ruffles, pleats, etc) is really incredible which makes sense since it was kind of the focus of the whole show.
— Inspired by Liv Kaplan, I’ve been making a hemp seed and herb pesto which basically goes with everything and uses up any sad-looking herbs in your fridge. Just put maybe half a cup of hemp seeds in your food processor, the juice of one lemon, a big handful of soft herbs, some olive oil, salt and pepper, and if it needs it, a little splash of water. Delish on eggs but also toast, fish, roasted veggies.
— Tahini, wow. I had never been into it until recently and now I can’t imagine my life without it.
— And finally, this gorgeous passage from Confabulations again about the concept of El Duende, which on the previous page JB defines as “a quality, a resonance which makes a performance unforgettable. It occurs when a performer is possessed, inhabited, by a force or a set of compulsions coming from outside her or his own self.”
See you in the next one,
Annabel
Ooh the Sargent exhibition looks amazing!
i love deborah levy! her novels are just as good, hot milk is one of my all time favorites