— Finally getting to Olivia Laing’s debut, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface (Canons)
. I fell in love with her because of the one-two punch of The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
(which I quoted extensively in my column about the film What Happened Was…, and The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking
. I cannot recommend her books highly enough. They’re not quite like anything else. They’re personal, but not personal essays. SHE is in them, but the subjects – loneliness – writers and alcoholism – and the history along the banks of the river Ouse in England – from the Piltdown man to Virginia Woolf’s suicide – override and inform the personal. It’s inter-disciplinary. They’re history books in many ways, and works of art analysis – writing, painting, poetry – but they’re also travelogues in a way, her own personal obsessions take her far and wide. This is the kind of writing I want to do. At any rate, I had never read her first book, about the Ouse. I am learning so much. She’s such a wonderful writer.
— Emma
, by Jane Austen. I picked this up after falling in love with the most recent film adaptation (my review here). It’s been years since I read it. It’s so hilarious, so uncomfortable … and Emma is not a particularly sympathetic heroine, which in my opinion is the best part of it. Austen herself said that she wanted to create a heroine that only she would like. So funny! You can see throughout that Emma is getting everything wrong, she is mis-reading ALL the signals coming her way … it’s so satisfying. I’ve needed this escape.
— American Poetry : The Twentieth Century, Volume 1 : Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker
. So you know I always read poetry in the morning. It’s why I have so many anthologies lying around. I find it meditative. And I discover new poets, and also read poems that are not normally anthologized. My dad gave me this volume (it was his Christmas tradition: he gave each one of us Library of America volumes every year, and this was one of them). And I have never read it cover to cover. So that’s what I’m doing now. And I’m discovering so much! A poem by Edith Wharton knocked my socks off. I read a couple poems a day so I’ve been reading this for months. I need all the meditation I can get.
— In Search of Lost Time, Vol. II: Within a Budding Grove (v. 2)
, by Marcel Proust. I read Volume 1 last year. I am finally tackling this 6-volume monster. And … yes, the sentences are two pages long in some cases. But … it’s surprisingly … an easy read? It’s weird, I put it down for a couple of days, pick it up, and remember exactly what was going on. And it’s not plot-heavy. 150-page descriptions of an afternoon tea, like, not even exaggerating. But it’s so brilliant and so unlike anything else that you just realize on every page that you are in the presence of a major sui generis work of gigantic (and rightfully so) stature. Also, no one told me it was so FUNNY. It’s so funny! I am loving it. One of the ways this book works is … it forces you to slow down. There’s no way you can read it and look forward to finishing it, or have the end in sight. It’s just too damn long. So you have to just succumb, let go of your normal pace, and submit to its rhythms. You can’t be like “My GOD, who cares about the curtains in her parlor – and her decolletage – why 50 pages on this one lane you walked down when you were 6 years old …” You literally cannot be impatient like that. You won’t last. So … like reading poetry … it’s forcing me to slow down.
— I know Imogen Smith, and cherish her writing. I love how her mind works, and the things she notices and then decides to write about. Her latest, for Criterion, is about watching women walk in the movies. She’s so good: Stepping Out: On Watching Women Walk.
— This piece is old (relatively) – written by a FB pal of mine, the wonderful Tom Carson who has written for Esquire, the Village Voice (dating back to its glory days), GQ, Playboy, etc. He had been working for months on a piece about Norman Rockwell, which he would post about on FB. He found a home for it on Vox. It’s a hell of a read. It’s about the transformation of Norman Rockwell – the man known for depicting an idealized version of small-town (white) America – into the man who would paint The Problem We All Live With (one of his most famous paintings). It’s a long one but so worth it.
