I don’t churn through a lot of books anymore. I am reading Harry Potter in Spanish, and that project is taking months per episode. I like rereading books I’ve read before slowly, trying to delve deeper into them than initial or previous reads. For new reads, I tend to fall for literary bricks in general.
During the Lost Week of December (between Christmas and New Years) and the slow starting early days of the year, I trimmed my to-read shelves of some shorter, snappier works. I found myself thinking of them, but not as reviews. Nor even as responses to their actual themes. I didn’t want these responses lost, so I wrote them down.
They are tangents. Inspirations. Spin-offs. Free association rabbit-holes.
They have so little to do with the original books that I will not state which books they refer to, as that will not clarify these responses. Since none of these books are canonical classics, I’m not trying to send you hunting for clues to reveal them. Any characters mentioned by name are not in the book I’m referring to. You won’t figure out what books they are, and even if you do, there are no prizes.
Nevertheless, I will list the books in footnotes for the curious.
Here they are:
Book I
Robinson returned to France, this time to meet an American rather than his friend Krasna. Krasna was a time-traveller, but the American was a spy. If anything, the American was not just contemporary but caught in the now, a now so profound it was a trap.
Robinson and this American Spy should not have gotten along. Where his eyes followed the road-lines of infrastructure to imagine factories beyond the horizon, she pointed at discarded panties in bushes. Where he accounted for the agencies and agendas that shaped the environment, she found them a tedium of middle management. Where he sought an intellectual method of transcending the quotidian, her objectivity derived from dissociation.
And yet. The reason they met, after all, is because they were searching for the same thing. And yet. Despite their differences, his contemplation against her profanity, his earnestness against her conniving, and his morality against her cynicism, in the end she was the one who actually found it.1
Book II
I like to joke that the Southwest is full of cults because there are vast, open tracts of land there that you can pitch a few tents upon and not die, at least immediately, of cold.
A common explanation is that the desert exhibits a spiritual pull in its vast expansiveness that makes communities ripe for magical thinking. As a born-and-raised desert dweller, that’s a correct assessment of the effect of the landscape on the psyche. But also, cultists’ interest in the desert because of those attributes are completely uninteresting to me because of my familiarity with those attributes. In the end, the cheap and remote land is the thing.
Somewhere in my mid-20s I came to the conclusion that cult leaders and con artists are all using the same psychological tricks for arguably the same, or at least similar, objectives. After I experienced an abusive relationship, I discovered the same can be said of abusers.
I’d like to pretend that knowledge has inoculated me against joining a cult, but after all, I’ve been both scammed and abused. The one benefit that insight has given me is recognizing what has taken over the US federal government.2
Book III
Krasna mailed me a picture of a woman at the end of a pier. Despite the fact the picture did not move, it plus his letter made cinema.
Books are filled with all sorts of anticinematic techniques: epistolary novels, oral histories, discourses between philosophers sitting in, if not an agora, then at least a coffee shop. It is the deposition, specifically, that is the most cinematic dialog.
In this deposition, there is a woman walking on a beach. In this woman is the narrative’s transcendence into the world of cinema. However we should never see her on screen. We are stuck in the barrack, chained to the wall.
When she appears, the character’s narrative broke. I have not yet decided if her appearance broke our narrative.3
Book IV
The Blind Argentinian sends his regards from India. He has discovered another ancient labyrinth, this one made of water instead of sand. Two gods in lovemaking speak the world into existence, which speaks of a demon, which speaks of a corpse, which speaks to a king, who listens to the corpse in order to ward off the demon.
There is a pun here to be made between onion-skin, the derogation of cheap pulp paper, and onion layers, the format in which these whispers trickle down from Platonic god lovemaking reality into existence to our own ears as fables. What other ogres are literature made from?
Like in the Bible, there is a great flood at the beginning, and then kingdoms to populate after. The proliferation of kingdoms remind me of the Grand Italian’s dialogs between Marco Polo and Ghenghis Khan, but it is definitely the Blind Argentinian who took this journey.
Like the Blind Argentinian’s more-than 1000 books, these are night tales told in the bedroom, and horny. There is, in fact, one branch of the labyrinth where a trans woman becomes both a wife and a husband split between two households.
In both the labyrinth made of sand and the labyrinth made of water, the storyteller’s head is at stake.4
Book V
Now I have something for Krasna, that memory obsessive. A woman made of forgetting. A man made of desire; or: a magic penis. Fate written in the stars, but the stars are more visible on history’s skin than in the sky over the city lights.
But Krasna would dismiss such a cozy curse. Like a sparkling vampire, agelessness here is youthfulness, and youthfulness is fullness, and the emptiness the characters feel is the limitations of their youth. This novel literally preaches faith in novelty, and history’s echoes is ego’s timestamp.
Between the financial crisis and the tyranny was an interregnum of stalled maturity, where “young adult” both described teenagers and 20-somethings. Here we find its apotheosis, and it’s a nondenominational demon who is defeated with his own situationship. 5
To read more about books:
For more musings:
Reading consumes calories. Venmo me a snackrifice?:
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
I Love You But I Have Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
Your Fathers, Where are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers
The Oceans of Cruelty | Twenty-Five Tales of a Corpse Spirit: A Retelling by Douglas J. Penick
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab