Unpacking My Starship

It has been a long time since I have posted on here. But that is going to change, with the Announcement of a New Book Club Book and a bit of explanation, occasioned, in a stroke of luck perfect for explanatory essays, by two different things: one being that I read too much, which is to say I unpacked too much of my library all at once; and the other being that I went "home", sort of, or failing that, that I went back to my biggest and favorite pile of books, the one in Lockport that my father and I built with second-hand lumber and which takes up an entire wall.

The obvious way in which one could read too much would be a crisis of content. It has been hypothesized (by others, not by me) that my personal, usual practice of reading two or more novels "at the same time" would result in some kind of intertextual freeforall, in which, in the first instance I remember hearing cited, Pip Pirrip would for some reason be in my mind imagined as rubbing elbows with Sissy Hankshaw, since I read Great Expectations and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues "at the same time", the simultaneity here consisting in reading the former for about an hour in the van on the way to a ski trip, and the latter while on the lifts, on the same day. I would experiment, sometimes, with the shortest acceptable unit that I could read from two books I was trying to read "at the same time" -- is it a sentence? A paragraph? What would it mean to read, say the Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and the Early Stories of John Updike with interpellated sentences? Would you have read either of them? Would, in fact, your understanding of Tarbox, MA come to be infiltrated with charming Russians with hilariously poor English vocabulary? At any rate, I should say, I never broached whatever line there is, and this crisis of content never happened to me. My crisis in reading too much took on a wholly different form.

If you read all the time, you'd better do it quickly. And if you own countless (actually strike that; I have them counted, in an Excel spreadsheet, on this very computer) pages and pages of unread book, you had better read quicklier still. I moved to Manhattan four months ago, exulted in my little closet in which to live with an internet and books and no cable, and set about the important business of Reading. And I read quickly. I read swaths of the internet by day, then I got onto the subway with a Train book and off of the subway with a Park book, and read and read. While commuting, I read the subway map and thought about other places to go; while dining, I read the menu and imagined other food to eat; and eventually, while reading, I thought principally about other books to read. I became a parasitic reader; I ignored the beam in whatever book it happened to be, and thought only about the motes in other books' eyes. It was a goddamn mess is all. I read everything like it was the subway map, and here is the thing about reading the subway map for no reason, over and over: I have done it for months, and I can not successfully tell you how to get anywhere except for certain intersections in Manhattan, between 135th and Bleecker Streets (which is to say, the gridded part, or, the part in which one does not need a map).

And so for a few months my goal was to read my books more strongly than I read the map on the subway. It was hard. I don’t know if I pulled it off. But for a while, I didn’t read anything that wasn’t on a syllabus, and then I had a flight to Buffalo, so I decided to relax my rule a little bit and I bought a book off of a table in the park, by Wodehouse to read on the flight, which was fun enough.

And then I got to my library, my actual library, in a mess around the reject lumber that my father and I built into shelves. My books. Not all of the shelves were saturated; there was a Target-sized bookshelf’s worth of books missing, which are in my apartment in Harlem. My bed, which used to sit across the room from the bookshelves was gone (it’s in my apartment, too). So I grabbed one of the books that I had made a note of looking at when I got home – Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar – and sat in the corner and read. And I don’t know why, but I felt like I read it the right way. I felt like I felt reading on the subway before I had had my brains had been overread. This was fantastic.

And it has carried on. I wish I had something more epiphanic to tell you about what I thought of, or some more specific set of phenomena that I could detail about how my reading is different, but I am afraid I cannot: all I can tell is that I was positive there that the time had come to get the band back together, that it was time for me to begin reading off of both my syllabi and my library, and that this book club is once again operational. We have a new cast of commenters; we have a new set of commitments; and we have a new book, which book being Haruki Murakami’s book of short stories Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. So here we are: time to read like we are not reading a subway map.