#2 march 14: some thoughts on reading

maggie nelson, rachel cusk, and me procrastinating on finals

I am sitting in the coffee shop I frequent, starting Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Maggie Nelson is my favorite writer. Although I thought the same thing about Rachel Cusk last night as I finished her Transit. Maybe it’s that I always fall completely in love with whatever I am reading at the moment, and whoever I am reading.

The strange thing is, their work is very different. Cusk’s Outline and its sequel Transit follow a writer, Faye, as the people around her tell her things — stories, memories, preoccupations, their own spirals. Cusk writes mainly through the dialogue of these stories; her prose is the words spoken out of these outside characters’ mouths, directed at Faye, the mostly-silent narrator. The world she builds centers around the narrator, but we can only look in at her through windows.

So it is the outside world, made of a constellation of nodes, of human/story data points, that allow us into Faye. We know little of her own thoughts, little of how she sees the world and how she makes sense of her environment. 

Nelson, on the other hand, writes from a single node outward. I am invested in her world of thought. I have fallen in love with her writing for a completely different reason: each sentence she writes seems to pluck some truth out of the sky. She writes things like “Is there a good kind of hustler? I wonder, as I steer my car through the forest of gargantuan billboards, ghostly palm trees, and light-flattened boulevards that have become my life.” Ugh. It’s like reading sunlight. I feel like translator would be an acceptable word for what she is, in that she seems to translate raw life stuff into sentences, into passages that make me feel like I’m gathering the whole world in my arms. 

I’m only twenty-something pages into Bluets, but I am so invested, invested enough that I bring it with me into the coffee shop bathroom queue, forgetting to look where I’m going as I maneuver through people-filled tables and chairs. The same thing happened with Argonauts; I read the entire thing as I laid on the floor of my bedroom, because once I start reading Maggie Nelson, her writing seemed to take over my body. My body’s primary function becomes metabolizing her words; moving is a secondary (and forgotten) activity. 

Yet both Nelson and Cusk – and I think this is why I have fallen so completely in love with both of them – are geniuses of observation. They seem to take the world and hold it calmly, non-urgently, in their hands, before blowing on it and letting it scatter. Reading them makes me feel my own body around me, breathing, solid and steady. It brings me back to my own chest, back to my own world, while silently removing me from it. It is like a new in-between world has opened up. 

This is starting to become a (very caffeine-induced) love letter to reading but this is where I’m going with this:

Reading, to me, is an activity of the entire body. I am a firm believer in this. I think I got this originally from Georges Perec, who I reference way too much but who is probably one of my favorite (of the old male) thinkers. Perec has a lot to say about reading. He talks about the ergonomics of it; how it is an activity of the eyes and hands, for instance. He also talks about how your experience reading is a function of your environment. Reading on a train that takes many stops, for instance, is a different activity than reading for one long, extended period of time in your armchair at home. Your environment informs how your reading is broken up, what outward senses flood inward, what context the words are given, in what form they float back out into the world around you. You can read a city, Perec says, just like you can read a book. Reading is a practice in seeing.

(Interestingly, I find that running and reading feel very similar to my brain. I’m a pretty avid runner and I think part of my love for it is that it requires a similar mental state to reading. For one, they are both somewhat of an endurance activity. And as you run, like with reading, you take in your environment, move though it, comprehend it.)

So reading is a function of the body, and of your environment, and of your senses. When I read Nelson I feel like I am dancing; when I read Cusk I feel I am meandering slowly through a forest.

Writing this is making me realize: I feel like people don’t pay much attention to how they feel when they read. They think about what they are reading only, the information they are taking in, but not how they feel, physically.

I love watching the readers at the coffee shop I go to. Often they have drip coffee and a scone (a scone for some reason feels like the perfect companion to a book, since it is dry, so you cannot mess up your pages, but it gives you something to do). There is a quiet presence that emanates from readers. I can never put my finger on exactly what it is, but it is there. They are completely absorbed in the world, even as they look down at their book. When people work on their computer, their faces often scrunch up or take on a sort of concerned look; when they read, however, the tension seems to fall away, and is replaced by a sort of contentedness. It is wonderful to think of all the different worlds being inhabited in this one coffee shop space, by virtue of the number of readers and the sorts of portals they have opened up. 

Of course, reading is different in a public space. For one, there is the music. The Strokes is currently blasting out of the coffee shop speakers. Other days it’s jazz or piano. One morning, helpfully (if you’re trying to read) it was Lady Gaga. There is the conversation, which, if you listen to it, is actually quite loud and overwhelming. Little bits and pieces of accidentally overheard conversation will randomly come flying into your ears (the people next to me are discussing the pros and cons of different models of hydraulic presses).

There is the constant movement of people, the opening of doors, the shutting of them, and the temperature changes as said doors are opened and shut. There is the accidental eye contact you will inevitably make with someone the moment you look up from your book. There is, also, the high level of caffeination. I laugh sometimes sitting here and looking around at the identical 16 oz of drip coffee me and everyone else in here has already downed, and how we’re all simultaneously reaching nirvana together. Or something like that. Reading does not take you out of all this; if anything, it emerges you in it even deeper. You become a function of the music and of the doors and windows.

Anyways. I’m obscenely caffeinated right now, and I can already tell you I’m probably going to ignore all my obligations today to finish Bluets. Maybe when I do, I’ll post a little write-up – I’ve been meaning to start doing more thorough reviews of the books I read. Happy week 10! as you can see, procrastination freewriting is in full swing this week <3

- chlo