2016: The Year in Reading

Five Two. Fifty-two. LII. For each week of the year, I read a book. This has been a goal of mine for the past few years and I finally achieved it.

Of course, this is an arbitrary number. Does it mean I read more than in previous years? What about the average length of books? Consider Saramago and the works of poetry I read. Do I need to count pages? Number of words? But this isn't about nit-picking. It's about setting a goal and reaching it.

I like this reading goal in that it forces me to read wildly and without precision. I can read a wider range of works when I force myself to read 52 books. Having this goal in mind means I read more short poetry works and more works of flash fiction and short story collections. I read more non-fiction this year than I've ever read before. I found that sometimes books had to resonate with how I was feeling at the time. Like Lewis's It Can't Happen Here after Trump won the election or finally reading in the Spring Tender Is the Night, which I had purchased at a book fair over five years ago. Some books I couldn't wait to start as soon as I bought them like Known and Strange Things or Speedboat (although I couldn't get into it at first, it really grew on me).

The White Album, complete with front cover falling off, I found at the Logan Square Arts Fest, the same warm day I listened to Ryley Walker and Bill MacKay and found a reissue of the Beastie Boys first EP on on vinyl. Open Books, where I volunteer, provided many serendipitous findings as well, including Road-Side Dog and Written on the Body. Some books I special ordered, like the poetry collection by Danez Smith after I read a poem of his on Buzzfeed of all places.

What Do I Want to Write?

That's always the biggest question, isn't it? And yet, for as many words as I've combined together, through keyboard or pencil or pen, it is still a difficult question to answer. Why do I write? Because I have to, I say, and so say the writers. The philosopher in me has to doubt: and he has to doubt that I actually want to write.

Because I have to doubt anything I think I want.

I can only want what I have been exposed to. I can only think I know what I want based on my experiences, which are based on my circumstances, which alas, I have not entirely decided on my own. /enddigression

One key to understanding what I want to write is understanding what I want (or "want") to read. Lit Reactor had a post today about lazy readers ("lazy fuckers") who are too dependent on Amazon. I am not one of these readers. I thought it curious that the writer of this article assumed their readers all depended on Amazon for their next book purchases as opposed to going to a bookstore. Is this really the state of the book-buying public? Perhaps that shows my own bias: I am fortunate to live in a city with a plethora of stores: one Myopic would be more than enough for a single town, yet I can go months (years?) without having shopped there due to going to other bookstores.

Likewise, I travel, and when I travel, I make it a point to visit bookstores (see: St. Louis / San Francisco).

You find books you never knew you even wanted to read. It's the same with record stores as I've made this point before: you don't know what you really want and being surrounded by all of these possibilities is so much grander experience than relying only on Spotify or Amazon. /enddigression

Cyn Vargas 'On The Way' / Rey Andújar 'Saturnalia'

So.

First off.

There's not really too much of a reason to lump these two books together. Other than the fact that they are both collections of short stories written by authors living in Chicago, put out by Chicago presses, and I finished reading both on the same day. And the settings for both alternate between various locations in Latin America and the United States. Other than that, there's not much of a connection, and I'm writing about them together solely based on my timing of reading them. Let's start with On The Way.

I picked this book up at City Lit about a month ago. I'm always game to try anything Curbside Splendor puts out, even if the epigraph is a Radiohead lyric. But a blurb on the back from Bonnie Jo Campbell meant I would pick it up anyway.

Let's start with this: these stories are not uplifting. They're not always tragic, but they are often heartbreaking. It's not the fact that death always awaits us (it does sometimes), but that more often, bad things happen and the devastation permeates itself in its wake throughout a life; lucky are we who don't have to identify with many of these stories. The protagonists are generally women. They've been abused, they've been cheated on, they've been divorced, they've been abandoned in physical and existential ways. Vargas writes about women young and old, who've experienced a lot and who've experienced a lot of pain. Rarely do they find redemption. In an interview with Kati Heng, Vargas revealed her personal connection with some of these characters, how she identifies with them, and why they need their voices to be heard: "To appreciate the joy, you have to have the pain too. I think I am able to write bittersweet stories because I have lived through it."

Hibernation

Experiment: Take six weeks off of work. Start date: January 19th, 2015.

Objective: Write.

Hypothesis: Failure. Complete and utter failure (in the most optimistic way possible).

Tools: Laptop. Pen. Paper. Various works of already written fiction. Brain.

Procedure:

• Week One: Outside of any emergencies, avoid all social contact. Avoid the news. Sleep a lot. Sleep very little. Writing above all else, even eating. No entertainment, except reading fiction, which is still work. No Twitter. No Facebook. No Netflix. No Groupon. No Skype. No Instagram. No Grubhub. No Spotif...who am I kidding, I'm keeping Spotify, but rocking that private mode.
• Week Two: Keep writing.
• Week Three: Are you deaf? Just. Keep. Writing.
• Week Four: Escape To NYC aka "Where's Waldo" but in Brooklyn. All the museums. All the Chinatowns. All the coffee. All the beer.
• Week Five. Escape to DC.
• Week Six: Recover.
• Week Seven: Reality.

Outcome: ???

I've been thinking about doing this for awhile. The closer it came to actually pulling the plug, the more nervous I got to thinking that I made a really stupid decision. Now that it's finally here, I have to follow through and see what happens. Two recent tweets by two brilliant minds serendipitously boosted my confidence in my decision:

Repeat after me: "Thank you for the invite but I'm gonna stay home and write."

— Sherman Alexie (@Sherman_Alexie) January 5, 2015

It's better to create something that others criticise than to create nothing and criticise others. Play nice everyone. & have a great day :)

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) October 20, 2014

"I went to the woods becuase I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." - Henry David Thoreau (not currently on Twitter)

A couple people have compared this excursion of mine to Thoreau and Walden. It's not quite that intense (pretty sure he didn't have a laptop), and it's only a week as compared to two years. But a week without any human contact must seem pretty bizarre, unrealistic even, especially living in a city. But this is my woods. Sometimes, it's best to revert into oneself, especially for someone who makes it a point to explore these urban woods so entirely and enthusiastically. For now, I want to make writing the essential facts of life, to write deliberately, and to learn what it has to teach.

How does one define human contact? I will still probably keep up with the news. I'll still read books that others have written. I'll listen to music others have recorded. I might even send out an email or two. But as far as physically seeing, touching, or hearing the natural, unelectronically amplified vibrations of sound from another person's mouth, I'll have no contact with any of it.

I read advice for writers constantly. I read about the habits of famous writers. I read the tips from the woman who wrote 90,000 words in six weeks. Have a routine they say; don't have a routine say others. Have word goals. Don't have word goals. Frankly, I don't give a shit about any of it. There is no one way to write or to type. Even Henry Miller's advice is contradictory. I want to conflate writing and typing (Capote be damned). I want to type pages and pages of material that can eventually be sculpted into a final product. And there may never even be a final product. That's a risk I'm willing to take. That all of this could be for nothing.

I just quit working two jobs six days a week, but this will arguably be the hardest work I've ever had to do. Probably because I've told so damn many of you of my plans. Well, make no small plans right? So, bon nuit for now. Time to hibernate (and if you're still reading this far, you can probably bet on catching me at Yonatan Gat at the Empty Bottle on Feb 2nd).

Who Pays Writers?

Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow (1956)

I keep seeing links to this site popping up in my twitter feed. Who Pays Writers? offers writers a chance to anonymously post what websites pay them for pieces, "intended to be informational, not judgmental." In addition to this, we have two points of view of a person who chooses to write for free and that of one who never does. And at the same time, we have two profiles of a day in the life of a freelance journalist in 2013 as well a day in the life of a digital editor at the Atlantic. Finally, an online conversation has been evolving between various people in charge of writer pay rates at well known websites (the Awl, Boing Boing, the Observer, the Atlantic, etc.) and a general discussion of how much a writer should get paid.

As someone with an interest in writing but with no educational background in any form of it (creative or journalistic), I recognize I am already a step behind every other person I have to compete with in either of these fields. I have few connections to people that can support, cultivate, motivate, edit, whatever to my work. Essentially, this is why I have to write for free. Perhaps it is naive on my part, maybe I really am the greatest fucking writer ever and I'm making a huge mistake by not putting myself out there and depriving the world of my unique perspective and keen social wit. Unfortunately, I have little to no ego, so I'm going to assume this is not the case. 

The thing is, I don't really have a problem writing for free right now. I try not to spread myself all over. I could probably have been on a bunch of online publications by now, but I have chosen to stick by a certain few, developing more of a relationship with my editors and fellow writers, instead of jumping from unknown site to unknown site. I think of "Better know nothing than half-know many things" and Badiou's philosophy of commitment and fidelity. 

Perhaps I'm also more patient than I realize. I have time to "make it" as a writer. I have time to go back to school to get a graduate degree. For right now I can work a part-time job that allows me to live in a city that I love, to attend cultural events, to work these writing gigs that aren't entirely without their perks, to take time off to travel, to expand my life experiences before I devote myself entirely to the written/typed word.

I'm also allowed more time before the inevitbale reality of repeated rejection. Right now I am a blank slate, free to explore any silly little ideas that creep into my mind, without a history to remain consistent with (not that I have ever worried about that; "with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do;" not that I believe in a soul; sorry, tangent).

There is no question that we live in a time where there is more written content than ever before, more writers, and more people that think they're writers. I am currently reading A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and she quotes Milan Kundera from Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980): "Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time isn't far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding." That was written in Nineteen-Fucking-Eighty. How prophetic. I want to attain that ability to be so perceptive. Which is part of why I continue to read more than I write. Essentially, I only write in order to read more. Which is why I propose this: somebody pay me to read. It would be much more preferable to writing. I wouldn't have to get into that whole messy business of revealing who I am to the world, exposing my innermost skeletons and shedding light on the darkness that the world inevitably creates in every single human being. I could just read! I wouldn't even need to be paid that much. So let's stop worrying about how much to pay you writers and start worrying how much to pay me, your reader.