the opposite of bloodless

I read because I am unsatisfied with my own brain

I have no burning desire to contribute to the jaw-ache conversation around a talented author who has attained deserved success and exceptional wealth and — as seems inevitable if you are a celebrated and symmetrical young woman in the arts — levels of over-saturation and over-critique that are, in my view, counterproductive to the flourishing of a living literary culture as well as my own personal brain cells. I look forward to reading the author’s new novel, which I imagine I will consume in the way I have consumed her other work: in a few sittings, with attention and pleasure. I will then, I imagine, move on, as I have from her other work: primarily unchanged, but appreciative. This is an acceptable experience from a work of art, and the one that I have most often. It is an accomplishment in itself, difficult to achieve. It is largely ridiculous to hold every book up against its level of success, instead of holding it against the level of feeling it cultivates in us. (I of course have been ridiculous in this way plenty of times myself. But it is transparent and silly, and a little bit sad.)

What I want to write about is something else, something for which I do not hold this author accountable or even properly emblematic, but which the airy mania she induces has enforced (likely against her own beliefs, if not her own interests). It is the general bloodlessness that marks the baseline of our Most Discussed Books and the conversations around them: the proliferation of works populated (and written and discussed) by blank-faced white women whose primary posture is a kind of knowing coolness, or a preemptive defensiveness in lieu of daring. This affect has, due in part to the high-profile works in this tone, become the starting point, the default, the most-echoed voice. (You’d be right to point out that defensive, unsmiling white men have made up most of literary culture, for most of time. This does not, I think, alter my point.)

The work of this archetype is often sparse and smart. It is concerned with Making An Intelligent Point, the way a twenty-something might be at a cocktail party. Sometimes this genre hinges on an architectural gimmick, and those tend to Make An Intelligent Point, too. I call these works bloodless simply because they (and the conversations they engender) do not pulse: instead, what runs through it all is an undercurrent of placid, contemplative consequencelessness, an assurance that the sword hanging overhead is for decorative purposes only—and in any case, ignore it, it won’t ever drop. I read plenty of the work produced in this vein, and I often enjoy the feeling it confers, the way I enjoy strolling through the barer wings of the Art Institute. There is real pleasure and achievement there. It can reflect something worth reflecting. And sometimes it’s just what my addled brain can take.

But then I move on. And the reality is that I did not come to reading with a desire to move on. I came to be cut into, or at least someway changed. I realize that sounds ~dramatic~, but the impulse, I think, is not masochistic, just human. I am discontent with the state of my mind, and I would like it to be otherwise, at least for a period of time. That is why I read, and why — when I write — I write. In general, I watch television to experience pleasure that leaves me the same. But I read in the hopes of something else. I think that beneath the layers of commerce — beneath the frenetic need, in an almost-entirely-commodified creative culture, to be seen tweeting about the right galley in the same way you’d wear the right pair of shoes or, I guess, own the right NFT — this desire is still there in most of us. I think it’s why we still put in the effort, when there are so many easier ways to be entertained.

Now: I personally have not written a book. And so I can appreciate that part of my frustration with a literary culture populated by these cool, well-iced novels stems from my own frustrations with myself, and an Altoid-sized portion of envy, as a treat. Still, I think a meaningful part of it comes from a feeling of perpetually unmet hunger, the irritating realization that those of us left unsatisfied will have to get up and cook our own meal. What I want is work that is uncareful and hot-blooded, books that are ambitious and self-incriminating and full of risk. I want writing that wills its way into being, like life, rather than representing the logical, vocational conclusion of an over-educated literature graduate’s quest to be published. (If this reads like a dig at any writer you have in mind, it is also a dig at myself.) I want elegance as an incidental outcome instead of a primary target. When I read, I want to be compelled forward by something greater than ease.

This work exists and often thrives. Among many other touchstones littered around my desk and brain, living and dead, I have most recently read and re-read and over-underlined Pola and Kiese and Elizabeth, Mieko and Valeria and Anthony, and always Clarice, always Jamaica. If there is a word for the opposite of bloodless, they are it. But I am greedy! I want more. I want these to be the inescapable conversation. I want these to set the tone.

Whenever I am stuck and glum in my own efforts, I realize that I have been sitting at the keyboard literally holding my breath, approaching the work as though it is a staid cocktail hour, and I may soon be asked for an accounting of my credentials. (An effective psychoanalyst might pull up an intimate book party I attended in my early twenties, invited out the blue by someone who had read a few of my essays. This felt like the most exciting thing that could possibly happen to me. I wore black, drank champagne. An impossibly chic older woman and I were having a fantastic conversation when she abruptly stopped and asked my name, and what I did, and then asked for my last name, my representation, my publisher—none, none—before squinting and ending the conversation on the spot. I later learned she was the director of a major London publishing house. I did not know this at the time. I had been enjoying the chat.) I realize in those stunted moments that I am writing (or not writing, as it were) out of a completely cursèd(!) and suffocating desire to stay a step ahead of any such humiliation, a desire to come across as cool and clever and knowing, a desire to go down smooth, a desire to avoid even the potential for ridicule or unseemly exuberance or shame. A desire to step over the threshold of respectability and legitimacy, where finally—what? The risks will be gone, and I’ll be—what—safe? Of the desires a person can hold these are, I am sure we can agree, among the least interesting. And yet! Look around. How much of today’s writing—in books and online and anywhere else—exists simply for the sake of having been written?

What I want from myself, and from the work that I read—and especially from the work that I review and debate and expend any kind of meaningful energy engaging with—is comfort with mortification, with aggression, with mess. What I want is earned release. Stakes. I want work that alters my perception instead of going along with it—not for shock value’s sake, but because my perception, like yours, is limited and thickly-guarded by the lesser parts of the brain, the parts that merely want to survive within the hierarchy of things as they are. I want, at least, a hairline fracture from my encounters with art, always with the hope that the next book will be the one that tips the balance, cracks it all open, takes something from me for good. Leaves me with something I don’t know what to do with, instead.

Recs:

“They are effusive, insatiable, and of course, enthusiastic. There is so much courage in living that way, though it can be exhausting.” “Social media rewards acquisitive networking, and so the new writing life is conducted at least half in public, with writers in search of their collectives — or perhaps their fans.” “Once she was back in the moment, she remembered that dancing is not something you’ve got. It’s something you have to let get you.” “He remembered this feeling from childhood, the nights he lay paralyzed in his bottom bunk, hardly breathing from fear, convinced that some evil vapor was gathering itself in the silence, gliding soundlessly toward him.” “This is not to say that the pandemic is a good thing, but it’s an opportunity to ask, what if the thing you’re waiting for never arrives?” “You have to have something. If you’re already in a town that struggles the way it does, in a county that struggles the way it does, there has to be something to attract people to want to work there. And a building is just a building, but it’s a start.” “I stopped smoking weed. I looked in the mirror. I ate cherries. I asked a friend out to lunch and we ate chicken salad sandwiches on the wet lawn in front of the Barnard Library. I bought a new pair of shoes. I bought moisturizer. Every day, I felt a little more settled in being alive.” And one from me :-).