Much of current reading is infill: I read before I write; I read when I can't sleep; I read in the bath. The rest of the time I am weeding, managing the days, cleaning and replacing. There's an important small pile to the left of my stove: two books by Lena T who stayed with us last year, Anne Carson's Plainwater, an article in the New York Review of Books about classical music, and how it could be the answer.
Some critics have held out hope that classical music, whose decline mirrors the decline of the utopian imagination, might play some part its recovery as well.
The other piece in this pile is another article from the New York Review of Books, by Merve Emre, 'The Illusion of the First Person'. I re-read it every week or so. Tonight I am not ready to read it again. Some pieces you only need to know they're there. Like Thomas Browne, whose capital letters for Elements and Legalities, continue to affect my writing though I haven't read him for many years. Or JD Salinger, whom I am re-reading, the italics of his speech, helpless emphases of family life, endemic conversation we need to rehearse.
No comments :
Post a Comment