It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?
I honestly don’t understand how people can read as much as they do. Certainly I’m aware of the ways I can make myself seem erudite despite taking a sort of dim sum approach to reading, especially non-fiction and more austere, canonical fiction: The first bit of an Anne Carson novel, or the first part of The Wretched of the Earth, or a particular Mark Fisher essay. There are people who can consume all of a book and digest it, synthesize it, and I am not one of those people. Or maybe those people are like me, and like me it would take just one incisive question to drop the whole façade like an old movie set just missing Buster Keaton.
I try to make peace with this deficit. To begin with, the ADHD that riddles me complicates reading as a mechanical act, but past that I’m excitable, and that’s the real trouble. I only read the introduction to Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and almost immediately I am captivated by a specific idea (in that case, the interpretation of the Siren song being promised news of home, rather than a magical/sexual seduction) and that’s all I need, I’m full to bursting, I can’t continue until I figure out how to use this one thing in a way that interests me.
So there are gaps everywhere. Fanon? I know and believe his conception of the “colonized intellectual” but I could speak about Wretched of the Earth as though that were Fanon’s key contribution, rather than one point in a constellation of critical thought. I’m off considering the knots of betrayal that subsist in having to live comfortably under colonial power. Luckily for me I don’t like to put myself in positions where I try and represent what Fanon’s point in writing was. I’ll be lazy but I’ll stop at being irresponsible, if I can.
For a time I was reading reactionary Japanese writing, following the bizarre allure of Yukio Mishima’s distressing, intentional-unintentional alignment of fascist despair and camp (in the Sontag sense, not Wet Hot American Summer, though I probably would watch a version of that movie if it were about self-mythologizing, suicidal partisans). I read only as much of Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows as it took to get something out of it, even as it’s very short. Like Mishima’s work it is a conservative, nostalgic tract, but it is also, like Mishima, half-serious, facetiously valorizing as it does the experience of using the toilet by candlelight, while also saying something poetic and weird and maybe-true about how quality of light informs the imagination (creative, political, creative-political).
Tanizaki believed not only that the quality of shadow in a candlelit room significantly differed from the quality of shadow in an electrically lit room (Tanizaki is, through this, associating candlelight with Japanese tradition, and electricity with European cultural influence), he believed that Japanese architecture, its wood and paper walls, interacted with light in a specific way, a specific confluence of elements. The experience of candlelight in a traditional Japanese room is different from the experience of candlelight in an old Victorian. What’s being lost with the electric lamp is the shadow sculpted by dim light, the volume and substance of darkness which emerges absent the insistent power of electricity.
I attempt to tie up all this ranging thought by shifting my metaphors from food and hunger to light and sight: If I think of my mind as a space, full books feel like intense wattage lamps, but the captivating detail is a candle. I don’t have to worry about the gestalt, about accurately representing the point in all its intensity. Partly because I’m lazy, but also because misunderstanding, and what can be done with it, is always more interesting than understanding, the way that shadows in dim light are more interesting than those in floodlights. Selective reading suits me.
When I’m reading for pleasure, or to be inspired, I’m not interested in being persuaded, or understanding what an artist is trying to do, such that there is the one legitimate perspective on the text and its meaning I am abandoning through my distraction — authors can have understanding for themselves. When I’m distracted, I’m interested in what shiny little baubles I can chip away from the text and reuse, decontextualize and distort for my own purposes in fiction. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m tired of subversion, that way of writing which demands agreement on what a thing is and means before it can be worked with. I take the Irish exit before all is agreed upon.
Is it irresponsible? It is, if you take art as teleological, which is to say, true only where it functions with intention and purpose bestowed by an author, and that bestowing is basically impossible to nail, imo — unfortunately for the Wachowskis, The Matrix spawns a fascist allegory despite their intentions, and that cannot really be helped. A text is only being misused if it is being presented as something intended by its author.
If you don’t care to put words in the mouth of the author, misunderstanding is not misuse. Misunderstanding, partial understanding, is generative. The parts you leave out are shadows, spaces where something else could be, spaces you can fill in to your liking. Duchamp doesn’t care what you’re supposed to do with a urinal, he’s not interested in engaging with urinals-as-urinals. He takes the shape and leaves the function, makes something else. He doesn’t turn the engine over, he siphons out the gas. Can you really rewrite the misogynist myth into a feminist retelling? Does that original text deserve the recognition and respect of a response? You could put flowers in the barrels of guns or you could hammer nails with their butts. “No subversion, only vandalism.”
All of which is to say, misunderstanding (intentional or unintentional) is a new way of seeing something, which is strangeness. And stealing in art is only stealing if you’re using the purloined bit for its intended function (and taking credit for it). In all other respects, when someone tells you that you’ve taken something that’s supposed to be a urinal and misrepresented it, you can say “it isn’t, and I’m not.” I take pleasure in my magpie reading habits nowadays. I’ve got whole closets full of urinals.
My (““)(wow, just learning Substack does not do smart quotes) book came out, an anthology called Mooncalves. I played faster and looser with the release date than I should have, realizing that I had a pretty decent number of preorders and with confirmation that the printing was successful (and how!), there was little obvious reason not to move forward. The less obvious reason was that in all the sturm and drang of moving halfway across the country, I had neglected to do much of any promo for it beyond tweeting. The bookstore I’d wanted to put together an event with closed, and then I moved, and I expected, anyway, that themeless anthologies were romantic, doomed affairs.
But I am nothing if not lucky. The launch has gone, to my lights, exceedingly well. Particular thanks are owed to my old friend Danny Lavery, who has a wonderful Aickman-esque story in the anthology, titled, “Remittance Man”, from which he posted an excerpt on his wildly popular newsletter The Chatner. I was also lucky in that I was able to reach and converse with so many authors even beyond those in the anthology, including Kelly Link, who provided the blurb above. I am starstruck, to say the least. I don’t feel I’ve done anything to deserve all of the generosity I’ve received. Every time a new order comes in it feels like… I’ve already made the thing, and now you want to pay me for it? I’m sorry? I want to say I’m sorry.
In the near future, I’ve got some podcast spots lined up with my lovely writers for readings, trying to get some sort of remote event going with a bookstore despite my cavalier attitude toward release dates. I’m making money (not really, I just functionally consider the money I spent on the book to never have been mine to begin with) enough to invest in the second book from NO Press - a collection of very weird and startling stories from Adam Golaski - and even looking into audiobooks. The ebook version of Mooncalves arrives in March. I am thinking about doing my own writing, again. Things are happening. I have a job that I’m happy with and a house with five (5) animals in it, who demand much but also, deserve much.
I made a decision back in… 2020, was it? That this book was going to happen, knowing that it not happening was not an option. I was ready to suffer for my (““) art, kind of looking forward to it, but that never really happened. Now I have a press! I’m pleasantly surprised.
Obviously, if you haven’t bought the book but want to, I invite you to do so. It is powerful and beautiful, the featherlight burden of my life.
Until next time… read more Chip Delany, would you please?
John