book roundup #04: visions accorded to a saintly hermit
reading for january-march 2025
i came stumbling into this new year clueless and off-kilter. unlike last year, i decided to take nothing with me. all i had was the unearned confidence of having lived after i died (i.e. barely survived what i’m colloquially referring to as “the worst year of my life”) because what does it matter? all is grace1. i had no real plans besides to work as much as i possibly could, and to read a dostoevsky novel with my good friend nico.
that’s where my thinking stopped. anything farther would have to be intuited. the dostoevsky novel was a smidge of direction divined from a reading of Tarkovsky’s Time Within Time at the close of last year, but other than that, i’ve been going where the wind takes me. i’m listening to frequencies and the whirring of my ceiling fan. it’s also lent as i’m writing this, so i’ve been off social media (save for work purposes), watching as many bleak old movies as my body can take, and trying to create a hermitage i can actually remain in.
the intuition exercise has been interesting. i’m learning things about my reading habits that i didn’t know before, especially what i’ve neglected. so far, i’ve had 2 main takeaways:
intuition must be practiced with a little wisdom. i’ve already written about my somewhat disastrous encounter with w.g sebald, who, despite being a great writer, did plunge me into a horrific depression i’m still trying to recover from. as much as his work moved and enraptured me in a really terrifying and hopeless sort of way, reading three of his novels in quick succession when i was already fragile was not the greatest idea
i’ve really missed reading non-fiction. over the last couple years, my reading has been 99% fiction, which is fine, because absorbing such a large amount of fiction is how i learned to write on my own. however, as i’m turning to writing more non-fiction myself now, whether that be for publications or personal stuff, i’m realising this is a genre i also need to study. i’m really enjoying not knowing anything and finding myself in awe at the structure of a paragraph, or a turn of phrase.
anyway. book time!
I Can Give You Anything But Love, Gary Indiana
this was the first book i really loved this year, and my first non-fiction Gary Indiana. i’d read Rent Boy while beset by the haze of bereavement last July, and don’t remember a lot about it, but the title of this book was enough to grab me. i laid eyes on it at the Tate Modern gift shop, it was the last copy on the shelf, so obviously i had to grab it and leg it to the cashier.
and then, of course, i didn’t read it for 2 months, until a random day in January when i thought ‘hey, i’m really in the mood to have a kind of bitchy older gay guy in my ear for a little bit’. it was fantastic. i couldn’t put it down. i was morbidly depressed, but on multiple occasions i found myself speeding through my work for the day just so i could shut my laptop early to hang out with gary.
at first, i’ll admit, i was thrown off by the extent of his bitchiness. he can be quite biting, even about people he considers his friends (? a particularly scathing portion on Susan Sontag made my jaw drop), but i found myself coming round to that after a while, for 2 main reasons: 1) whatever the gripe was, he had a point, and the picture he painted was a testament to his incredible eye for detail, which was influenced by 2) his principles. i don’t think that’s something he’d ever admit to in that way, it’s too significant, but nevertheless it’s what i’ll call his ‘fuck-you attitude’ that’s being drawn out. his instinct in writing, as he floats somewhere in the back of his mind as a keen observer, is always to carve away anything that isn’t true or beautiful. those are relative terms, but i realised he was taking a not-entirely-obvious complementary approach to what’s so full and lovely in the films of tarkovsky, who, if you read his diaries, could also be incredibly bitchy. like it’s sincerity pursued with utmost seriousness.
“Events, or a lack of them, have instilled in me an unshakeable sense of utter insignificance. I am too peculiar to figure importantly in anyone’s life, including my own. Even years later, when the idea I exist can be asserted with external evidence — books I’ve published, films I’ve acted in, plays I’ve directed, friends who can confirm my physical reality, passport records of countries I’ve visited, bank statements, dental records, blood test results, psychiatric files, hotel registers, airline ticket stubs, old photos, bales of early writing archived at a major university, and other documentary proof — I will continue to register as a blurry human smudge in my mind’s eye.”
The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy
i swear to god there’s a quote about Mary McCarthy from William Burroughs where he says something amounting to, ‘she’s the closest to me in writing, there’s a spiritual bond to the way we present ourselves’ — except i can’t find it, and i know i didn’t imagine it, so i must ask for your grace and trust at this time.
i picked up this book because i felt stilted and murky, and thought that a lovely book of personal essays in and around florence would be just the thing to break me out of that rut. it’s just that when i opened the book, Mary McCarthy was nowhere to be found. there are barely any ‘i’s in the book, something i eventually took great delight in but at first really threw me off. they were anchored in her and her preoccupations, of course, but she never gave anything else of herself away. that’s how you got to know her, but reading what she found interesting in the curve of a cathedral ceiling, or a minor skirmish in the bloodied history of the republic.
while reading, i was enamoured with the almost academic curiosity she managed to maintain throughout, but in the aftermath, i’m in awe of how she’s neatly scooped herself out of the narrative without leaving so much as a flesh wound. there’s nothing to see here. and it’s not insistent or overdone either, like when you can tell the other person is really hiding something. she believes this. there’s nothing about her that would prove more interesting than florence, and so she becomes a vessel for it. that’s all.
“…everything (i.e all creation) was against Michelangelo — the mountains, from which he tried to draw marble like a dentist savagely pulling a tooth, the rivers, human beings. This is why so many of his works, like Leonardo’s, are unfinished: no particular work would satisfy the magnitude of his ambition. Perfection can be achieved if a limit is accepted; without such a boundary line, the end is never in sight. Desiderio, say, or Mino could finish; Michelangelo could only stop.”
doing stuff intuitively is so fun — it wasn’t until writing this post that i noticed what i enjoyed so desperately about both books (read 2 months apart, mind you) was their insistence on the disappearance or insignificance of their authors, who were more than happy to slip out of the room as soon as you stopped looking. this afternoon, i started bartleby & co., another book about literary silence and stoppages, which is a fun coincidence.
before i let you go, minor housekeeping; i had 3(!) new poems out in the month of march, and they were:
‘through a glass darkly’ in the inaugural issue of bustalk lit (p. 40), one of the first poems i ever wrote which is a bit weird but still very cool that it’s out
‘cranach the elder gets me to chill out’ and ‘the high priestess in reverse’, very recent pieces of writing which were so lovingly given a home in brawl lit by taylor :)
i hope you enjoy reading them, if you do — and as always, thank you for the time you spend reading these! hopefully i’ll be back soon with some actual analysis, and i will see you when i see you2.
a combination of two sentiments: from Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. ("Wherever I go, I carry the grace of having lived after I died. What did I do to deserve that? Nothing. That's what makes it grace." & “What does it matter? All is grace.”)
cover img is a screencap from Naked Lunch (1991), dir. David Cronenberg