When I started this newsletter, I loosely intended to write about each book I had read in 2023 and dedicate an email each month to the next in the series. But I have been reading too quickly and writing too slowly and now have a backlog of books to discuss and too few drafts to build around each one. Plus, I didn’t love every book I’ve read so far, and I don’t like to discuss art or literature I have lukewarm opinions about unless there are tangible benefits involved. I don’t care what most people think about my taste, and trashing popular art only makes most people sound like assholes. So, here are some books I have read so far that I did like, and what I liked about them. If you don’t care skip to the picture.
Tao of Humiliation—I admit I bought this book for the title. I’ve been ordering directly from small presses lately because it seems this is the only way I can stay somewhat abreast of current literature. Big 5 publisher books and chart toppers have rarely appealed to my sensibilities, despite attempting to read a few each year. I tried this year to read This is How You Lose the Time War (because of Bigolas Dickolas, of course) and about 15 pages in I hadn’t found a reason to continue. This is not to knock the book, which has made many people excited and fulfilled as readers, but it certainly wasn’t the book for me. Anyway, Upton’s characters are often humiliated—by their wants, by their circumstances, by those they keep closest—and as the collection title promises, often find a tenuous peace in their lives as a result. In a story about a student who sleeps with a professor (a big theme in what I’ve read this year…Disgrace, Stoner, The Wife) the professor treats her like a feral cat, tells her to scram, tries to influence her opinions on Keats. “You ought to develop and imagination, he said. Start small. At least lie a little. Lying is a start. Just don’t lie to me. Remember this: Great liars in history, they’re countless. Tacticians, strategists, managers of any land beyond the size of an acre. Liars, all of them.” Isn’t that a fantastic bit of dialogue? God I love it when characters are terrible people. It makes the messes in real life so much more bearable.
Break Every Rule—I was introduced to Carole Maso in graduate school, and I was on a different tip then that prevented me from really appreciating her style and sensibilities. I found in this collection concepts I have also considered as a writer. This collection should be required for everyone in their 20s who cares about art. It captures early artistic grappling in hot, sharp observations. Sometimes these are clumsy and easily disputed, sometimes they smack of the unbearable entitlement young educated artists exude in their youth, but that feeling is a brief reaction before “my heart swells with forgiveness.” In her essay Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose, Maso writes: “The novel’s capacity for failure. Its promiscuity, its verve. Always trying to attain the unattainable. Container of the uncontainable. Weird, gorgeous vessel. Voluptuous vessel.” I love art about failure, but I never considered before that a novel itself is at extreme odds, that the many ways novels fail or could fail are overlooked by both writers and readers. (Maybe not by critics thank you very much.) I have read many novels with what seem like small failures, and those have been quickly forgiven and forgotten. Or, I attempt to read novels that fail immediately, laudation notwithstanding. I think well-read readers have a sense for novels without any failure, the so-called “perfect novel” that occupies the top position for each individual (i.e Housekeeping).
Maso writes about reinventing art and writing with passion familiar to artists who spent their early days in frenzied and sometimes graceless creative mode. From her essay The Re-introduction of Color: “The hairline cracks already beginning to show through the college years. The stress of wanting to know what to do. The burden of talent completely unrealized, utterly nebulous, just a pressing feeling, nothing even close to words on a page yet. And that strange counterforce coming from almost everywhere. The message—leave that all behind—before she ever embraced, or tried—leave it behind.” Boy howdy, I felt that.
The Wife—I’m late to this book, I know. I saw the movie a few years ago after meeting Meg Wolitzer at a summer workshop in Southampton, where she was wry and humorous and very nice to us lesser writer folk. This library book came with me on the month long sailing trip (more on this below) a week before it was due back, resulting in fines so high, I couldn’t borrow another book until I paid them off. Each new year I make the resolution to have fewer overdue library books, and each year I fail to hold this resolution around the April/May calendar mark. But enough about my debts—knowing how this book ended did not distract from my enjoying The Wife because the writing was toothed and glittery. I wish I had written down some sentences in the notebook I keep to record my reading progress, but I didn’t, and the library has my picture on their board of Problem Borrowers in the sorting room, so you’ll need to do your own work here.
Other books of note include All of Us Together in the End, which is tender, funny, philosophical, and made me cry several times during a sail from Milwaukee to Chicago; The Ok End of Funny Town; My Manservant and Me, which I picked up in June from the library’s Highlighting Pride table, which later struck me as a little edgy for Wauwatosa; Stoner; A Philosophy of Emptiness; The Collected Works of John Berger; Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Sailing. Currently, I’m reading All The Pretty Horses, because I recommended it to Eric (my Girl Noir collaborator) with the footnote that I had yet to read it (but would not recommend Blood Meridian as a first McCarthy novel unless you have a strong constitution. It is not a beach read), and then he read it and recommended it back to me. I’m also reading one of those classic self-help books because I’m 34 and still so very dumb.
Let’s talk about boats. I recently returned to Milwaukee after a month on the sailboat, which sounds glamorous but is more like RV camping than yachting. We (Justin and I) crossed over to the Michigan side and lived on the hook (on anchor) in harbors up the coast. This is the second year in a row for this trip and overall things were much smoother from a technical and practical perspective. It’s funny that the first thing people ask when I tell them I’ve just returned is “Were you in any scary situations?” Yes, absolutely. Not to be dramatic but on August 26th 2023 I thought I was going to die. We set out from Frankfort to Ludington mid morning anticipating 15-18 knot winds from the north—perfect for sailing south on a run (when the wind is directly at your back). Our sailboat, Nacreous, is most comfortable when traveling 7-7.5 knots through water. She goes faster when she heels, but if the passage is longer than a few hours, we typically opt for comfort over speed and adjust the sails accordingly. That morning, we took the dog to shore to pee and to tip the marina dudes who looked the other way when we snuck into the showers every few days. Among them was Mark, whose brand of chillness I’ve observed in seasoned sailors who believe it to be the most beautiful thing in the whole wet world.
“Boy, I bet she can really pick up speed,” he said, looking at our boat floating in the bay. “If you sail on a reach and that hull dips down, I bet she just screams through the water.” He said this quietly, as if in awe. He held out his hand and moved it forward like a sailboat heeling and went shhhhhh. He stood his hand upward. “Then you just wave at all the other boats you leave behind.” I thought about this during my shift at the helm, handling the boat at a comfortable 6 knots while I sailed her around fishing boats trawling off the coast between Frankfort and Arcadia. Periodically, I turned to watch the black clouds from the north creep up on our stern.
Some specs for context, and in case there are any sailors reading this newsletter: Nacreous is a 1984 38ft Catalina built with a tumblehome hull that bulges out at the waterline. Imagine a marshmallow being squished until the sides curve out beyond the top, rather than slowly taper or continue in a straight line. This design means the interior has slightly more space and deeper cabinets than boats with other hull designs, but the real benefit is in the way she sails. The hull acts as a counterweight when underway, since, according to physics, the faster the wind pushes the boat, the more weight is required to keep it from capsizing. A fun comparison I heard on the PBS stated that a sail is essentially an airplane wing on its side, and so follows the same principle of generating lift as a wing. The keel—the fin attached to the bottom of the hull—is also a wing, accepting force from the opposite direction of the sail, thus maintaining balance and momentum. The only way a sailboat submerges in the water is if one force overpowers the keel, which happens when strong gusts of wind influence the sail and well-timed waves or swells influence the balance. So on the afternoon of August 26th when the winds reached 25 knots with gusts registering at 30 with a full headsail unfurled, Nacreous clocked a top speed of 10.9 knots through water—the fastest we’ve ever pushed this vessel. Not only were the winds powerful enough to break hull speed, but the swells must have been between 8 and 10 feet tall. Each time she reached the top of a swell, inertia surfed her down at these forceful speeds, snapped the dinghy line taught and crashed the bow into the valley where the swell we had just ridden charged on. Our only option was to reef the headsail, reduce the towline slack when the dinghy rose above our heads, and muster up a sailor’s constitution until we turned the southern point.
Somewhere in the space of those 2 hours, I must have examined and revoked all my favorite vices and made a hundred promises to become a better person. I’d stop drinking, flirting, procrastinating, eating unhealthy foods, falling into unhealthy patterns. I’d tell my family and friends I love them more often, be more honest and forgiving of myself. I would confront conflict with peace and volunteer for noble organizations. I’d do whatever it took to arrive in Ludington safely, let down the anchor in the bay shared with the Badger and Spartan passenger ferries, and feel the boat at a standstill again. All the while we sailed down the Michigan coastline, I whipped from “Oh God we’re gonna die” to “Oh God this place is beautiful” without much of a transition between the two extremes.
We did make it to Ludington. Our blood was pumping and our wits reached their end, but we managed to sail into the harbor and turn the boat around a few times in an attempt to furl the sail without snapping any fishing boats in half. We exchanged angry words through clenched teeth and shouted expletives at boatfuls of fishermen who cut into our right-of-way. But by 4 o’clock the anchor was set and I had begun the task of righting everything in the cabin that had pitched to the ground or became otherwise jostled during the passage. I held out my hand and observed the jittery movements as if they belonged to somebody else. So: handfuls of white cheddar Smartfood hoovered into my thousand-yard stare and an emergency half a Xanax. I felt more calm within the hour but I also had a stomach ache from too much popped corn.
As of this writing I have not abandoned all my vices and character flaws. But I do think since then I’ve made progress in areas of self-love that have traditionally been difficult to attain as a deeply critical person. Coming face-to-face with scary situations has that effect, even if our lives were never really in danger throughout the ordeal. Like anyone my age I have been in few life/death situations, but what’s more common is I have been in many, many more chillin’/examinin'-life-in-cold-light situations. I think about death a lot, unfortunately. But I assume it’s because I think about life a lot, specifically how beautiful it is and how easy it is to be happy if you adopt a few principal reference points for observing the world. Those too are born of death—dying ideas and identities. Enlightenment is attained, in part, by the recognition that one is living inside an ever-shifting koan.
“The problem—I’ve said it before, I’m beginning to say it again—is figuring out how to occupy the time you’re alive. It’s better to occupy it than not to occupy it, as sometimes it can be so captivating that you forget death, this narrow margin, this river, this trickle of water. Life is restricted to life. How can we convince ourselves?” -Marguerite Duras
I believe if you are equipped with a discerning mind and a heart that is still capable of goofing around, you can pass through even abrupt and unwelcome self-examinations without losing too much footing w/r/t your own convictions. I don’t know. You tell me. I’ve only been sailing for a few years, but I suspect if anyone is right about anything in this sport, it’s that good sailors are not born, but made, their psychology shaped by resilience and terror and the inexplicable beauty within the sublime. If you recognize the entwined relationship between human logic and natural chaos, I suspect you’re in good shape to survive such moments.
Thank you for making it to the end of my now apparently seasonal newsletter. Tell me especially about your self-optimization and how you stopped being dumb. Send emails, DMs, comments, whatever. As part of my litany of near-death bargains, I do remember vowing to have more conversations on the phone with my friends. I will call you while I cook dinner and tell you all about the sweater I bought that makes me look like an uncircumcised penis (paid subscribers only).