I spent far more time on Twitter last year than I did writing, so I stopped using Twitter in January. I read about the same amount, but without the app to suck out all my productive energy, I could turn my focus back toward creating rather than consuming.
I finished 2022 with Ottessa Mosfegh’s Lapvona, which I read because I felt an obligation from the fiction community to read something current by a writer who creates a respectable buzz and frequent re-visitation of her former work with each new release. But I don’t really like her work. The stories are usually fine, but I find the sentences rather practical and lacking the sort of lusciousness I seek in fiction. That’s really my only criticism of Lapvona: it was too efficient. Does that matter if the story was clear and easy to follow? I’m not sure. Anyway, I started Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti next because the books were both part of the same library hold. A few chapters in and I felt it wasn’t the book I wanted to read at the time. I wanted something rapid and exciting and wondered if I should just read J.M Coetzee instead. I found Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello in a little free library in Bay View and took them both home. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever contributed a book to a little free library, making my way through the neighborhoods a literary leech of the most ungenerous kind. Forgivable on the internet. Shameful in a community. Elizabeth Costello holds a special place in my library, so I anticipate Disgrace will make me want to read his complete works.
My problem is: for the last 4-5 years my New Years resolution has been to have no overdue library books, and every year I fail within the first three months. To push through Strangers however would mean to push through my preferred pattern and reading style. Energetic —> Depressing; Novel —> Collection; Essays —> Poems. By reading Strangers, I would begin 2023 by addressing the root cause of my greatest borrowing failures: breaking this pattern preference.
I can’t be alone here. Are there really people who can work down a list of books without reordering or redirecting their focus based on the tone set by the book before? I call bullshit. It’s like making a playlist of all your favorite songs with a total disregard for order. Playlist attentiveness is the bare minimum of self-expression and I feel very strongly about this.
Thirty pages into Disgrace, I went back to Strangers I Know, which turns out to not be a novel at all, but embellished memoiric vignettes about an intellectual and multicultural life. Here I am, sticking to my resolutions. The good news is today I found out my local library has waived all overdue fees. Good news for me, a person with outstanding library fines in at least 3 states. How cute was it that the library still had my information on file from when I obtained my first library card, circa 1996?
Anyway. Strangers was not so much a balm to Lapvona, but it was a form I have enjoyed reading in the past. I am thinking in particular of two distinct but similar sounding books: Flights (Olga Tokarczuk) and The Art of Flight (Sergio Pitol), both of which embrace the vignette format and genre blending between fiction and history. Sergio Pitol was once the Mexican ambassador to Czechoslovakia. I Googled “what does an ambassador do” because I had only a vague idea of the job. Not as exciting as it sounds, unless you’re an ambassador between two countries at odds. One summer, I served as a teaching assistant for gifted and ambitious high school students who travelled to New York and DC to take classes on a specific topic that many hoped would lead to a career path, or at least a better college application to the Ivy Leagues. In DC, I accompanied a few classes to the Global Responsibility to Protect center, where grim individuals in suits discussed how to be an effective ambassador for the United States, a protector of the world while pushing paper. During the field trip, I could not picture myself ever, let alone in my junior year of high school, having the ambitions to do something as altruistic and globally-minded as become an ambassador or work for the GRP. I can only be a lower-level ambassador, and that is to a fictional world, or a to fictional version of the self that incubates inside a private reading practice. I can be an ambassador for literary delinquents.
My other resolution this year is to stop having ambitions. In the spirit of honest reflection, I will tell you this: I have spent the last few years of my once-flourishing life languishing. I have lost big support structures, disassembled reachable milestones, and had to redirect many energies spontaneously. I have been looking for a path out of this hedge maze, taking pages from thinkers who have articulated branching problems out of the larger problem:
“Even when you get what you want, you can’t have what you want. Even the best relation, the one that deserves the optimism you attach to it, can turn out cruelly when conditions beyond your or any dog’s control suddenly cleave your confidence about the scenes of increasing austerity beyond the one here that stretches out infinitely into aesthetic time […] there is so much experimental suturing to be tried and so much confidence to be maintained, but because there is so much there is optimism that sitting in the situation will allow more of a flourishing.” -Lauren Berlant
I am sitting in a situation to allow for the flourishing to return to me at 33, with no big finished writing projects of which to be proud, no academic career in the humanities, and no tangible grasp of my “audience” or “brand” as a writer. All of these goalposts I planned to meet in the cloudy pursuit of artistic relevance have eluded my grasp. It is the product, I believe, of too much emphasis on ambition and not enough on discipline, pattern, and grit. This year I have a will to change, but once more I grow concerned that this ambition I harbor that is not braided with the self-control I desire to possess. And I felt this in an acute sense while reading Strangers I Know.
Although Pitol’s Art of Flight is more personal, Tokarczuk’s Flights was more interesting. Strangers I Know falls somewhere on the line between making an investment in the narrator’s journey through self analysis and succumbing to the lulling, distant feeling I slip into when reading personal vignettes. The setting contributed to both my sense of investment and my sense that I was only finishing the book because I started it. It’s set in my time. Not just today time, but nearly the entire time I’ve lived. The writer/narrator was born in the late 80s and has experienced culture beat by beat nearly in step with my own experiences. And while I typically do not like reading novels set in the current time period—it makes me feel like I should be living in the world instead of reading an account of it—I found the narrator relatable for having the unique brand of neurosis that befell girls who went through an extended shithead phase in the early 2000s, fell in love with moody boys and prized a lack of self-direction. Reading this novel, at times, convinced me that I have something called Borderline Personality Disorder. At the time in the book the narrator ponders this self-diagnosis, I was at the end of a week-long fog where I felt like the core of my identity resembled a pile of sawdust, so the mirror image in the text served as a cathartic justification for the kind of pitiful ongoing examination artists subject themselves to. But I’ve become less interested in this type of literary solipsism than I once was, where the infinite paths of life and endless shifting of ones personality cohere in an insecure reflection that seems always to speculate on the kind of person one would be if any of us truly lived an authentic life. It’s a thought that certainly makes me uncomfortable.
“I didn’t inherit a single political thought from my family; what I inherited instead was a jumble of aspirations, self-pity, kabbalah, sloth, and rage that can assume the ideological orientation that’s most convenient and readily available. A sad, useless genetic dowry that helped me predict Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—like I come equipped with sensors that allow me to anticipate collective agitation[.]”
In the end, I closed the book with an affirmation of my belief that only one of us in a relationship of any kind can be neurotic and obsessed with beauty. I also had time left in January to start and finish more books, and Strangers I Know awakened my old familiar pattern: I did not want to read a book that resembled reflection, a “working through” of self-continuity during a shift in adulthood. I needed next to read a novel with actions other than what happens inside the mind, which I have many times used as a surrogate for tension and conflict in my own writing.
And last, welcome to my Substack. Without Twitter, I have energy to engage in other interests, one of which is a faux-public discourse about thoughts about reading and about writing. Keeping a record of what I read and think may ultimately amount to nothing but a series of exercises in thought, under-baked, with momentary bursts of clarity regarding culture, artifacts, and the self. Direction, in my practice, often reveals itself over time.
A note about the name: id/Id/ID is meant to reflect the id, the primal ego; Id, a butchering of “I’d” as in “I should/I would/I could” combinations of regret and ambition; ID, as in identification, which this document is concerned with only to the extent of using books and small philosophies to identify issues of interest. I pledge to not make this all about me.