Shome Dasgupta's Blog, page 10

Darby Larson, On Reading

"The swine in the page with ink and blank ink on pixels near the idea of the page. Tattoo words into the eyes of pigs and let the page of the idea read ink and let pixels make happen ideas conjuring ink. An ink is an ink while reading is reading swine with ideas. Make happen the swine more in the page with more ink and thread it like ink on pixels near the idea of the page also. Blacksmithed words into skies and let the pages of a billion ideas thread its ink, let pixels make happen ideas with ink. An ink is ink is ink while threading is threading swine with ideas forever. Make happen this time swine in a page with ink and blue and red thread inkpixels near the lawnmown ideas of ideapages. Tattoo artists have your mother's words in their eyes. Your mothers let their page of threaded ideas thread their ink and their pixels and make their ideas like sewn sweaters for winter. An ink is blinked at, thinked at, while threading is threading swine together with sewn ideas and an apple perhaps. Make sentimexperimental music the swinging swine in the page with ink and threaded ink on spines near the idea the book looked at you during. Tattooed its meaning into your cerebrumless swine first, into the eyes, let the page, the idea thread ink and spines make happen ideas blinking like strobe headlights rearview mirrorlooked. An ink is an ink is an ink is an ink is an ink. While threading is threading swine with love. The swine in the metaphor with ink and threaded like red ink on bloody spines of brewmaster witch libraries. The idea of the metaphor. The idea of the tattooed words. Let the metaphor of the idea thread its pig and spines make good hooks, ideas like pigs and forests. A pig is a pig while threading is reading library spines. Make the slaying in the metaphor with the pig and thread a pig with spines near the metaphor again. Words in shapes like double yous and ohs and ares and dees and eses into eyes and let a metaphor of an idea thread its pig shins and spines conjure your imaginary pig. A pig is a big metaphor while threading is threading slayed with ideas. The slaying in the metaphor with pig and picked pigberries on spines near the love story of the metaphor. Let the metaphor of the love story thread its pig in you with hooks the size of mutant swines and spines with love stories concerning you. A pig is you. You while threading and slayed with love stories. Make art later. You, the slayed swine in the metaphor with your lover pig threaded in cerebrums of a billion human readers. Threaded red pig ink on spines near the love story of the metaphor. Make art love story pigs after reading with inspersperation. A pig is a pig is a pig, read and threaded, while reading is threading slayed with love stories."


{ Darby Larson is the author of The Iguana Complex . Recent short fiction can be found at Caketrain , The Collagist , kill author , and Everyday Genius . He is the editor of Abjective .}

Sandra Beasley, On Reading

"As a child, there was a year when my brain stopped processing the images from one of my eyes; I was reduced to monovision, The cause? My opthamologist figured out that I had been trying to read past the point of exhaustion every night--first shutting one eye, then the other, resting each eye for 10 pages at a time. They took away my flashlight. Another time my mother came into my bedroom and discovered graphite marks on the ceiling. Why? I'd been hopping up and down on the mattress, using the point of a pencil to attach a piece of scotch tape to the ceiling. Why the tape? It was supposed to secure a long piece of yarn. Why the yarn? So I could suspend the paperback I was reading over my face. My arms were tired from holding up the book, but I was determined to find out how the story ended.

Reading isn't easy on either spine--that of the book or that of the reader. I sprawl on my belly and prop my chin on my fist. I sit back against pillows. Then I shift the pillows and try again. I lay on my side and lean my cheek to my palm. I turn the pages. I take the papercuts. I love reading, and I've got the aches and pains to prove it. Reading is my only full-contact sport."


{ Sandra Beasley is the author of three books, including Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life (Crown) and I Was the Jukebox: Poems (W.W. Norton). Visit her website here for more information.}

Ellen Meister, On Reading

"I believe in the magic of reading. The escape is real, and there is something like rapture in discovering a thought you've had your whole life but never put to words. That giddy moment of 'Yes!' feels like you've been granted a wish.

And as a writer, there's another side to reading. Every book I pick up—good or bad—has something to teach me about my craft."


{ Ellen Meister is author of three novels, including The Other Life (Putnam 2011). To learn more, please visit her website at ellenmeister.com .}

Tom Williams, On Reading

"I'm moving, and that means I'm boxing up books, making tough decisions on what to keep and what to leave outside my office door with a FREE BOOKS sign taped above the piles. A lot are easy to toss: textbooks and duplicates and classics that bored me or I've been meaning to read but have realized I'm not going to get to and besides if I really want to I can look them up on Google Books. The ones I'm keeping, though, are those by friends and those by mentors, and those by writers so dear to me it's as if I've never known a time when I wasn't reading them (Charles Johnson, Philip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Clarice Lispector, Graham Greene). I'll shove them all in a U-Haul box and seal it up, wanting to get this onerous task out of the way. But invariably, my hand, as if on its own, will pause when I pull something from my shelves. And I'll stare at the title, recalling not only the wondrous contents of the book itself but the circumstances, places, and times when I read and reread it. This time it was Mark Harris's Bang the Drum Slowly, a book I'd been thinking about a lot lately, a book I've cherished for decades, which I've wished I'd written and tried too often to rewrite. And I realize again, something I've known forever, that I was a reader first, before I even wanted to be a writer, and that what made me want to write, most likely, was a desire to keep company with people like Mark Harris--whom I never met yet whose heart and mind I feel I know. After that, I stuffed, neatly, carefully, every book into a box. I couldn't leave any more behind."


{ Tom Williams is the author of The Mimic's Own Voice , which was published this year by Main Street Rag Publishing Company . His stories, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, most recently in Barrelhouse, Booth, The Collagist, RE:AL and Slab. An associate editor of American Book Review , he is the incoming Chair of English at Morehead State University.}

A D Jameson, On Reading

"I used to have lots of concerns about reading, I felt a lot of anxiety, when I was in college. I felt that I hadn't read enough. I'd buy books compulsively back then, thousands of titles. Some I read. More than a few I never got to. And even the ones I did read, I mostly read long ago, and now have forgotten. (Although I tend to take pretty good notes.)

I eventually rid myself of this anxiety, or most of it. My life goes on, regardless of what I've read. Or haven't read.

And reading new books leaves me less time for rereading. And reading at all leaves me with less time for going to movies, or listening to music, or visiting museums, or walking, or cooking, or working out, or dancing, or having sex.

And no matter how many things I've read, and will go on to read, I'll die without having read all that much, in the grand scheme of things. So it's better to make use of what I have read, whatever's at hand.

I feel the same way about movies and music and visual art. About everything, really.

Though I understand now (or I think that I understand) what I was so anxious about back in college. It was not not having read all that much: it was not knowing all that much about books. I didn't know who was who, so to speak, or what was what. If somebody told me, 'Thomas Pynchon's new novel is coming out next month,' I didn't know what to make of that fact; I couldn't use it. (When somebody did say that to me, in 1996, I borrowed Mason & Dixon from the library, read the first ten pages, returned it. It wouldn't be another two years till I read a full book by him.)

(And I've still never finished reading V. Nor his two newest ones, although I looked at both, purchased one.) (But why did I buy it? Out of some sense of obligation?)

I do enjoy reading very much. These days, I read more and more online. I read a few blogs, occasionally, mainly political ones. I read lots of film reviews. And articles on the card game Magic: The Gathering, of which I'm a fan.

I like reading magazines and newspapers—for instance, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, which I steal when I can (I love doing the crossword). And the Chicago Reader and the Onion, which are both free. And the British Film Institute's journal Sight & Sound, which I have been reading for over ten years now, and which I joyously purchase every month (it costs $9.99 exactly, no tax).

I read lots of poetry, a few poems every day. I reread my favorite ones over and over: poems by Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Lorine Niedecker, Philip Larkin… Plus song lyrics—especially ones by Morrissey, my hero.

As for books, sometimes I read a whole bunch in a row, and then don't read any for several months. I often start books and fail to finish them, or wind up skimming them. I'm reading right now:

• The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara (I'm almost done);
• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (I just started; this is reread);
• Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown (I greatly enjoyed The Da Vinci Code);
• Lion in the Valley, by Elizabeth Peters (I may not finish this one);
• The Zapp Gun, by Philip K. Dick (He's one of my favorite authors; I'd like to read everything he wrote).

I like reading several books at once; it helps to show their individual structures. I also reread books a lot, in whole and in part. That helps me to see their structures, too. (I really like structure.)

That said, it's good to read very widely, as broadly as possible. And to read about books: where they come from, who their authors are, what others have chose to write about them. Indeed, it might even be more important to know about books than to actually read them. (I am a disciple of Pierre Bayard.)

I like reading best while riding the train, or staying up very late at night, reading a book straight through. (I often do this while on vacation.)

To a very large extent, what I have read, and what I find I most enjoy reading, is arbitrary. My dad owned a lot of Ian Fleming novels, and a lot of Kurt Vonnegut novels. My mom had a lot of children's books. I read them all, because they were there. I also read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and J.R.R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander. And to this day, I adore mystery novels and spy thrillers, and science-fiction and fantasy novels, although I rarely read them. (I love the idea of them more than anything; I love those genres.)

I also, while still a child and a teen, read thousands of comic books—more comic books than anything else, I'd guess. Mostly issues of Uncanny X-Men and G.I. Joe; I got hooked when my grandmother bought me a Transformers comic; I read it to tatters.

But why those things? They were what was around. I could have just as easily fallen in love with Westerns and romance novels. Or technical user manuals. Had I grown up around those things.

When I allow myself today to dream about reading, when I fantasize, 'Tonight I will draw a hot bath and sit there as long as I'd like, reading,' I often picture myself reading comic books. They've given me the most pleasure."


{ A D Jameson is the author of the novel Giant Slugs (Lawrence and Gibson) and the prose collection Amazing Adult Fantasy (Mutable Sound). Adam is also a video artist, performer, and soon to be Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In his spare time, he contributes regularly the group literary blog Big Other . For more information, visit his website here .}

Michael Kimball | Us

Michael Kimball's Us connects the powerful forces of love and death through the process of dying, and the book, itself, is a being, breathing life into the reader and taking life away from the reader. What happens when your loved one must live in a hospital? What would you do? How would you react? What happens when your loved one has only a bit of time to live? What would you do? How would you react? Kimball creates a world which silently, and sadly, asks these thought provoking questions--these questions that float and drift around as ghosts in the brain. This is a story of a husband and wife and their love for each other. But it's not as simple as that. There is this gentility and softness and purity that becomes some kind of being, and this being, by the end of the book, is us. It's love. It's death. It's sadness. It's happiness. It's hands. It's legs, and heads, and beds. It's clocks--it's boiling water.

The author provides a series of concrete images, but at the same, because of the depth and emotion and isolationism behind these descriptions, there is a surreal quality--a silent and lonely voice combined with hope and memories and passion. And these dreamlike tones can be found both at the hospital and at the couple's home. For example:

I whispered things into her ears so that she would remember how to talk and remember me and the things that we did together. I would say that we were going for a walk when I moved her legs and I would say that we were holding hands when I held onto her hands. I would tell her that was she was taking a bath in our bathtub. I would tell her that she was sitting up in a chair or looking out the window or brushing her hair. (58-59)

There is a gap here in what is actually happening and what is going on in the narrator's head, and it is in this gap where the sadness and the love exist--the dichotomy of dreams and reality. This same sadness and love can also be found when the husband and wife go back home:

But my wife wasn't getting any better anymore for those days that we were back home. She began to forget how to live in our house or with me anymore. She forgot what things were or what they were for. We made labels for the refrigerator and the food inside it, for the doors to the kitchen and our bedroom and the bathrooms, for the things that she used in the bathroom, and for the couch and the chairs and the other places where she could sit down. We wrote instructions out for the things that we used around our house--the telephone and the television, the microwave oven and the stove, the toilet and sinks. (93-94).

Again, in this gap, the reader sees the space between the normality of home life and the life of husband and wife coping with death and dying. These small actions, these little motions which take little thought in everyday life become a struggle. It is through these attempts to overcome these obstacles, the fragility, and, the wonder of love grows and grows, and it grows so much that by the end of the book, there will be dampened pages and salt.






Us
by Michael Kimball
$14.95
180 pages
ISBN 978-0615430461
Tyrant Books , 2011

j/j hastain, On Reading

"Reading as projection of sound--literal individual projection of one's voice into space. We do this because we can't make opera backwards (the voice swallowed inward)--I am saying what sweet gift and necessity, this projection. The auditory experience of sound emanating by way of our volition. The confidence we exhibit. A way to be both exact (expression) and exposed (expression in public)--

Also, reading as relation—a sweet inversion to projection, but not an opposite. The elation occurring as accrual in a solitude. The way we take in each other's data and magnetize that data to our cells—to our ever upcoming bodies. I am saying that combination is how we become future versions of ourselves, and to say that this happens without the relation of each other is a fallacy. You write your book. I open your book and eat there. Morph there. Graft there. I tear the pages from your book and bury them with pages from another's book. Then it rains. The soil compacts and tightens what once existed as space between our pages. I am saying we become progressive-we, this way. Through activisms related to our relational reading. Reading with the intent to fuse—for the sake of new profundities."


{ j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with hir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous full-length, cross genre works, chaps, and artist's books: the ulterior eden , autobiography of my gender , prurient anarchic omnibus , we in my Trans , asymptotic lover// , our bodies....}

Marthe Reed, On Reading

"There is reading and then there is reading. To escape—stress, overwork, crazy life—reading a certain kind of novel takes me out, away, elsewhere. The fruits of sheer pleasure: Terry Prachett's mad, parodic Disc World, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: 'You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it….From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.' Elizabeth's fiercely righteous indignation, Austen's glorious syntax, extending and extensive, the commas stringing together clauses, its delicious formality—disapprobation!

To read, rather, not seeking escape but a way into the words themselves, I want stillness all around me, a quietness into which the language enters slowly, shifting its way through conscious and unconscious, unfolding its sinuousity, its stutters, its musics: 'If the window was an assertion of injustice nonetheless / If a listener is uncertain &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp (face the glass) / If the interior is a preoccupation / If there are events but first and last are meaningless' (Laura Mullen's Dark Archive) – the language drawing me wandering/wondering into the questions and possibles it proposes.

Or, Will Alexander's Compression and Purity:

The horizon scrawls itself as interior distillation
as interminate terminology
as floating ocular ravine

it remains
a parallel radiophony
a flashing sun in phantom waters
being aquatic in exhaustive sonar kingdoms

like exhausted solar feathers
parallel and subsumed

The images, always already other, reintroduce me to the world I inhabit – 'floating ocular ravine…like exhausted solar feathers.' Reading is an occasion, insists on activity or response. Requires a notebook, a writing implement, a place in which to sprawl with books open, lines spooling about me, sounds catching in my ears, setting my hand in motion. Reading initiates writing, becomes writing, unstops the pandoric box. Takes me into language."


{ Marthe Reed has published two books, Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink) and Gaze (Black Radish Books), as well as three chapbooks, (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations , and post*cards (a collaboration with j hastain), all in conjunction with the Dusie Kollektiv Series . Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, MiPoesias, Exquisite Corpse, and Fairy Tale Review. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette . Visit her website here and visit Nous-zot Press here .}

Emily St. John Mandel, On Reading

"I read in the evenings sometimes, but I do most of my reading on the subway. I have a long commute to and from my day job, and I read for the entire distance. On scattered mornings I'll occasionally forget my book, and there's a certain sinking dread when I realize that I've got nothing to read for the journey. Reading is partly an escape for me (I can't say I love spending 45 minutes in the subway every morning, and it's nice to escape into fiction), but it's also a means of connection; it makes me feel like I'm part of a community of readers."


{For more information about Emily St. John Mandel , please visit her website here .}

Matthew Salesses, On Reading

"There is something about reading. I will waste plenty of time watching poorly made movies or tv shows, but I can't bring myself to waste a single minute on a book that does not enrich the act of reading."


{ Matthew Salesses is the author of Our Island of Epidemics , a hypertext and PANK little book , and the forthcoming, The Last Repatriate (Nouvella). He is the Fiction Editor for the Good Men Project Magazine .}