In Which All Good Reading Is Best Done Cautiously

The Way They Were Meant To Be Read

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

Coming across a person who is completely jaded about something you enjoy is either amusing or frustrating. In the case of my boss - let's call her Ms. J - it's a little of both. She's clearly "well-read" even though that expression is itself so overused as to become meaningless, but she also seems to have elaborate gaps in her education. We all have blind spots, but none are so educational as Ms. J's appraisal of modern literature. Here are some of her comments on books I asked if she read.

The Scarlet Letter

"She should have been thankful all they did was put on a letter on her: they could have also tweeted about it."

Journey to the End of Night

"If I wanted to read a book by a man with a woman's name, I'd read Justinians."

On Beauty

"It would be nice if nobody ever used liberal arts colleges as settings for novels ever again, but I'm not that naive."

The Cider House Rules

"Fun fact: there has never been a condom in any book that sexist ponce ever wrote."

The Last of the Mohicans

"You just know James Fenimore Cooper would have been, like, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly."

The Secret History

"They got high and killed someone? Big deal. Didn't that also happen in E.T.?"

The Brothers Karamazov

"One of the brothers was way out of line, can't remember which one. The one that looked like Rutger Hauer."

Middlemarch

"Could we lose the last million pages?"

The Tin Drum

"Was that where he kept his Jewish friends? Don't tell me, I'm going to read it after I finish Motherless Brooklyn, e.g. never."

Hunger

"My college roommate ate a lot of ramen noodles. Was that not an option in Scandinavia?"

Henry and June

"Studies show that 90% of young female bloggers owe their existence to Nin's success as a writer. I'm not sure which party should be more insulted."

Trainspotting

"Wow, drugs are so crazy, aren't they? Let me know when that guy starts writing in English. When people can actually read his work, they might notice he's a hack."

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

"This guy ruined irony for at least the next decade, but who doesn't love a man with curly hair?"

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"I can't read a book that doesn't have a woman over the age of thirty in it unless it's by Wayne Koestenbaum."

Mansfield Park

"Everyone is always holding back a slight smile. Perhaps there was a lot of food on other people's faces in Austen's time."

Lolita

"She was a lot more mature than Gwyneth Paltrow."

Things Fall Apart

"The expectation that things would come together in turn-of-the-century Nigeria was perhaps premature."

The Things They Carried

"Vietnam was full of happy memories, wasn't it? No."

To Kill A Mockingbird

"Wow, what white people can accomplish when they put their mind to it. Scout later grew up and became the star on the The Real Housewives of Maycomb."

The Adventures of Augie March

"I can't read anything by anyone who I know is an asshole, unless it's about how much Dale Peck sucks."

Chilly Scenes of Winter

"It should have had an unhappy ending." 

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

"More like extremely manipulative and incredibly overrated."

Time and Again

"If you suddenly find yourself in 1882, and you're a man, for christ's sake stay there and never come back."

The Recognitions

"Whenever I see an emdash before someone talks, a part of me dies inside. Actually whenever I see an emdash anywhere, I get a little twinge in my rectum."

The Hour of the Star

"The only thing more confusing than this book is realizing you emerged into the world from Ayelet Waldman's uterus."

The End of the Affair

"The first and last time anyone had sex with a civil servant and did not regret it."

Gravity's Rainbow

"This was responsible for over 90 percent of Fredric Jameson's orgasms in the 1970s."

The Catcher in the Rye

"No subtler novel about a homosexual was ever written. Still, it should have been called A Bottom In the Bottom."

Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. She last wrote in these pages about the childhood of Jorge Luis Borges. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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In Which We Could Scrape Color From The Petals

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Blue Like You

by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.

- Stéphane Mallarmé

I grew up poor, I guess, though not the kind of poor that’s rhetorically advantageous. It wasn’t, that is, a son-of-a-mill-worker kind of poor — not yet — because it is an ongoing, unresolved kind of poor, the kind where you list class and poverty as research interests in your doctorate profile but come home to a family’s fridge of just condiment jars and a bottle of seltzer water and Judith Butler can’t really lend you a hand with that one, you dig?

My father was trained as a physicist in Ecuador and has used, in this country, his knowledge of gravity’s moods to master balancing eighteen bags of hot food on his bike at Wall Street noon, but he used it first to bend my childhood into a shape he liked: admittedly poor, but inconspicously poor, immigrant-poor, lives lived as a gamble that education would fix it all. We talked less than we read and we didn’t talk to anyone outside of each other. When my parents moved to Brooklyn in the 90’s, they moved to a tiny neighborhood where nobody spoke the same language, rejecting the enclave, a Babel of their own design where nobody could influence me but them. Books and foreign newspapers were stuffed into every corner of the house, piled above Bibles, as armrests and door stoppers. We read with urgency. How could we not have? Our ancestors famously lacked a written system and here we were, hemorrhaging language.

When we fought, we stopped talking but wrote each other letters that we left by the kitchen sink to find when we brushed our teeth in the morning. Milestones were pre-scripted:

Judy Blume for when I turned ten and started to bleed.

Keats and Neruda for the first time I liked a boy.

Eileen Myles for the first time I didn’t.

Gloria Anzaldúa for the very first time I heard “spic” directed at me.

Everyone has a list like this. The problem with mine was that it became religious; reading became a sacramental penance.

Then I got sick.

I

When doctors ask when it all started, I think of a line in a Les Murray poem — “from just on puberty, I lived in funeral” — but say I was around 16. When they ask whether I have ever contemplated suicide I ask them what they mean by contemplated and what they mean by suicide, but then they begin to write down words faster than I am speaking them, so I say no, no, not at all.

When I was still very little, there were uninspired attempts at things with outcomes I couldn’t have known how to think through — mouthfuls of toothpaste and capfuls of mouthwash, knotted rags under bathwater, traffic. They were harmless motions of sensuous violence; my esophagus may have burned and my palms may have moistened but it was nothing that couldn’t come undone by some red clover tea.

(I say red clover tea because that’s what I imagined the Pepper family drinking in Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, which isn’t exactly a handbook for living in the ghetto but it might as well have been. What I actually drank was warm liquid Jell-O prepared on the stove. It was red. )

II

Friends talk about my first three years of college as The Lost Years. I am not exaggerating when I say I remember almost nothing about them. At the end of my freshman year, an advisor gave me an anthology of e.e. cummings’ poetry, a slim little volume wrapped in bright paper. On the title page she wrote, “”To my kindred Franny.”

(I’d found “Franny & Zooey” in the spring.)

III

I came to Joan Didion through a Jezebel comment I found sometime after my sophomore year. The comment was a link to “On Self Respect” re-typed sloppily on a blog somewhere. That’s all it took.

I bobbed my hair like Joan’s, wore dresses and skirts long enough to graze the floor but not gather dirt. Her drink was bourbon and for a while I made it mine too, self-conscious when the bartender asked for a preferred label, embarrassed when I could not hold it, regretful after the third boy from a midtown sports bar whose name I could not remember. From Joan I learned to eat cucumber sandwiches on flattened slices of white sandwich bread my mother paid for with food stamps and learned to sit through panic attacks with my head in a brown paper bag except I used the white plastic ones from the corner Chinese takeout place instead, the ones with the yellow smiling faces. From Joan I learned it was okay to take expensive taxis, so long as I could cry in them. I read her packing list in The White Album as a check-off list: I was missing a typewriter so my friends found me two. Again, the bourbon. She wore leotards with stockings so I started to as well. They looked different on my body, hips and ass and breasts, not those of a steely postwar West Coast waif. 

I get the impression, through Didion’s other essays, the ones written post-cry, that she wouldn’t much like me, that we wouldn’t be buds. In “On Keeping a Notebook,” she writes about being 23, “skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance.” 

Didion’s over it, and me, and the girls I meet at parties who wear the leotards too. Her work inspires what Caitlin Flanagan called “a cult’s kind of fierce and jealously protective loyalty” because hearing about another person’s love for Slouching Towards Bethlehem is troubling —i t means we’ve landed “both a landsman and a rival.” But I know enough to know I’m not Caitlin Flanagan at the hunger games. We don’t fill out the leotard in quite the same way.

In Blue Nights, she describes how stressful it was to adopt her daughter Quintana Roo — named after a Mexican state — which is only aggravated when a social worker visits her home:

What if the social workers were to notice that Arcelia spoke only Spanish? What if the social worker were to happen into the question of Arcelia’s papers? What would  the social worker put in her report if she divined that I had entrusted the perfect baby to an undocumented alien?”

What if my mother were to notice she’d entrusted her perfect brown baby to a rich white woman in dark glasses, smoking by the water in Malibu?

It didn’t matter, because I hoped the weight I carried would help me deserve my way into whatever space she made hallowed by her presence. I belonged more than the other leotard-wearing girls belonged. I really wished that fervently.

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes  —
I wonder if It weights like Mine — 
Or has an Easier size.

- Emily Dickinson.

I hoped that if she pressed her palm to my forehead, she’d find my sorrow sound.

III

I went into Boston the day I decided not to take anti-depressants. I went into Boston because it was hot and I lived in an un-airconditioned dorm with some 250 girls and 250 boys — a righteous halving guaranteed by the housing algorithm and replicated in every other sphere at the college except the finals clubs, where the vulgarity of ratio was the whole point. All the girls wanted to lay on towels with their backs to the sun and the boys all wanted to play Frisbee. I wanted to be away from them.

After reading in the sun for a few hours, everything started to look bathed in an incandescent vapor, sleepy and white like a wet sheet of tissue paper held against a flame. I had forgotten my sunglasses at the dorm and the blue-white gloss of the magazine pages I was holding hurt my eyes. A group of shirtless boys threw around a football. The girls shared a joint. There were ants on the dress I’d pulled down to my waist to tan. When I sat up to brush them off, one of the football-throwing boys came over to see if I wanted a beer. I unscrewed the cap of my orange juice bottle and held it under his nose. He asked what I was reading.

I was reading an essay in an old copy of The New Yorker I picked up from a pile of unread issues. I chose it because I liked the cover — a bundled up woman in a fancy hat walking a dog in the snow. It was a Malcolm Gladwell review of two books, Gary Greenberg’s Manufacturing Depression and Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs.

I was moved by it in the way you are moved when you are looking to be, by whatever. I could just as easily have found Jesus or Libertarianism or the Grateful Dead during that time. I was looking. Anyway, this part, the conclusion, stood out, and I tore out the page and carried it around for a while until too many wash-and-tumble cycles turned the paper into a dusty pulp.

Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn’t short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don’t want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies? Questions like these are the reason we have literature and philosophy. No science will ever answer them.

Those last two sentences — that was it. Seventeen words, seven of them nouns, only three verbs, none of them poetic or philosophical or exceptional. But they imbued the poetic and philosophical and exceptional with a talismanic majesty and so they made sense to me and so I abandoned my treatment.

IV

My senior year, I sort of emerged whole and without a backstory, like Athena fully-armed born from Zeus’s forehead. I mean, that was the reception — how else do you explain abrupt and sudden there-ness? Whenever I’d go get dinner at the dorm where I had lived for more than two years, classmates and resident advisors stopped me by the fountain drinks to introduce themselves and ask if I was a transfer student.

September was a liminal space. One too-warm night, I sat by the Charles, along the joggers’ path, and tried to light a cigarette with a red plastic lighter I picked up at the dollar store the afternoon I decided I would smoke. (I decided I would smoke like I had decided, in high school, that I would love Bob Dylan. It took a few spins before I stopped pretending I liked the taste.) It was very windy and the lighter was not working and my thumb was striped purple from trying. A clean-shaven guy in a thermal walked over, and said he’d help. I handed him the lighter. When he continued to talk, I realized he was severely retarded. The whole of that scene overwhelmed me and I so wanted to be away from the water. I took back the lighter, must have said sorry, and ran to the ice cream shop a few blocks away. I called my mother.

She visited that weekend. We ate takeout from the Square and she cleaned my room in the near-dark while I slept. When she wasn’t cleaning — and there was a lot of cleaning, the first thing to go is cleaning — she made her way through a stack of imported tabloids from the library about octogenarian Spanish duchesses with frosted hair and their bullfighter boyfriends. When she left, and she left, she left my room very clean, sticky-clean, the clean of Clorox and Sweet Williams.

VI

In October, a professor friend from Colombia rented a car and drove us to Providence to watch a performance of “Adios, Ayacucho,”  a play about a Peruvian peasant who returns from the dead to find and bury his body. A boy I desperately wanted to like invited me to a party that was secret garden themed but I didn’t have a floral dress and I didn’t have money to go to the Downtown Crossing Mall so I bought a few stems of hydrangeas and attached them to a metal hanger I’d bent into misshape.

It was raining and traffic was slow. While María drove, we gossiped about the Spanish department and about President Uribe, that lying motherfucker, while I fastened petals to wire with ribbon and scotch tape. By the time we arrived at the party, just after midnight, the police had shut it down. At the end of the night, the boy I was with gathered my wilted petals, waxy and excreting futile juices, off his futon and into a Kleenex I threw out myself.

I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.
If I could break you,
I could break a tree.

- H.D.

I rode the bus back to my dorm with the crown in my hands, the pale pink ribbon coming undone around the peeling gold wire, the scotch tape not even worth describing.

V

By November, I was fine. A very wealthy man, a family friend who for years had given me shopping bags full of his dead father’s books to read, paid for a gentle electric current therapy. He didn’t like that I opted for the highest pressure and so he told me to stop and also sent me stories and books, so I stopped and I read them. The treatment was very gentle and it was very nice and it helped me go to sleep at night but it dyed everything a kind of blue. So I read William Gass’ On Being Blue and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and every Bukowski poem with the word “blue” in the text. Google Books is great.

VI

Some weeks before I took the train into Boston, the day I decided not to take anti-depressants, New Directions published Roberto Bolaño’s The Insufferable Gaucho. Bolaño was dying of liver problems when he wrote it. He dedicated an essay in it to his hepatologist, Victor Vargas. The essay is called, “Literature + Illness = Illness.”

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New Haven. She last wrote in these pages about sex and the ivory tower. She tumbls here and twitters here.

In Which Everything Has The Same Use Including Food

The Consumption of J.D. Salinger

by ELIZABETH GUMPORT

J.D. Salinger provokes the personal turn. When we write about his work, we write about him, his private life – or our own. What is public becomes private; criticism creeps towards memoir. Salinger is the JFK assassination, Salinger is 9/11: where were you when you read The Catcher in the Rye? Aleksandar Hemon was in Sarajevo, Aimee Bender in Southern California. Both of them were teenagers, as were Joshua Ferris’s waiter and Adam Gopnik’s son. Joanna Smith Rakoff was working for his agent in New York, where she answered letters from fans who wrote in with their own Salinger stories.

I was on my couch. The book had once belonged to my father, and on its cover was a partial peace sign, which at the time I thought was part of the design. Later I realized my father had drawn it himself. (I think I am not alone when I say I remember Salinger’s stories as books, as encounters with physical objects. Their content seems embodied in their bindings: Franny and Zooey’s green border, Nine Stories in blue and orange. Salinger himself selected the precise shade of white Little, Brown used for his covers.)

When my mom saw me reading Catcher, she reminisced for a while, and then she asked me: why didn’t Holden just eat something? If he had just had a snack he would have felt fine. Who isn’t crabby when he’s dehydrated? It’s a good point, one both real and fictional people would do well to remember, and one that is particularly relevant in the case of dirty realism: everyone feels lousy when they are hungry or hungover. A headache is not a philosophy of the world. Unless, possibly, that world belongs to Salinger, whose fiction is full of finicky eaters. Holden is hardly unusual: Franny picks at her chicken sandwich, and when the narrator of “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” offers Esmé a piece of his cinnamon toast, she declines, saying “‘I eat like a bird, actually.’” The narrator himself takes only a single bite.

Although Salinger’s characters are not terribly interested in eating food, it does intrigue them for other reasons. In “Just Before The War With The Eskimos,” Selena’s brother presses a chicken sandwich upon Ginnie, who hides it in her coat. When she leaves their apartment, she takes the sandwich out to throw away – but then returns it to her pocket. “A few years before,” Salinger writes, “it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust at the bottom of her wastebasket.”

Salinger’s characters ignore meals and preserve dead chicks because, as Aleksandar Hemon points out in “The Importance of Wax and Olives,” Salinger’s characters are interested in objects only insofar as they are useless. The title of Hemon’s essay comes “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which Sybil asks Seymour if he likes wax and olives. He says yes: “Olives and wax. I never go any place without ‘em.” What unites olives and wax is their worthlessness: they are pure objects, pre-commodities, neither candle nor garnish. They are just things, things that serve no purpose, like a sandwich you will never eat. The hotel room where Seymour kills himself smells of “new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover” – the odor of officious practicality, of objects bought and used.

In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Buddy reports that his brother admired the kind of poet whose “real forte is knowing a good persimmon or good crab or good mosquito bite on a good arm when he sees one.” Buddy’s analysis serves equally well as a description of Salinger, and of his relationship to objects, or at least the relationship towards which he aspired. His ideal is a kind of categorical imperative of objecthood, Kant’s second formulation applied to Easter chicks. Objects ought to be treated not as means to an ends but ends in themselves. A persimmon, an olive, an arm or the arch of a foot, like Sybil’s, which Seymour kisses: what counts is things as they are, the very pieces of the world.

Buddy’s account also goes a long way towards explaining what it is that makes Salinger’s writing so good. Salinger is acutely aware that we exist in the world – in cities, in apartments, in bodies that rub up against couches and church pews and cabs and other bodies in those cabs – and he is a master of capturing what it feels like, literally feels like, to live.

In Zooey, Seymour’s letter is not just summarized but described: it is a packet of yellow paper, its pages wet with bathwater. It is a real thing Zooey can hold in his hands, like Esmé’s father’s watch, or the red tissue paper that reminds the young Comanche of the Laughing Man’s poppy-petal mask. The richness of Salinger’s fiction comes from his attention to objects, to the physical stuff of life, and from his understanding that the words that describe these things are things themselves. Words are their meanings and more than that: they are themselves, and in Salinger’s hands they are beautiful.

Yet if it is in his treatment of the physical world that Salinger excels, it is also where he eventually gets in trouble. On the New Yorker website, Salinger’s stories are available in their original format, columns of prose bracketed by advertisements for sunscreen and department stores. The offerings are refined, luxury tempered by good taste: madras bathing suits and foundation from Helena Rubinstein for the lady, Yardley shaving cream for “the man who won’t settle for average.”

Unlike wax and olives, these items are valued for reasons beyond themselves. Yardley shaving cream is used to shave one’s face – and to mark oneself as a man who will not settle for average. This is what Hemon calls its “spiritual essence,” which is required for “a commodity to enter the market and attain a value as a thing alienated from human labor.” A commodity, Hemon writes, “cannot be an empty thing... It has to fulfill a need that is not merely material — it must have a spiritual essence that responds to a spiritual need... To possess, to own that essence, that ineffable quality of a commodity that differentiates it from other commodities, one has to buy the thing that contains it, which makes one different from those who buy other commodities. Consumption spiritualizes and individualizes the consumer, as he or she enters a web of imaginary relations between human beings and the world.”

The man who buys Yardley’s shaving cream violates the categorical imperative of objecthood, but so does anyone who values anything for any reason beyond it. Zooey says it himself: “treasure’s treasure,” even when that treasure is spiritual. Disgusted by all the savages, with their phoniness and “unskilled laughter” and consumerism and self-serving ambition that mistakes itself for the pursuit of knowledge and knowledge that does not even pretend to be wisdom, Salinger’s characters devote themselves to that final item totally and explicitly. What they want is spiritual enlightenment, and it turns out that to achieve enlightenment all they have to do is look for it everywhere.

Thus Salinger himself not only betrays his own injunction but commands it. Everything you do ought to be done the service of self-perfection. The smallest action ends in enlightenment: this is what it means to shine your shoes for the Fat Lady.

This is also what tempers the soaring generosity of Zooey, what cuts against Zooey’s – and Salinger’s – overwhelming, aching belief in other human beings. Do you not lose sight of the person himself when all you can see when you look at him is Christ? When, more to the point, all you want to see is Christ? It seems you must: people and objects are valued not for themselves but because for the person seeking wisdom they contain it. Every object is holy, every gesture a genuflection, every person the Fat Lady, and in every Fat Lady is Christ Himself. No longer is anything useless; instead, everything has the same use, including food. “How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one,” Zooey asks Franny, “if you don’t even know a consecrated cup of chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?”

To a fan, Salinger’s fiction is that “consecrated cup of chicken soup.” He nourishes his reader’s hunger to understand and to be understood, to feel as if Salinger had him in mind when he wrote the way Bessie had Franny in mind when she cooked. To each reader, Salinger says spiritual satisfaction can be achieved through what Joan Didion summarizes as tolerating “television writers and section men” and “looking for Christ in one's date for the Yale game.”

These are what Didion calls Salinger’s “instructions for living,” whose simplicity is the source of their appeal. To ask someone to endure a date is not to ask very much. Ultimately, Didion concludes, Salinger’s books are but “self-help copy. . . Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.” We need not change our lives, they tell us, or even necessarily our behavior. All that is required is a good attitude. Enlightenment is as easy as heating up a can of Campbell’s.

If Franny and Zooey is an instruction manual, one of its rules is that it should be read as such. Everything in Salinger’s world has its use, including books: compare Lane’s interest in Madame Bovary with Franny’s in The Way of a Pilgrim. He wants an A, while she wants enlightenment, and it is her way of reading that Salinger celebrates. If Franny is our model reader, what she teaches us is that reading for self-improvement, self-enrichment, self-abasement, self-whatever – reading for the self – is the height of nobility.

She treats The Way of a Pilgrim the way Didion says we treat Franny and Zooey, which is in fact the way many of us do treat Franny and Zooey: as something that can be applied to our own lives, and can change them. Reading for private instruction is not misreading but reading rightly – reading in the manner of Franny. It is for this reason that our first encounters with Salinger loom so large in our memories: his are books about taking books personally.

My father’s copy of The Catcher In The Rye is an artifact, now, so delicate as to be unreadable. Still, I keep it, and if this is taking things personally I will say that is perhaps the way some things should be taken. In fact, part of me is sad that I no longer take Salinger as personally as my younger self took him, and sad that I am a stranger to that girl and the people she once loved.

Elizabeth Gumport is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about Maeve Brennan.

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How & Why To Write

Part One (Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin)

Part Two (James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov)

Part Three (W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck)

Part Four (Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, William Butler Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Roberto Bolano)