What I talk about when I talk about reading
On the joy of artistic participation, and my favorite reads from August
Last month, I came across an essay from January called “On the Hatred of Literature” by Jon Baskin, where he remembers a college lit class he was in:
…a student stood up in the back of the room. Nearly giving way to what seemed to me at the time (but not now) an embarrassing overflow of emotion, she accused the professors of “hating” literature. We had become English majors in the first place, she went on, not because novels and poems told us interesting things about history or politics but because they made us feel less alone, captivated us with their beauty, helped us to better know ourselves and the world. The professors, as far as I can remember, responded politely: after all, the student was only a sophomore. She would learn.
This struck me. I, too, was an English major and suffered through a great multitude of literature classes that made me second-guess if I really get it. I thought I liked reading, but almost always when I was in one of those classes with very smart and studied professors discussing major works of literary importance, I was bored out of my mind. Discussions of the books we were reading, couched in one literary theory or another, made me think that I was not refined or sophisticated enough to truly enjoy reading — which is what literature is at its most essential.
I recently read a wonderful book of short stories by Yukiko Motoya (more on that below), and in it one of my favorite writers, Hiromi Kawakami, wrote this blurb: “I could never try to explain Yukiko Motoya’s stories. For me, the joy of reading fiction isn’t to analyze it, but to feel it in my body. In that sense, her writing offers enormous satisfaction to the sensitive organ inside me that is attuned to the pleasure of reading.”
That’s it. That’s the joy of literature — feeling it in your body, wherever that part of you exists — that English classes so seldom articulate. Understandably so; teachers and professors have benchmarks and standards, and I’m doubtful anything as immeasurable and important as “teach students to love reading” makes its way into those standards. Besides, literary analysis is not devoid of value; it’s often a useful way to understand history or politics, which also justifies the act of having people read it.
I’ve been lucky to have several teachers whose joy for reading was unmolested by professional or academic strains, and that seems to be the only obvious way to deal with the pressures of turning art into Serious Scholarship: teachers, parents, mentors — whoever — demonstrating as early and as often as possible that reading is a profound pleasure before it’s anything else.
Favorite Reads From August
Pegge Hopper and the ‘Myth’ of Native Hawaiians by Natanya Friedheim in Ka Leo
“I am not painting Hawaiians, I am painting a myth,” she said. “It has nothing to do with Hawaiians. I am merely using them as a beautiful thing, just like an orchid.”
How the Pandemic Defeated America by Ed Yong in The Atlantic
The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.
Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America by David Roth in The New Republic
It’s not just that the truth doesn’t matter to Trump, although of course it very much does not. All presidents lie, and if few have done it quite as relentlessly or thirstily or with as much unaccountable personal dampness as Trump, he certainly didn’t invent the right to howling, self-serving falsehoods as the ultimate executive privilege. What’s still jarring even this far into his presidency, though, is how unbelievably cheap and checked-out his communication remains. In his role as president of the United States, Trump reliably holds forth with the same po-faced casualness of a lonesome boomer hoisting some confounding eagle-strewn Facebook meme onto his page to an audience of sighing nieces and cringing grandkids.
August’s Books
Folks You Meet In Longs by Lee Cataluna
Considered a classic of Hawaii literature, I found it irresistibly charming. It’s a book of short stories, each about a page and a half, and all taking place in the aisles of a Longs (a drug store or CVS). It’s a clever storytelling technique, and through it Cataluna — the best Hawaii columnist in my lifetime, for my money — captures a sample of a lot of different flavors of island life.
From the introduction:
Longs is where people go to when they NEED. On the shelves you find relief, distraction, healing: and if there’s no product for what ails you, there’s often a kind clerk, an intuitive fellow-shopper, or a bit of overheard conversation that is enough to keep you going.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, translated by Asa Yoneda
Another book of short stories, I also found it charming and delightfully strange. A woman in a dull, inattentive marriage takes up bodybuilding; a zealous clothing store worker goes to extreme lengths to find the right clothes for a woman who may or may not be human; a married couple notices their facial features drooping and shifting around to look more similar to each other. It’s all very strange yet undeniably entertaining — and eerily evocative. The original Japanese version (entitled Picnic in the Storm) won the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, and the short story “An Exotic Marriage” won the Akutagawa Prize, often considered Japan’s most prestigious literary award.
From “The Women:”
There was nothing to be done. No matter how many times I asked why, all she would tell me was that she was challenging me to a duel. I begged her to reconsider, but it was no good. She was the kind of girl who would call me every night when we first started going out just to check that we were really dating, a lover who was so slender she looked like she might break if you embraced her. I couldn’t believe it.
She stood up as if to say there was nothing more to discuss, and asked if I’d like to do it by the river.
Reading Now
Been focused a lot more on Beautiful Country Burn Again by Ben Fountain lately, which covers the run-up to and fallout from the 2016 election. I’ve been reading it on my phone in short chunks for a while, but with the current presidential election intensifying, I’ve found myself drawn to it more frequently. Smart, incisive and illuminating, it’s some of the best political writing I’ve read.
I also started a poetry book, Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi. It consists of 49 poems, one for each day spirits roam the Earth before they get reincarnated. I’m not sure how I feel about it yet, but it’s certainly engaging.
What I’m Writing
For Civil Beat I wrote about popular social media accounts posting anti-mask nonsense, how our leaders need to quit waffling and start making tough decisions, what the first week of school was like, and how the highly dubious distance learning program selected by the Department of Education is a symptom of larger problems.
For Sherdog I wrote about the UFC not paying fighters who had last-minute bout cancellations due to covid, how losses impact legacies (and how they don’t), and how there’s no way to go back to your former glory.
Seven columns in one month. Whew.
Oh, I also re-posted one of my favorite Korea pieces on Medium. I wrote it in 2017 (for the now-defunct Summit Magazine) when Kim Jong-un was threatening to destroy Guam, Trump was threatening to destroy North Korea, and South Korea had just ousted and imprisoned its president. It was a dramatic time on the peninsula, and this is one of the first times I really swung for the fences in the ending, and connected (I think).