You read a lot of books, said Olive today, as she tried to sell me a sticky note for 7 cents. You can use it as a bookmark!
Success!! I thought to myself: the Instagram post about how your kids notice if you’re reading rather than scrolling came true and so quickly. Make one little change and they’re on it, those bloodhounds. Luckily I do really love a good book. But I also have to make an effort to put down my phone open one up instead. Recent reads have all been memoirs:
Real Estate, by Deborah Levy (recommended by my friend Caroline) a meditation on home and becoming older without a script
Knocking Myself Up, a memoir on queer childbearing by the incredible Michelle Tea who makes difficult times seems like fodder for Cosmo magazine
and I’m in the middle of Phosphorescence by Julia Baird, a book on joy that separates each chapter into different wonders like bioluminescence and notes that the number of trees on any given street can impact the number of dollars someone makes.
Happily, by Sabrina Orah Mark is also all marked up and ready for review – though it’s hard to encapsulate all her mysterious messages, some of which fall like spring blossoms at the end of each story.
I’m not sure how I got to love reading so much. I know I spent a good part of 2007 in St Mark’s bookstore, reading for free in the back where the fiction section was. This bookstore had only the most amazing books and so anything on the shelves was worth reading from beginning to end. I read Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird on one of those little stools and I sensed something raw and alive that I’d never been as close to before. And in the front staff recommendations led me to the paperback edition of Dahlgren - a book I once lent to someone undeserving of the story. So many things in this story were exactly true for me and yet I had never known them for myself before. A burning city. A group of dirty and dangerous teenagers desperate for each other. A family who pretended nothing had changed and lived in their own mental trap. So much of that made sense to me even though the book was a zillion pages and almost unreadable in plot and character development. There was much possibility in these books. I spent hours there because I didn’t pay for anything besides rent in those days, and the occasional avocado roll a few storefronts away.
I had a night like 2007 on Sunday. There had been a long weekend and it included a festival in Cupertino that was too far to drive, and a reorganizing of a family fridge that was so domestic a task it hurt my bones to both do it and also to see how I had not done it before. Wandering out for a few hours at the tail end of Sunday I almost wondered if I should just go back home. There was a kid’s hair to wash and I love this task. There were astrology videos to watch since tomorrow is the first day of May. There were endless things to pickup and put away and that last one convinced me to keep going - down 24th and into the Mission that so often feels inaccessible to me — either too young or too urban — and my confusion with having been both for so long sometimes keeps me away from exploring in depth.
My friend Addy came to stay this week for a day or so and saw the old Dog Eared Books on the corner and remarked about this name so now I went in to poke around. The smell is what hit me first off. A good bookstore always smells a very certain way - some combination of paper and fire that isn’t burning and a tea that isn’t brewing in the back. There’s also a sound, some kind of music mixed with the creeks of the feet walking through the store on the floorboards - there’s almost a rhythm to it. It gives you the sense of people moving and then pausing to stoop down, to move their hair around their ears, to pull a smooth cover from its neighbors and open the pages or read the back blurb. It feels sexy to me, like dating; like which book will come home with you tonight.
In every aisle there are old friends and new friends and ones who you know you should have read ages ago and yet the inner pages don’t call to you even today. Speak Memory, for instance, is the favorite of so many of my favorite writers and I can’t seem to get pulled into the pages — not even when a copy is on the “good books on sale” table.
I crouched down and saw a used book already underlined explaining that families that eat together can amicably form a unit but those that do not can begin to lose their ties to each other and become separate - the house becoming impersonal and strange to its inhabitants.
There were glass bookshelves of tarot cards and photos of Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham in squat positions performing the “rise of medusa” at the Black Mountain Summer Institute in 1948. A Grace Paley book reminded me that journals are inherently boring for the reader and that the writer’s favorite sentence most probably is the reader’s least. She also quotes a poem, by Paul Goodman, to which I deeply related:
The shipwright looked at me
with mild eyes.
“What’s the matter friend?
You need a New Ship
From the ground up, with art,
a lot of work,
and using the experience you
have –”
“I’m tired!” I told him in
Exasperation,
“I can’t afford it!”
“No one asks you, either,”
He patiently replied, “to venture
forth.
Whither? why? Maybe just forget it.”
And he turned on his heel and left
Me – here.
Do you need a new ship? Will you build it with hard work and a whole lot of art? Even if you’re tired and can’t afford it and no one asked you to? If so, let me cheer you on. Let me be like one of the books on the shelves saying so nice to meet you. It’s not too late and we’re both just here anyway, so we better get to it.