BELT

It seems preposterous, probably bordering on pretension and unoriginality, for me to be writing about reading again, but fuck it–here goes. I often say out loud to anyone who will listen, “There are (insert large number) of reasons that I read and all of them are good.” Certainly, that is bloviating and hyperbolic, but it’s based in a truth that is very present and also elusive, hence why I keep coming back to it. What’s interesting about this topic–not only for me, but also in general–is that reading is basically an act of trying to find something; you begin with the first word of the first sentence and you then chase the words until you reach the last word of the last sentence and along the way you pretty much get the world.

I love to read sentences in two ways, simultanously. First, for the information contained: Lyndon Johnson stole a Senate election with 87 votes; Nick Carraway was raised with more money than you; Hal Incandenza liked hiding getting high almost as much as he liked getting high itself. Second, the shape of the sentence, or the “prose”. Prose is a tricky word and my definition of it is the way the words massage the brain. What I mean by that: I will read a sentence and as I settle into a book, I feel it move about from my frontal lobe to the rest of my brain, like a drug with an agenda of calm, trickling out and herding my thoughts together like the sheep that they are. A sigh of the brain, flowing or straight forward, it pushes and leans on different sections of the mind. I love to try to figure out the pattern, even as I’m being informed; where will the break come, the breath and the edge of the cliff, just to be pulled back again, something like a good blow job or the best strip tease. Words have this ability–they have mouths and bodies, fully formed urges and thrusts, you just have to look for it.

I love to read because it distracts me from my own solipsism. It’s very simple to say, “reading takes you away”, but fuck it, it does. There’s a quote on the cover of the book I’m currently reading–The Passage by Justin Cronin: “Read this book and the ordinary world disappears.” It’s true; I’ll be reading away and then suddenly six train stops later and something has disappeared, but I’m not sure if it’s the world, or my terrifying sense of loss. What I have lost and what I could lose; that’s the killer, the monster, the created world borne of bitterness and fear–what I could lose. Think those thoughts and the ordinary world disappears; or more appropriately, the ordinary world becomes unbearable.

Having just reread the author’s note of HST’s The Great Shark Hunt, the idea of taking a gainor out of a 28 story window into a fountain as a final act does have its merits…and its drawbacks. The drawbacks being obvious, but the merits being courage and finality, a strange punctuation, a piece of prose in and of itself, ending in an exclamation point of cracking bones, no less. Such energy in his prose, something like a halting madman tugging on your sleeve, pausing to cough and pull on his cigarette, quietly laughing at the sound of the rocks in his drink and then more knowledge before you have the chance to process the first.

There’s a reason he sat at his typewriter as a young artist and typed the novels of Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald–because the marrow and rhythm of the words are the world. Do you see? Brain massaging.

My Saturdays are best spent falling in love with women in bookstores.
Sure, I wake up and I read and wonder at the amount I have slept from the night before; I work a little and I run; I come home waiting for that burst of energy. I worry that I’m dying. And then I suit up and head to the bookstore.
Once there, I wander the stacks, drink in the spines and the legs, and saunter up–books I will not purchase under my arm–and I smile. There she is: glasses frame and solid colored shirt, hair a hurricane in stasis, a slight smirk on her face. I try to make small talk, but generally I stutter and just mumble my need for coffee and no, thank you, I do not need room for cream. And then I sit down, opening the books, sipping at the rim of the cup.
Today, reading Bolano. I read a sentence and immediately made a small noise and pulled up my phone; I had to text this to someone. “It’s probably clear by now that literature has nothing to do with national prizes and everything to do with a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.” What a wonderful sentence. The use of the oxford comma is certainly energizing, but it’s the word semen that makes that sentence–and so many others. Of course, it brings up images, but also the majestic Neutral Milk Hotel lyric, “Semen stains the mountaintop.”
I peak over the book; she is brewing another pot of coffee and her face seems so perfectly framed by her glasses; I watch as she goes to pull two books off of the shelves and look at her ass. Large, but not huge; cupped in grey jeans, jeans made as if from the lost and ashen pages from another bible I will not believe.
I get up and receive a refill, leaving a tip in the jar as if this will show that not only am I well read, but also wealthy and caring!
Finally, I just sigh and make a book purchase. For what is more exciting than a new book, another addition to the shelf, words upon words that I will read and ingest and become before coming back to it in small moments later and later.
I smile at her one more time and walk into the waiting late autumn sunlight, wondering how the rest of my Saturday can possibly compare.