A new year approaches! In fact, Iâve never had anything but an ambivalent relationship to New Years, as with anything that reminds me about the passing of time (Linklater movies are heavy in this regard). This year, Iâm approaching it with more equanimity, since Iâm chipping away at a long writing project and have already started on some others, like learning French; itâs good to be caught in mid-stream come January 1st. Nevertheless, I take heart from Gramsciâs article âI Hate New Yearâs Dayâ:
Thatâs why I hate New Yearâs. I want every morning to be a new yearâs for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigour.
No spiritual time-serving. I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed. No day of celebration with its mandatory collective rhythms, to share with all the strangers I donât care about. Because our grandfathersâ grandfathers, and so on, celebrated, we too should feel the urge to celebrate. That is nauseating.
I await socialism for this reason too. Because it will hurl into the trash all of these dates which have no resonance in our spirit and, if it creates others, they will at least be our own, and not the ones we have to accept without reservations from our silly ancestors.
With 2023 drawing to a close, I also thought itâd be nice to reflect on what Iâve read this year, starting with five fiction books I especially liked.
I started the year reading The Inferno (technically a poem I guess). I read something like seven articles about choosing the right translation and then my brother gifted me the wrong one by accident anyway. Though seven intervening centuries (and the unrhymed version I read) made some of its pleasures remote, its combination of âcoldâ theological and descriptive rigour with its portrait gallery of deformed, palpably human sinners was de-familiarizing and fascinating. Us moderns may feel the wrongness of our life as strongly as Dante did, but unlike him and his audience, we donât have the assurance that this wrongness is part of an austere architecture of justiceâcanât even say of our own Hell what Dante writes of his: âMy Maker was Divine authority / The highest Wisdom, and the primal Love.â
Iâve sometimes said that I find it hard to read contemporary novels about privileged people despite the fact that everyone in Anna Karenina, my favourite novel, owns a billion serfs, and Elif Batumanâs The Idiot, whose main character is a Harvard freshman, is the result of my getting over that pettiness. This book revels with such evident pleasure in language and the confusions of undergrad life that I was won over very quickly. Thereâs a recurrent thread about the narratorâs engagement with a simple Russian storyâwritten as a didactic tool to teach students the languageâthat exemplifies this bookâs frolicsome approach to the serious, stupid enterprise of meaning-making through reading. It also helps that Batuman is actually funny, unlike a lot of contemporary novelists.
If you canât enjoy big city loneliness, you can at least aestheticize it. Reading Dostoevskyâs novella-length White Nights in a little cafe after coming in from winter cold, reading it on my tiny apartmentâs couch, reading it in an empty barâthis never made me relish my misery so much. Thereâs a specific passage in this that is basically the most Down Bad thing youâll ever read, and its mood of dislocation and sultry, lamp-lighted nights filled with lonely wandering souls is as evocative as Chungking Express. My copy also came with a very funny short story, Bobok, that shows off Dosteovskyâs gift for orchestrating absurd patter between characters evokedâin this case, exclusivelyâby their idiosyncratic voices.
I owe reading Moby Dick to my book club. Itâs fucking bizarre and amazing (and yes, strangely gay). It has an ungainly episodic structure that includes extended scientific and philosophical riffs, some parable-like second-hand stories, and chapters written as plays, all sustained by an on-rushing, mad, incantatory, lush language that swerved between the evocative-concrete and airily theological. At one point, Ishmael talks about how hard thinking produces fumes over your head as whaled spout water, and provides some very dubious âproofâ of same; at another point, Melville turns a whale hunt into a textural cubist extravaganza, overloading the strictures of traditional narrative. This book, which was an attempt to write Shakespeare for the tragic capitalist heroes of a non-aristocratic age, is termite art of a grand order, a window into the exhilarating atmosphere of the nineteenth century.
My desire to read more adventurously led me, when I came home, to pick up Babel-17 and Empire Star by Samuel Delany in a book that pairs both, apparently per Delanyâs original intentions. Before this, the last sci-fi novel Iâd read had been⊠Enderâs Game in middle school? These are fairly short novels, and though the visual description is often quite good, itâs really Delanyâs gift for showing characters thinking about and working through intellectual problems that made them a pleasure for me: these are adventure stories that are in the fullest sense about the life of the mind. I loved Empire Star in particular, which has a neat de-familiarizing narrative conceit and makes you re-feel the joy of discovery and education (also the ethic of cosmopolitanism), to the extent that it seems to me the perfect book for middle schoolers to read to fall in love with learningâa non-idiotâs The Closing of the American Mind.
My fiction-reading is never very programmatic. When looking for a new book, I always try to keep in mind a passage from Proust that I came across in Elaine Scarryâs âOn Beauty and Being Justâ:
a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new âgood book,â because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation . . . would not enable him to discover.
Iâve spent a lot of my reading career basically âcatching upâ with the classics, and though this has been tremendously rewardingâwhat would my life be without Woolf, without Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, without Bellow and Updike, without Dickens, Munro, Paley, Chekhov, and OâConnor?âIâve become worried about the limits and biases of both the canon and my own provincialism. This is partly why I made an effort to read something contemporary (Batuman) and something sci-fi (Delany) this year (both, to be sure, hardly obscure). Going into 2024, I hope to pay more attention to books from small presses, non-anglophone books, and experimental literature. At the end of the day, the Western Canon is probably like Wittgensteinâs ladder: you make use of it, you climb it, then you throw it away.