COLUMN: You'll Thank Me Later--Reading Recommendations from Stephen Mortland That Will Solve All Your Problems, #2
What should you read if you've never been to therapy? What about if a dog licks you? What about if you don't like your haircut? Stephen Mortland is back, providing answers to the toughest questions.
WHAT TO READ IF YOU HAVE DEVELOPED A SOMEWHAT TRANSACTIONAL PHILOSOPHY OF FRIENDSHIP THAT PUTS AN INORDINATE AMOUNT OF WEIGHT ON THE UTILITY OF YOUR FRIENDSHIPS AND MIGHT (UNCHARITABLY) BE CHARACTERIZED AS COLD
It might have something to do with your childhood. Maybe you were the sort of child whose social insecurities drove you to foster isolated and codependent friendships. You were never like those rowdy boys in the movies who ran around town as part of a pack—boys on bicycles, boys throwing rocks, boys hiding pornography in the woods, boys hitting on lifeguards. Instead, you were a boy who maintained one strong friendship, and it was enough. Every two years, for as long as you can remember, the object of your codependency shifted. Sometimes, your friend moved away; sometimes, they grew tired of you; sometimes, a new and superior friendship came along and eclipsed its predecessor. It happened this way throughout elementary school and into high school and it continued into college. After college, what friendships you maintained were friendships of proximity and convenience, so the pattern was broken. You were solitary for a long time then. In recent years, it is entirely likely that you have felt the sting of this solitude and have been pulled again toward friendship, though, of course, wanting friendship and making it happen are two very different things. When you first explain your particular fraternal philosophy to someone (likely you are explaining it to someone you do not yet consider a friend—you are feeling it out), they do not assume that what you are saying is complimentary and exciting. They do not assume that you are evidencing high standards regarding friendship and the possibilities of intimacy. They assume, instead, that what you are saying is a little bitchy, verging on the sociopathic. But listen, you want to say, it might well verge a little too near the sociopathic, but that does not mean it is not peppered with wisdom and common sense. You simply want to benefit in some way from your friendships—really, you want to be made a new person by your associations with others, to be changed in some quiet though fundamental way by something they give you without meaning to give it. Occasionally, you are invited into the sorts of situations where friendships are meant to naturally develop. Let’s pretend, for the sake of an illustration, that you have been invited to a barbeque. You attend for the benefit of your wife and your children, whom you feel you are doing a disservice by being so generally off-putting (you worry you are robbing them of cordial social engagements). So you attend the barbeque with your best foot forward, prepared to find something divine and sensible in even the greatest dullard. But sitting on the patio, you merely drink and smile and feel unbelievably tired. You cannot stand chit-chat and long-running inside jokes. Even when you are invited inside the jokes, you feel a little outside. Another accusation: sometimes your wife or your mother, both of whom understandably worry for you, suggest that you only want to be friends with writers and artists. In fact, you want to tell them, there are a great many writers and artists you have met whom you actively dislike and would never want to be friends with. You know that saying this out loud would not exactly bolster any of your arguments, so instead you tell them that you could be friends with anyone, so long as that person were a little bit obsessive about something. You could be friends with a beekeeper, you tell them—a man serious about the vocation of beekeeping—so long as he truly cared about bees and knew things about bees and was willing to talk with you (a novice in all things apicultural) about the bees. What you want from your friendships, really, is an association with someone who cares deeply about something because, you believe, that care is often the site of connection, the place where the other person becomes a real person. But this is your problem, isn’t it? You struggle to separate the person from the things they care about—the person from their mind—in the same manner that you struggle to separate yourself and your sense of worth from the workings of your own mind, your own thinking. You locate yourself in your thinking, and you become friends with the thinking of others, and is this love?
“The Pavilion on the Links,” Robert Louis Stevenson
The Manner Music, Charles Reznikoff
“The Quarrel,” Harold Brodkey
“Friends,” Grace Paley
[The world pops out to me], Olivia Muenz
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano (tr. Natasha Wimmer)
“Cortes and Montezuma,” Donald Barthelme
“Why Go Out?” Sheila Heti
Saint Sebastian's Abyss, Mark Haber
WHAT TO READ IF YOU HAVE NEVER ONCE ATTENDED THERAPY (AND IT SHOWS)
It shows in your sleeping patterns, in your eating habits. It shows in the way you laugh and reach out and touch the shoulder of the woman you are talking with when you have been drinking too much, and it shows in the way you flinch sometimes when touched by others. It shows in the way you clear the table and wash the dishes at any social gathering and in your generally problematic relationship with just about anything that demands moderation. Maybe your loved ones have made certain insinuations. Have you considered it, is all they want to know. “If I had done it when I was your age, it might have made many things easier for me,” your father suggests. Your mother nods her head. Maybe Walt keeps bothering you about it, keeps telling you: “You need analysis” or “Your unhappiness would be less of a problem for you if you were in analysis.” You dream about mirrors and balloons and umbrellas and women with shifting faces—Jesus, Walt says. Probably because you have a touch of narcissism, you distrust most (if not all) forms of talk therapy. You distrust anything that gives you what you want or tells you what you hope to hear. In this sense, you see the appeal of analysis. A bored Lacanian sitting over your shoulder ignoring you. Yes, please. But analysis is expensive, and more than the money (because, Walt assures you, they’ll take whatever you pay them in the end) it’s the time. Three days a week at least. Your life is a precariously arranged program, and there is no room for indeterminate lengths of time three days a week spent on a couch. Speaking of your precariously arranged life, there is also this: you are certain that your life is a delicately balanced thing, balanced delicately (to put a not too fine point on it…) on a skillfully staged architecture of neuroses. Maybe this is not ideal, but what is? You wake in the morning. The dishes are done. The children seem happy. The dog, if you had a dog, would be walked. To dismantle the anxieties that fuel your productivity would, at the very least, lead to incredible inefficiency and no less than three very uncomfortable conversations. As a writer, though, you are torn. On the one hand, you have made a literary style out of your repression and denial. On the other hand, Samuel Beckett went to analysis and it’s hard to argue with his work.
Scaffolding, Lauren Elkin
The Body Where I was Born, Guadalupe Nettel (tr. J.T. Lichtenstein)
Steps, Jerzy Kosinski
Zeno's Conscience, Italo Svevo (tr. William Weaver)
The Verificationist, Donald Antrim
Basic Black with Pearls, Helen Weinzweig
Tribute to Freud, H.D.
The Blue Flowers, Raymond Queneau (tr. Barbara Wright)
“Psychoanalysis: An Elegy,” Jack Spicer
Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
WHAT TO READ AFTER THE DOG WITH THE BLACK SPOTS ON ITS TONGUE LICKS YOUR WRIST FIVE OR SIX TIMES WHILE YOU WAIT IN LINE AT THE UPSCALE COFFEE SHOP
Listen—you like dogs as much as the next guy, assuming that the next guy is the kind of guy who likes dogs in a reasonable and somewhat removed way and does not particularly want to keep a dog in his home and doesn’t really want a dog to lick him and isn’t all that interested in touching most dogs, but sometimes laughs at dogs in public and gets a lump in his throat when dogs are hurt in movies. Maybe you are the sort of person who, at parties or in social gatherings, enjoys delivering manifestos and overarching systemic theories. And maybe one of the agendas you push at these parties, for comedic effect, is the large-scale de-domestication of pets. You present it as if you are a politician. We should de-domesticate our housepets. It will be a gradual process, you concede: we will stake out plots of wild land like sanctuaries for the dogs and the cats to be released within. It is about respect for the animals. It is about a return to nature. You recognize that this is maybe an unpopular opinion, and your whole attitude toward dogs is maybe an unpopular attitude, and one that marks you immediately suspect. Sometimes, you perform the ritual of “loving a stranger’s dog a little too much”—squatting and tussling the dog’s furry cheeks, lifting the dog’s muzzle, rubbing your nose into the dog’s neck. Who is a good boy, you ask the dog. You have learned that performing this love for the dog is sometimes a way of communicating with the owner. It is a way of saying to the owner of the dog: Look, I am a safe person—I am full of love to give—and because I like you and want you to like me, I love your dog. It is not so different from the way the young Mormon mom at the park looked at your child and said, “Someone has been raised well,” by which she meant to say to you, “You are doing a good job with this child, and I recognize that, and I respect that.” Cats are another story, but also part of the same story. You could watch cats at a distance for a long time. Maybe when you were young and living in Indiana with your parents, your family accidentally became the proprietors of upwards of sixteen cats. Your mother bought two cats to clear the mice that lived in the yard and sometimes found their way into the basement of your house; she bought a male cat and a female cat, and soon your yard was overrun with cats, and you sat on the roof and watched the little inbred cats explore the yard and hunt for snakes and tangle themselves in grapevines. If you weren’t allergic, you might even consider keeping a cat in your house to watch. When you see pictures of dead writers with their cats, you think: Yes, that would be nice. But you realize then that you are treating the animals like an extension of your own ego. You want a cat because you want to be a writer holding a cat. So back to the de-domestication. Really your problem is not a problem of empathy, but a problem of anxiety. Dogs, it seems—the sweetest among them—have no sense of propriety and recognize no boundaries. They want only to be near you and cannot understand why you wouldn’t want the same. They become, in this sense, demanding. And you fear that maybe you haven’t the emotional capacity or the mental fortitude to meet their relatively innocent and admirable demands.
“The Orientation of Cats,” Julio Cortazar (tr. Gregory Rabassa)
Pets: An Anthology, edited by Jordan Castro.
The Cat, Colette
“Finder,” Joseph Grantham
“Hawk” and “Substance,” Joy Williams
Flush, Virginia Woolf
“Feral Cat,” A. L. Snijders (tr. Lydia Davis)
“Why Look at Animals,” John Berger
“For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry…” Christopher Smart (from Jubilate Agno)
“King Midas,” Izzy Casey
“Dog People,” Venita Blackburn
“Cat in the Rain,” Ernest Hemingway
WHAT TO READ UPON RETURNING FROM THE HAIR SALON AND NOT LIKING WHAT HAPPENED THERE
It seems like a small thing, but it is not. Or maybe it is a small thing, but even small things can cause private anguish. As each year passes, you have less and less to take pride in. Physically, I mean. Your eyebrows are thinning for god’s sake. You are not being melodramatic; this is the way things go—at least as far as the body is concerned. But you have your hair, and some people don’t have that. Is it vanity, or is it a way of performing yourself publicly, and is there a difference? Vanity is more than a concern with one’s appearance, of course. It is thinking about yourself seriously. Thinking about the way you walk and where your arms fall in relation to your hips. “Someone once told me that vanity is thinking about yourself as if you were someone else thinking about you,” you tell a group of your wife’s friends at a barbeque even though no one ever told you this maxim—it is actually something you made up and only attributed to someone else self-consciously in the conversation, which is a vain thing to do, you understand. When you were in middle school, you sometimes posted aphorisms to your Facebook with quotes around them, leaving the quotes unattributed to see if anyone would like them. The question of what is the right way to perform oneself in public is a difficult question. You have weighed your options mostly by watching the way others perform themselves in public, measuring your private appraisals of them against how badly they seemed to need these appraisals. When you have encountered those who do not seem to care one way or another what you think about them—and when what you think about them is actually quite impressive—then you pay attention. Being an asshole in a particularly uncaring way works for some people, but it has never worked for you. Being dopey and lovable and flamboyant has also failed. What has worked best, more often than not, is gratefulness. Gratefulness and curiosity. Gratefulness, curiosity, and a well-placed hand on an arm. Strategic eye contact. Also what helps is your full head of hair that looks good and does not look like you’ve spent any time on it at all (because most of the time you have not). You have only ever wanted amateurs to cut your hair for two reasons. First, they are easier to communicate with. There is no chance you will communicate clearly in a proper salon with a properly trained hairdresser whom you are afraid of offending. If you walk into a salon and there is music playing, and they sit you in a soft chair and offer you a beer, you know you’re fucked. You will show the woman a picture of a celebrity apologetically, knowing that the woman is thinking: Okay, buddy, Or: In your dreams, pal. And you want to say: “Look, I know—a lot of what we’re looking at in this picture is a very precise bone structure, we’re looking at a face that is doing a lot of work; all I’m needing you to notice is at the back of his head there, where the hair is a little longer than the sides.” The other nice thing about amateurs cutting your hair is that they’ll do it a little badly. When it’s done right badly, it’s really a good head of hair.
I Look Divine, Christopher Coe
“O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer,” John Cheever
“Comme,” Paul Dalla Rosa
Beautiful Star, Yukio Mishima (tr. Stephen Dodd)
Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz
“The Drunk, Gay Barber,” Writer’s Life Tips
“Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Unstitching,” Camilla Grudova
“October,” May Swenson
“Beauty, Love and Vanity Itself” and “The Widow and the Hamburger,” Diane Williams
WHAT TO READ IF YOU RECENTLY PICKED UP THAT BEST-SELLING NOVEL BY THE FRUSTRATINGLY SUCCESSFUL WRITER OF LITERARY FICTION AND FOUND THE FIRST SENTENCE COMPLETELY UNDERWHELMING
Sure, it's validating; your own relative lack of success is not a You Problem as much as it is a problem of taste, the problem of a public who happily settles for plodding narratives and imprecise lyricism. The success of the book is a symptom of our ever-increasing hunger for immediate gratification, though, you wonder, scanning the first page of the novel and turning to the second, what about any of this is gratifying? Why would someone read this book instead of watching bad television? Bad television is just as disposable, but it is much easier to consume, and generally, you laugh more. You realize, though, that any reading, even bad reading, has become a sign of distinction, a way for someone to count themselves serious and thoughtful; it is tied at the ankle to our rabid fascination with self-improvement. You are discouraged, reading the second chapter of the novel, flipping distractedly forward to the middle of the book. You grow despondent and write little mean notes in the margins. The novel won a significant literary award and was shortlisted for pretty much every honor available to a book of its kind. It was read in book clubs and was displayed prominently on the Staff Picks table of your local bookshop. The author received a Guggenheim. According to more than one critic, this is a “courageous novel.” The courage seems to be located in the “unflinching honesty” with which the author writes about sex. Reading this praise, you wonder about the sex lives of such critics. Hesitantly, you ask your peers if they have read the book. Generally the response is not as cruel as you had hoped. What is happening, you think. Here’s the thing, though—you have to be honest—the day before your underwhelming encounter with the best-selling novel, you opened a Substack post from a writer who (although more successful than you) is very much not a best-selling writer. The Substack prose was just as bad as the prose in the novel. Bad writing is everywhere, it turns out—among the Guggenheimed literati and substack derelicts alike. You recognize, as you stand in judgment, how condescending and egotistical all this is—but we are due for a little more well-appropriated condescension and egoism in the arts, you tell yourself. Sometimes now, you think about the best-selling novel when you write. It creeps into your thinking. The book is undeniably a success, and you, of course, want to be a success. You worry that the shadow influence of this novel might infect your writing in some way. You write a few sentences and feel that sexually courageous novel lurking somewhere behind your prose. What you need now is a new book to read, a book that will shock your system and make language a problem for you again.
Geography and Plays, Gertrude Stein
Nightwork, Christine Schutt
A German Picturesque, Jason Schwartzman
Tropisms, Nathalie Saurraute (tr. Maria Jolas)
Dissolve, Sherwin Bitsui
For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet (tr. Richard Howard)
Ossia, Jimin Seo
The House of Hunger, Dambudzo Marechera
The Geography of Rebels Trilogy, Maria Llansol (tr. Audrey Young)
Creature, Amina Cain
WHAT TO READ AFTER THE DOCTOR CALLS TO INFORM YOU THAT THE ROUTINE BLOODWORK CAME BACK WITH DECIDEDLY IRREGULAR RESULTS PERTAINING TO YOUR LIVER
Likely it was your wife who received the call because she is friends with the doctor—but let’s say, instead, that you received the call and relayed the information to your wife afterward. The doctor makes one thing very clear: It is imperative that you stop drinking immediately (you are probably, at that very moment, drinking a glass of wine; you look sideways-like at the wine, the way a dog eyeballs a treat set out of reach when he is told to sit and wait). In the coming days there will be an ultrasound and a CT scan of your liver, you are informed. What are they looking for? Anything, really. Something bumpy and sickly and deadly. When you hang up the phone, you decide not to worry yet. You relay the information to your wife calmly, as if this is just one more thing that happens to men in their early thirties. Maybe your wife works “in medicine,” so she knows about these things, and you generally off-load any medical anxiety onto her. When you tell her the liver numbers, she says nothing and makes her lips tight. You decide now is the time to worry. Then it is waiting. Three days. The question of how to live if maybe you are dying is another difficult question. There is no reason not to continue your ordinary routines, so you continue your routines. The baby—if you have a baby—will need to be changed, so you change the baby. There is no reason not to go to work, so you go to work. You are worried all the time in the back of your throat. In your fingers. You feel as though your eyes are opened very wide and never shut, and everything you see is seeing too much. Everything you see has become suddenly incredibly substantial. Holding a plate in your hands is holding a very heavy, very hard thing in your hands. Driving to work the morning after the phone call, the sky was orange, and water had collected in empty cornfields, and the sky was in the water too. Seeing it was like seeing it for the first time, seeing it like something you would never see again. This is what the potential diagnosis does to you—it makes you see in time with the time of the world. Maybe your job is one of those fake jobs—a “copywriting” position justified by the fact that your immediate superiors feel immense shame anytime they are made to write words on a page. You finish your work in fifteen minutes and sit in your cubicle doing nothing for the next seven hours and thank god because you wouldn’t be good for much else that morning. Sitting in your cubicle watching Austyn Gillette’s “Radiant Cure” Part on YouTube you are thinking about your liver and wondering if you can feel it, certain, suddenly, that you can feel it. Feeling it must be a bad sign. Your body—especially the inside parts—should remain unfelt. When you are home again in the evening, after the child has been put to bed, the question of what to read becomes a suddenly very consequential question.
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
“Myself I Sing” & “Psalm,” George Oppen
“Paean to Place” & “[What horror to awake at night],” Lorine Neidecker
The Prone Gunman, Jean-Patrick Manchette (tr. James Brook)
“Speak, You Also,” Paul Celan (tr. Michael Hamburger)
Persona, Ezra Pound
The Shaking of the Foundations, Paul Tillich
“The Instant of My Death,” Maurice Blanchot (tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg)
Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (tr. Douglas J. Weatherford)
“A Doctor’s Visit,” Anton Chekhov (tr. Constance Garnett)
Aug. 9 — Fog, Kathryn Scanlan
WHAT TO READ IF YOUR WRITING, IN RECENT MONTHS, HAS TURNED UNEXPECTEDLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
Maybe you find this encouraging—a sign that the work has become consequential for you and not merely technical—or maybe you are uncomfortable seeing yourself on the page and worry that you have resorted to cheap tricks. For a long time, you defined yourself against such autobiographical impulses and privately considered them a crutch for others. Sure, it is sexy in its own way, but your literary predilections have always hewed closer to those of the early 20th-century novel; your aims are different, you think, than the aims of contemporary diarists of autofiction. Whatever seductive appeal you hope to achieve in your writing (and you do hope the writing has some seductive appeal), is, at best, a counterintuitive sort of seduction (you tell yourself). When you were confronted, for the second time, by the Baptist woman passing out pamphlets at the petting zoo, you did not think: what a story this will make. When your son sang a song in the shower, you did not take notes for later transposition. When you sit down to write, you begin by amassing words and images that mean nothing to you. Cold words and hard images. You trust that, once combined and shaped and smoothed and formed, these arbitrary words and images will suggest vast webs of meaning that somehow contain you. It is a nearly psychoanalytic confidence—a conviction that your own surging and unseeable neuroses will inevitably find their way onto the page. You have always wanted to disappear on the page. What has most moved you in literature is not the vulnerability and disclosures of writers but the unexpected shock of an authorial gesture that could not be concealed—the sense that the page is haunted by the hidden human presence. This is what you have sought to cultivate in your own writing, and yet when you reread these recent stories—uh oh. It’s all quite flagrant, and you are not sure what to do about it.
Reader's Block, David Markson
Pamela: A Novel, Pamela Lu
Speedboat, Renata Adler
The Sarah Book, Scott McClanahan
“Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges (tr. Andrew Hurley)
Self-Portrait in Green, Marie NDiaye (tr. Jordan Stump)
The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald (tr. Michael Hulse)
“A Movable Feast,” Graham Irvin
Here is Where We Meet, John Berger
Stream System, Gerald Murnane
I Am Not Jackson Pollock, John Haskell
“The Jewels of the Cabots,” John Cheever
COLUMN: You'll Thank Me Later--Reading Recommendations from Stephen Mortland That Will Solve All Your Problems
WHAT TO READ IN THE CAR WHILE YOU ARE WAITING TO PICK UP YOUR DAUGHTER FROM SCHOOL
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would love to read these in a book form
Great list, Stephen. Zeno's Conscience is the best. Getting read to read a memoir that Svevo's wife wrote about their relationship.