#241

Read The Hakawati, by Rabih Alameddine. Loved it so much. Classic shit. Then I reread the Digger omnibus. Unflagging quality. So fucking good and really took me back to what passes for some of the good old days on the wide world web. Now I have picked up Here I Am, by Jonathan Safran Foer. I think the rule for awhile will be thick books, content and provenance secondary but at least every other book should be new to me. Want long trawls. Will definitely read War and Peace again sometime in the next couple years, I think. Completing that book may mark a milestone in my life, on par with The Silmarillion and reading Nietzsche. 

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Saw a red-shouldered hawk in flight above the car on a drive just now. 'Twas Ezra who spotted it. Its tail band was wonderfully stark, bright flashing cream arc across dark chocolate fan. 

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Left the post at that for the day and ended up finishing Here I Am the next. Now it is the day after that, and I have read the first few pages of Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry. Maybe I'd better publish this before I have to amend it again. Maybe I really should just shut up about what I'm reading for the rest of my life and amortize that time into reading more. It is not outside of reason to say that everyone should do the same with many, if not all the things they talk about and do. 

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Here I Am was excellent (it's laughable. I could never stop myself, so I why do I bother to think of it?). I want to read it again. I want to read everything again. Why can't I get a Guggenheim or something for that? Be good to cut, say, a nickel a word, keep writing for free. In this economy, you say? I can make it work, I reply. Life takes so much goddamn time and energy to live, setting aside how much life it costs to get money to sustain life (almost always most of it). Give me the money to live--just to live--without the sacrifice of this time, and I would read not twice as much, not four or five times as much, but ten at least. How ten? Out of one hundred and twenty-six waking hours in a week, roughly, at least forty are spent literally on the clock, but at least twenty more are spent around the clock, like traveling to and from, and thinking about it, and getting ready, and so on. It's fucking tedious just to consider it. Then, the cleaning, the care of cats and men, the cooking, the eating, the shitting and showering, the going out to get stuff or see people, the consumption of other media in other mediums, the creation of art, the listening, the seeing, and so on ad scholastica. By which I hope to evoke the pedantic listing of everything I do and perform.

Anyway as it stands I barely get to read ten hours a week, broken up and scattered. That's nothing, and pathetic. If I were able to read books the way I work shifts--eight-hour blocks where nothing else is expected at me, and slacking frowned upon--you would not see me fucking around with my paltry however-many books a year. I would not have just ten bookshelves and be pruning them when able. I would live at a library, and I would read its entire ever-expanding contents every five years or so. Fuck you if you think I'm lying. I'll read your stupid tits off. I'll read your stupid dick back into your body.

--JL