Sailing Through This to That

We Meet Again

First, I’d like to thank you all for your kind responses to last week’s newsletter! I was glad to see that many of you not only read the Rilke, but also enjoyed it. Perhaps one day we’ll stumble along to the Second Elegy.

Second, a correction: Rilke is Austrian, not German as I claimed in last newsletter. It’s fun to make mistakes because then every subsequent newsletter is just a correction to the previous, and we get to continue like this in some redundantly linked past-future reality until we finally land on Truth. So, that’s great!

Lastly, here’s the subscribe button!

Let’s do this thing…

On Reading

Sometime in January, I landed on a 2023 resolution: to finish one book per week.

I know what some of you are thinking: “What a bold commitment, Robiny! Are you making sure to brag about this enough?”

Why, yes, kind stranger. I am doing a great job of bragging about it. Partially for accountability’s sake. Largely for my pride.

And I know what others of you are thinking: “Only a book a week?”

I mean sometimes it’s more. Look, I don’t work in publishing, okay?? I’m doing my best. (I think I’m remembering correctly when I say a poetry professor once answered the question of “How did you get into poetry?” with “I moved to New York and read a book a day.” So.)

How I make it work:

• I said finish. There have certainly been weeks so far where I can’t quite make it to the finish line, so I instead pull down my half-finished Fran Lebowitz Reader from the shelf and eke it out in a day. This is satisfying in its own way.

• Most poetry books aren’t all that long.

• I have a 45-minute train commute every day, long lunch breaks, and an aversion to television and TikTok.

• Sneaky motivational tactics. The best/most embarrassing motivation? No social media until the book is done. It’s not much in terms of reward, but it is deadly when it comes to habit-swapping: in a miracle of miracles, the urge to scroll has slowly begun to melt into the the urge to…turn? (flip? paginate?) All week, I read-and-train, read-and-walk, and read-and-sip until I hit that satisfying back cover. Then, I re-download Instagram, experience a couple of hours of inconsolable homesickness for snow (and all of you jerks who are thigh-deep in it), and start all over again!

• Read-walks. I told someone recently that the only reason I’d want to be famous is so that there’s a little-known but loyal Twitter fan page of paparazzi photos of me walking and reading. You know, like this. Is this an incredibly niche desire and one that in no way compensates for the great pressures, responsibilities, and scrutinies that immense fame will weigh upon me? Yes. Shall I persist? Yes. To manifest this dream (and for the sheer joy of it), I’ve been taking myself on read-walks, where I happily stroll the streets of New York while reading my book. “Don’t you run into people?” No! New Yorkers have been developing their texting-and-walking techniques for years; as a read-walker, I am merely a ship adrift among many ships. The iceberg? Why, poop, of course.

So, all that considered, it’s definitely an “only??” situation.

Anyways, this activity has now become most of my personality, so I shall write about it.

Robiny’s Review of Books

The Goods

• Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew-Bose

  • This doesn’t happen often, but when I was reading Chew-Bose’s playful and esoteric essay collection, I had the great urge to look her up on Instagram. Not necessarily because I had to know what she looked like (she was, of course, pointy and beautiful) but because I felt a deep conviction that she and I might somehow already be best friends. We’re not best friends (yet), but we are both 28ish-year-old writers living in New York who like their friends, plotlessness (in books and in life), and Virginia Woolf. Which brings me to:

• Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf

  • It’s Virginia being Virginia! This collection gathers The Goat’s¹ autobiographical writings from throughout her life through focused pieces that tell you everything and nothing about Virginia’s mind, the way Virginia will and must. For more on Jinny, see the past.

• Normal Distance, Elisa Gabbert

  • While I had heard great things about this collection, I was spooked by its cover. Finally, I took it home and it turned out to be delightful! So, it just goes to show… never mind. Gabbert populates this book with metaphysical insight in tasty, witty bites. Some randomly-selected nuggets: “I think panic is a decent strategy,” “I think every well-meaning critique of-war film will eventually turn into ‘explosions look beautiful,’” “Why do I have to make this future that already exists?” and “I don’t trust the news unless I can’t understand it.”

• Engine Empire, Cathy Park-Hong

  • This collection by Park-Hong is tenacious. She is absolutely brutal, wise, and expansive. In one book, she gives us an old-timey but deadly narrative of Western Expansion, a present-day industrialized Chinese boomtown, and a portrait of a sparkly, off-kilter future. I don’t know how we get from the Wild West to flying saucers, but we do and I’m along for the ride.

• The Fran Lebowitz Reader, Fran Lebowitz

  • The perfect subway read. She makes me nostalgic for 1970’s New York: the land where life is all about smoking, complaining about cabs, and avoiding landline phone calls. I don’t usually laugh out loud while reading, but I can honestly say that I was LOLling every other page. Which is the best kind of LOL, because I also felt Smart while LOLing. ROFL. LMAO. Okay, I’m done.

The Bads

It’s not you; it’s me. I just… I don’t really like fiction. There are a few books that pop their little hands out and whoosh sleep powder over me to lull me into their plot lines, but generally, I just don’t like it. To me, nonfiction is like looking through a window: the author has, perhaps, stained the glass or drawn the curtains through syntax or style, but I’ve been promised that there is something true on the other side, so I look. In fiction, as much as I try, I just can’t get past the window. Sometimes, the window is so gorgeous (Woolf) that I’m perfectly content looking at it forever. Sometimes, the window is so clear—the narration so realized—that I forget about it entirely (I’m reading East of Eden right now, and the characters feel entirely alive to me). But as soon as there’s a misstep, I snap out and get stuck looking glumly at the window again.

• Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

  • The misstep: Not telling us outright that it’s Shakespeare’s son. One review reads, “Without Shakespeare’s name in the text, one gets the feeling that this family could be anyone’s.” Sorry, in 1575?? No. It is not anyone’s family. It is Shakespeare’s and there’s a witch-mother and twins that switch bodies on their death bed. No.

• Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel

  • Oh boy, I wanted to like this one. But I could not! And again, the reason is so weak: the details felt… made up? The best novels feel inevitable. This one felt like spangly. One review reads, "A superb novel . . . [that] leaves us not fearful for the end of the world but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence.” Honestly, one should be pretty fearful of an end of the world that concludes with the murder-suicide of a post-pandemic cult-leader. One would fear it if the novel actually caused one to believe it.

Also, how did I get stuck with two books about pandemics? Help…

The Uglies

The Uglies here are the Ugly-But-Goods—the books that required a bit of teeth-gritting, but were ultimately worth the effort.

• Salvador, Joan Didion

  • Even as a Didion fan, I can’t say I was blown away by Salvador. Didion has executed (😬) stunning images here, crafting a powerful portrait of El Salvador’s 1980’s violent landscape. But I can’t say I needed Joan Didion to write it. The best part of Didion is that no matter what she writes about, she always seems to find a way to write about herself. When she speaks of hippie culture in California, she is speaking about her California. When she criticizes the Reagans’ table settings, it’s because she’s eaten off the same china. This is also the most infuriating thing about her—Joan Didion’s irrefutable privilege quickly sours her “everyman” status. In writing about El Salvador, Didion very much needed not to write about herself. The terror she experienced as a two-week visitor in El Salvador is not the terror of Salvadorians. That said, I learned a great deal about El Salvador and I respect her for taking on the project.

• Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith

  • I love Zadie Smith, I just don’t like this. Where Feel Free, Smith’s other essay collection, felt like a realized book that happened to consist of previous essays, the first half of Changing My Mind feels a bit more like we’re fishing through the bottom of a file cabinet. (Granted, it’s Zadie Smith’s filing cabinet, so it’s immensely smart and stylish.) By the second half, though, I was along for the ride, especially for her analysis of David Foster-Wallace and anything to do with her family.

• Ventrakl, Christian Hawkey

  • This is a poet’s poetry book with a few of those squishy instances that open themselves up to that “This is what you learn in an MFA?” comment. The premise? A man tries to understand the poet Georg Trakl by translating him, imagining conversations with him, and analyzing bits of biographical and photographical information. Some of his translation strategies include “shooting, with a 12 gauge, an open Trakl book from a distance of ten feet, then translating, with a dictionary, a remaining page of perforated text” and “working from a book of Trakl’s poems which [he] had left outside to decompose over a full year in a glass jar filled with rainwater and leaves and mosquito larvae until its pages, over time, dissolved into words, pieces of words, word-stems, floating up and rearranging themselves on the surface of the jar.” I’d recommend it. But I’d recommend reading Trakl pre-fermentation first.

A Palate-Cleanser

Note: Thank you all for bearing with the Rilke last week! Here’s something to go down smooth. (Recommendation: save it in your notes app for a quick toast, or send it to a dear friend who happens to like boats and somehow also lives over a St. Mary’s Harbor in New Zealand.)

Thoughts

Just a few of them:

• I love the line break in “may you kiss / the wind then turn from it”. The break suspends us, for a moment, in a kiss that hangs off the line as a complete idea. (It’s a wish in itself: may you kiss.) Then, the next line shuffles us along so swiftly: in one breath, we’ve realized that we’ve only kissed wind and we’ve turned away from it. From a freeze frame, fast-forward.

• “certain that it will / love your back” is such a wonderful play on words: not “love you back,” but “love your back”—as if the love is not requited, but it is propulsive. (See Rilke and leaving your lover.)

• What a vague and true wish: to “sail through this to that.” We may not have words for what “this” is, or what “that” will be, but we do very much want to sail through this and into that.

New York in my Notes App

A few moment-thoughts I’ve collected this week:

• New York: Where leggy models in leather can order egg salad.

• The moment between a dog on a lap and a boy with a unicorn helmet: a sudden eye-level intimacy.

• The man who put his hand out and touched the train as it slowed—like settling a horse—like it was an animal he knew.

• The man who began his run the moment he exited the subway car—swaggerly jogging down the Union Square platform, up the stairs, and then along the street.

• Find a book that slows down in the moment that it’s supposed to speed up—like Take On Me at the chorus.

Quote of the Week:

“This is a picture of a heart. It stays still and doesn’t do anything at all.”

- 4-year-old dictating the caption to her picture book.

A Reading Prompt:

(If you’re in publishing, just skip over this section—for your own sake.)

Read a book this week! Probably, the book will be between 200 and 300 pages, so you’ll have to read about 40 pages a day. This may necessitate a read-walk. If this feels absurd, choose a book that you’ve almost-finished-but-haven’t. Just pick it up. Delete Instagram/TikTok/LinkedIn until it’s done.

And here’s the important part:

When you’re finished, close the back cover and hold the book for a minute. Feel it in its wholeness—no bookmark, no dog ear, but complete. Think about how smart you are now. Feel how much people respect you now. Place it neatly on some corner of your desk like an incredibly intellectual little trophy. Maybe even take a photo of it. Wiggle your happy little reading shoulders. Then respond to this email with what you read. I’ll be waiting.

Thank you for your readership! I’ve loved thinking with you every week, even if sometimes I claim that Rilke is German (sorry). Please let me know what’s been working for you, what you’ve been scrolling past, and what you want more of. (Like dangling modifiers, for example.)

And, as always, please feel encouraged to pass this newsletter along to some kind friend. Hopefully, they’ll be grateful. If not, that’s my bad and I apologize for making it weird with your friend.

May you sail through this to that,

Robiny