Things I’ve loved reading recently:
I just finished “On the Morning After the Sixties” from Joan Didion’s The White Album, and sometimes I wonder what it would have been like not to have missed the bus of the Sixties.
“When I think about the Sixties now I think about an afternoon not of the Sixties at all, an afternoon early in my sophomore year at Berkeley, a bright autumn Saturday in 1953. I was lying on a leather couch in a fraternity house… lying there alone reading a book by Lionel Trilling and listening to a middle-aged man pick out on a piano in need of tuning the melodic line to ‘Blue Room.’ All that afternoon he sat at the piano and all that afternoon he played “Blue Room” and he never got it right.”
After that, I was again drawn back to Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which I keep returning to, reading random passages from now and then. Every time I open it, it rekindles this specific kind of imagination in me, a way of seeing. Her afterword is so relatable:
“I wanted to write the kind of book I like to read,” Renata Adler said, “which is narrative, thrillers, with plots, suspense, and dialogue, with characters and things going on, things which you wish to happen and things you do not. I found I didn’t seem to be doing that. I thought, ‘Well, now what do I do?’”
Speedboat was the solution. Reading that felt so true to my heart because I’ve been there for so long, just trying to figure out what kind of form actually fits my story. I’ve had the exact same problem with my own manuscript.
I struggled through reading Proust. The first twenty pages were actually riveting, but then it lost me, I will get back to it soon.