The Tyranny of A Reading List

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• I AM A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER PLAYED BY TOMMY LEE JONES AND THE THING I WOULD LOVE MOST IS IF SOMEONE ON MY DANG TEAM COULD JUST TELL ME WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE at HAD

I Gotta Get Better at Reading, I Say For the Hundredth Time

If you’ve written something on the Internet and we’re Internet acquaintances and you’d assumed I’d read the thing you read: I’m sorry. I probably haven’t. It’s not your fault, as these sorts of things often go. It’s my fault. I’m bad at reading. I wasn’t always bad at reading though. When I was young, I would lose an entire Saturday afternoon flopped back on a couch to a book, fervently flipping pages as I felt transported into a different mindset. It made me want to go to school for writing, and when school for writing made me into a writer, I lost my connection to reading.

Something clicked in my brain where the thing I wanted to do the most interacted terribly with the thing I liked to do the most, and for a good 10 years after getting a degree in Fiction Writing I neither read nor wrote any fiction. My mornings are usually dedicated to my media diet, whether it’s watching a movie or working on a writing piece or reading a book or playing video games, but the more I’ve tried to be a writer in my life, the further away from myself the art I consumed needed to be. You can only get so many short humor pieces rejected before every short humor piece you read starts to feel like a reminder that you should be working on your own writing. Better pick up the series of post-war Italian novels if you want to enjoy something; your friend’s serialized fiction newsletter is going to read like a dare. Go watch a movie; fuck it, you’re never going to make a movie.

I was lucky enough last week that my first non-nonfiction piece was published over at HAD. It’s a dumb idea I had about a stereotype of a type of character a certain beloved actor tends to play, and it’s both indebted to pop culture, has jokes, gets weird, and plays to a strict structural form. In short: it’s everything I’ve ever wanted to write finally distilled in less than 800 words on a page, and I love it. It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever written. Seriously, go read it.

Did you read it? Oh, you already saw my promoting it last week on numerous social media channels. Okay. I get it. I know what that’s like. When people post their own asks, I’ve been hesitant to click. What if I don’t like what they wrote? Even worse: what if I love it? What if I love it so much that I immediately feel guilt for not working on my own pieces?

That attitude has shifted for me since my piece went live. I’ve felt less pressure about what I click on and what I read because hey, I’ve already done it. Plus, I got an iPad and it’s way easier to read stuff online with one of those. So I’m trying to pick up where I left off, find the things people have shared, and go back to read them thoroughly. It’s only fair for how much I’ve asked people to do the same for me. I’ve got a bookmark tab that’s longer than I want to admit, but easy does it, one at a time.

I’m sure a lot of my struggles with reading mirror the same struggles I faced with writing. I’m both ambitious and anxious, overconfident in my abilities, and unable to concentrate my brain long enough to execute them because I over-examine my thoughts and intentions too much. But there’s something else, there, too. Earlier I wrote about a sort of “dry January” month where I was trying to unplug a bit more from trying to suck down as much media as possible, but I also heard a podcast themed around “dry January” aimed at examining relationships with addiction. On that episode, A.J. Daulerio talked about how all of his professional successes felt like nothing the moment he achieved them, and it immediately forced him into a position of reaching towards the next thing he wanted. It was the main aspect of his depression that fueled his addictions.

That struck a chord with me: I’m the son of an alcoholic who has been sober for the exact number of years I’ve been alive, and I’ve never quite faced what my addict behaviors are like. I’m lucky that I only enjoy substances in moderation, but when I get my mind focused on something I tend to become obsessed and will reorganize every priority I have in order to indulge myself. Needing a new pair of jeans maybe becomes an obsessive quest that eats up two days of my life as I eschew every task I’m supposed to complete until I have denim in hand. If there’s something I want, I feel trapped into wanting it more than anything I ever have before. Once I get it, I’m never satisfied with the result. The moment I had my first writing published professionally, I felt absolutely nothing. All it meant was that everything I wrote deserved to be published from that point on, and if you can imagine, that’s a great way to breed a depression in your life that wasn’t there before.

So I’ve been mindful of that impulse. And I’ve tried to stay present as this new short piece was published. I received great feedback, I shared it with friends and family, and I actually felt a sense of accomplishment seeing my name in print that I’d never felt before. I also gave myself an ultimatum: no working on any new writing until I read all the stuff I was supposed to read.

Maybe if I concentrate hard enough I can forget that I’m a writer and focus purely on the bliss I once felt as a reader and reader alone. But then again, I’m supposed to put out one of these newsletter every week.

Read

• Hellboy

As I said above, I got an iPad. And my local library has a digital comics service I can use. That means I can finally go through the entirety of Hellboy and the B.P.R.D collections legally and easily. Hellboy is maybe one of the best-crafted series out there. Mike Mignola’s artwork is always stunning to look at, and his use of shadow to block out shapes and figures is unparalleled. But his scripts are also incredibly thought out. Every panel drives the story forward through image first, and dialogue fills in the gaps when you need more information. The stories and themes are big, focusing on end-of-the-world narratives, and for me, it’s a great way to re-center my problems. Ain’t no seven-headed serpent coming down from space to end the world today so maybe I can just go ahead and finish this newsletter without whining.

Watch

• True Detective Season 4

Everyone just needs to shut the fuck up about this one. Is it the same thing as the first three seasons? No. It’s a new showrunner. Is the music supervision atrocious? Yes. But it’s also just a good season of TV, focused in on the bad decisions we make to try and get around the worst parts of ourselves. The story isn’t the mystery, the story is about the people who are trying to solve it. Which is what the first three seasons were. But calling this show True Detective made sure it had a bigger built-in audience than if it was a standalone program, but it also meant that the audience was going to turn on it the moment it was different. Some shows you can get away with shifting personnel, but True Detective had one writer for the first three seasons. It didn’t matter if that was bad or good, it just means anything else was going to be notably different.

Listen

• “Shine a Light” by Constantines

I saw Constantines open for the Weakerthans in 2004 and they blew the doors off of everything. We didn’t really have a baseline for what to do when an art rock band had deep-rooted connections to hardcore music and, say, Bruce Springsteen-style working-class rock and roll, but hey there it was. “Shine a Light” has the benefit of a slight echo as if it was recorded live in a room and gives you a slight taste of what the band sounds like on stage. And while Constantines would fuel their energy into a Can-like exercise in near-drone ambient repetition for their follow-up, Shine a Light, the album, is still a big rock and roll record that’s fun to revisit. Their albums can sometimes be hard to digest in total, but sometimes certain songs (like “Shine a Light”) can be more accessible to bring you into more of what the band is best at: defying expectations with guitars.

Consume

• Pistachios

We just got a Costco membership, and with that Costco membership came an enormous bag of shelled and salted pistachios. Pistachios are the king of the nut world: dynamic, savory, lightly aromatic and sweet, and overall just incredible to eat. I like a shelled pistachio for the effort required, but damn it’s been great just grabbing a ramekin of pistachios throughout the day as a nice little snack. I like to pair them with chocolate chips for a sweet treat or eat them next to a salty cheese if I’m feeling hungry and want something satisfying. I don’t know why I’m recommending pistachios. Maybe I need to move the food part of this newsletter higher so I have more juice left when I get to it.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.