What I was reading in June
Books Bought or Borrowed
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy
There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé, Morgan Parker
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration, Michelle Alexander
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Jonathan Mahler
Modern Romance: An Investigation, Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenburg
How to Ruin Everything, George Watsky
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Books Read
Radical Hope
How to Ruin Everything, George Watsky
Makeup Bought
A shade of lipstick almost identical to one I already own
An eyeshadow actually identical to one I already own
Bright fuchsia lipstick in a tiny size
Lip gloss that I thought was lipstick, and was disappointed to discover was not, but kept anyway
I don’t enjoy wearing makeup, but once or twice a year I decide that dabbing things on my face is the way I want to change my life and wind up spending too much money on things I’ll never use. I keep buying the same shades of lipstick over and over, keep buying the same exact things over and over, as if they’ll save me from despair. As if the right color on my eyelids will make me better at socializing, make me more interesting, make me braver in public--and in private. Like it will totally change my life and erase the parts of my personality I’m ashamed of.
I’m writing about makeup I bought because I’m still not reading very much. In fact, I’m probably buying makeup because I’m not reading very much.
I also returned to the library and built up a small wall of books. They’re not related to the resistance. They’re not related to anything of the moment. I just want to read them.
I skimmed my way through How to Ruin Everything, a collection of essays from spoken word poet and rapper George Watsky. I fell back into Hamilton and then went deep on Watsky this month. Hamilton led to revisiting the Hamilton Mixtape, which led me to Watsky's 2016 album xInfinity, and eventually to videos and then to this book (also written in 2016 -- what a hard working person). They had it at the library and feeling despondent about not reading and about buying makeup I knew I'd never enjoy using, I ordered it.
I've been feeling guilty about not reading, but I've also started feeling guilty about what I read if and when I do. Nothing's clicked for me in so long, and I'm still burnt out on despair. So this book was a nice brief reprieve from the not-reading guilt, if not the other kind.
All told, it was pretty fluffy, a young guy doing stupid shit, but underneath all the levity and self-deprecation is this fear of running out of time. It’s the clock Lin-Manuel Miranda talks about in this interview with Michael Ian Black, and the driving current of Hamilton too. The fear becomes more overt by the middle-end of How to Ruin Everything and "Crying & Baseball" and "What Year is it?" are particularly poignant. "Crying & Baseball" explores how love of baseball can be both learned and inherited, and how the love of something silly can be the foundation of a love that's too deep to acknowledge very often. It also looks at how the things we love and the people we share that love with matter, and how when we lose the people and are left with only the thing we love, it becomes a remembrance and an altar. All of this is a roundabout reflection on Watsky's father and his father’s best friend's suicide, but the fact that it starts with baseball is so resonant to the ways that sometimes we can only touch the dark deep emotions while doing something else superficially. How we have big conversations in the car or in a stadium, when there’s something to occupy the top of the mind with so we can dip in and out of the harder things.
"What Year is it?" follows "Crying & Baseball" and winds through family history as well as social history while Watsky lays out some of what it's like to live with epilepsy, and how the disorder casts the props of quotidien life into much more sinister instruments. Watsky's great-aunt Pam had epilepsy too, and died after hitting her head on a bathtub during a seizure. Watsky holds his experiences up to his great-aunt, touching on the social stigma associated with epilepsy then and now -- from forced sterilization in the early twentieth century to misguided pity from witnesses of his most recent seizure. It's a really lovely essay about family and impermanence and existential threats and it fits in nicely with the entire collection which moves from a lighthearted tone into something deeper and then into something more resolute. I wanted to read this book quickly, and did, and that was this month's gift.
On the other hand, Radical Hope I kind of had to hammer my way through. I probably shouldn’t have read it all at once, I should have skipped in and out, the way you sometimes can with collections of essays. For right now, the letters that spoke most powerfully to me weren’t the ones written to children or the future, they were the ones written to the past or present. The ones extending beyond children and parent relationships and into something fuzzier but just as powerful. I didn't read Radical Hope well. I was in an off mood and pushing to read it to have something to write about here, but it deserves a return -- or some of the essays do. Perhaps if I can read something more substantive in July, I can begin to put some of the letters next to longer works, make them talk or dance or shout.
I also started Modern Romance -- and then had to return it to the library before I finished it. I could probably have anticipated that though. The first thing I did with the book was kill a waterbug in my apartment -- I'm just really good at living a glamorous single life and not ready to give it up. The book didn't have much of a chance. Homegoing and The Underground Railroad came way sooner than the library said they would and I wound up with too many books to read, and they're in high demand so couldn't be renewed. Maybe this fall?