Am reading

 

Mostly I seek the promiscuous feeling of being alive.

--Lisa Robertson, Nilling, 2012:12

Dear Void,

Today’s readings (two) were all about reading. Although one, even though it seems to be a non-critical work (that is, non-academic), is also about putting practice into reading and reading into practice (cooking). Both, I think, are helping towards my thesis and my creative response to an eighteenth century manuscript, a commonplace book that belonged to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu which is held at Fisher Library, University of Sydney.

For my critical reading, I’ve been working on (scrutinising/analysing) Lisa Robertson’s Nilling. Her sentences are so swoony that you don’t care if they are true statements or false.

What makes a sentence swoony? I can’t say for sure (that would be a little like trying to work out what makes a joke funny) but Robertson’s recent book Baudelaire Fractal is fat with them. Each time I read it (or listen on Audible) I sort of bounce around looking for pen and paper, wanting to transcribe every second sentence. Not knowing what to do with myself, the lines act like bolts of electricity jolting my nerves. I have the same reaction listening to Bjork’s work. She is in conversation with Sir David Attenborough on her work Biophilia, when he describes her work as having mathematical beauty (he mentions her composition ‘Crystalline’ and foundational mathematics that can be found in the natural world and says of her music that it is . . . challenging. That it requires thought, requires full attention and perhaps isn’t recommended for someone who is tired and wanting to relax. That is, someone looking for uninvolved pleasure. The Baudelaire Fractal and Biophilia both demand involvement, which feels like complicity.

For my non-academic reading (though I think it is having more of an influence than I am yet aware of) I’ve been reading the Julie/Julia Project. The book is actually called Julie & Julia but I like to call it by Julie Powell’s original title, the project aspect being crucial to the enterprise and to the way Powell herself moved among the commodious sensations that Julia Child’s book brought her. To wit, see epigram above.

If you want a daytime, non-sensuous take on the word ‘promiscuous’, then know that the early sense was ‘consisting of elements mixed together.’ So, we could say that my reading today consisted of elements mixed together; mixing and remixing suppositions (outside of knowledge) brought about by the text, with the potentials of my own body. Et voila! I read.

Anon, Void!

Jx

 

Powell, Julie. Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen. Hachette UK, 2005

Robertson, Lisa. Nilling : Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, the Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias 1st ed. Toronto, Ont: BookThug, 2012.