I have been getting lost in Indiana's Constitution these past few weeks. I have books started and not finished. It is to the point that I decided last night to take off two days. In the old days, I took on too much work and would then get buried under the obsession of getting it done and then the despondency started taking over. I like to think I have learned to change my behaviors, to be wary of myself, and this is proof of the effects of my education.

But that does not mean you should not be reading - get rid of the smart phone, your apps, your email, and start reading.

Summer reading: 50 of the best new books to dive into

Your holiday reading list: chosen by Zadie Smith, David Nicholls and more (lots of Irish writers!)

10 Banned Literary Classics You Might Not Know

Gabriel García Márquez on the Magic of Juan Rulfo

On the contrary: I felt I still had many novels in me, but I couldn’t conceive of a convincing and poetic way of writing them. That is where I was when Álvaro Mutis climbed with great strides the seven storeys up to my apartment with a bundle of books, extracted from this mountain the smallest and shortest, and said as he laughed himself to death:
“Read this shit and learn!”
The book was Pedro Páramo.
That night I couldn’t sleep until I had read it twice. Not since the awesome night I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in a down-at-the-heels student boarding house in Bogotá – almost ten years earlier – had I been so overcome. The next day I read The Plain in Flames, and my astonishment remained intact. Much later, in a doctor’s waiting room, I came across a medical journal with another of Rulfo’s scattered masterpieces: The Legacy of Matilde Arcángel’. The rest of that year I couldn’t read a single other author, because they all seemed inferior.
***
I wanted to write all this to say that my profound exploration of Juan Rulfo’s work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing, and for that reason it would be impossible for me to write about him without it seeming that I’m writing about myself. I also want to say that I read it all again before writing these brief reminiscences, and that once again I am the helpless victim of the same astonishment that struck me the first time around. They number scarcely more than three hundred pages, but they are as great – and, I believe, as enduring – as those of Sophocles.

Byron and Borgia: A Meditation on an Impossible Encounter

War, disastrous sex and a lot of lawsuits: the chaotic aftermath of Motown’s peak years

Power and choice in the 1930s novel by Julia Cooke:

The book’s world, of women engaging deeply with ambition and pregnancy with no specter of religious moralizing, thrilled me. I soon learned other novels and stories from the era evoked that world, too. A lot of them. “At the rate [abortion] is occurring as an item of the heroine’s experience in current novels,” wrote one Bookman critic in a 1933 review of a Sinclair Lewis novel, it “is likely to be looked upon as an initiation rite of our period by sociologists of the future.”
This, needless to say, did not happen. Instead, the literary community and the political right today appear to have agreed on something like an abortion-plot amnesia, forgetting that these narratives ever exerted so much power over the American imagination at all.
Religious, anti-choice conservatives insist that legal restrictions on abortion and widespread moral consensus successfully kept women from daring to have them. All the while, according to a crop of recent essays that draw attention to abortion narratives in literature and film, before Roe v. Wade no one dared speak of the abortions they did have, or certainly not in interesting ways. Abortion happened, of course, but quietly; this is why the years between the 1860s, when a wave of legislation criminalizing abortion hit the books, and the ascendance of the American women’s rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s are known as the “century of silence.” In these essays, on the many reading lists assembled after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, among the book clubs that read abortion-themed novels, the oldest title mentioned is usually Alice Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian.
Even as historians have begun to challenge the idea that silence reigned in this era, books like Hahn’s Affair, or Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed or Margery Latimer’s This Is My Body, are still rarely mentioned. Were they simply not good enough, not profound enough, not numerous enough to constitute a collective? None of this, as it turns out, is right.

***

The abortion narratives of the late 1920s and 1930s responded to their own recent historical currents: the nineteenth-century movement to restrict the legality of abortion, for one. Before then, people and institutions alike—the Catholic church among them—agreed that human life did not begin before “quickening,” a subjective time frame that relied upon when a fetus could be felt in a childbearing body, and which proved hard to shake: even into the twentieth century, consensus and state court systems often considered pre-quickening abortion an obviously lesser offense. The leaders of the anti-abortion movement openly admitted that their goal was to keep women tied up at home. “The true wife” does not seek “undue power in public life … [or] privileges not justly her own,” wrote Dr. Horatio R. Storer, the leader of the medical campaign against abortion. Enough people knew, by the 1920s, what bunk Storer sold. They’d just lived through the First World War, and the fight for women’s suffrage, and Prohibition, which cracked open, with its lawless speakeasies, women’s public social lives.

Examining climate change

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman review – a pleasure and an education (I read Sand's Indiana while in prison and enjoyed the novel without going nuts over it; I liked Impromptu, and wonder if we are all more interested in Sand than her work. That is if her life was not her art.)

Another review of War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline review – disturbing, compelling, incomplete. Now this is the mark of a great writer, to be a nut like Céline and not have a completed novel and to have this said about your work:

War was to have been the second volume of a trilogy of novels provisionally entitled Childhood-War-London. It is an extraordinary work, hysterical in tone and demented in content. Had it been completed, it might have been a masterpiece; as it stands, or staggers, it is deeply disturbing and horribly compelling.

What I write is not compelling.

The Los Angeles Review of Books

Southern Humanities Review