About Reading Matter
I am not sure Reading Matter is the best name for what you find here. To get the first thing out of the way: There is a manuscript with that working title that has occupied me for 4+ years and is now finished; you don’t find it here (apart from a short excerpt further down). Instead, you find, among other things, a short vignette on each of the one hundred novels I have used.
The book “Reading Matter”
The book “Reading Matter” came together entirely by reading and browsing the set of one hundred English-language novels published in 1982 (i.e., no translations) using this set as source material. I have not added a single word of my own (but often removed parts of sentences). I call my way of working a resonance approach, which sounds pompous, but describes exactly what happens when I read and browse all these books stacked up on my desk: some sentence I read resonates on some passage in Reading Matter, I see if I can fit it in, and in the best case, it adds an unexpected turn or a new inflection that I am delighted to follow; and only then, the fragment is actually added. Much will later be removed or shifted; the text seems to eternally digest itself and reshape. In this process I constantly negotiate terseness and abundance, which, given the diversity of sources, is about same as avoiding both the surreal and the aimlessly redundant. I keep tight control of both the plot and the language (by choice and elimination), and in that sense, I am an author in the traditional sense. This is not the execution of some Oulipian scheme. While I am indebted to conceptual takes on writing like Kosuth’s Purloined, I aim for readability, and tend to throw out passages that I don’t enjoy re-reading.
The sources of “Reading Matter”
Of the novels in the set, 50 were authored by men, 50 by women. It was a lot more difficult to find 50 novels written by women — if you weren’t ready to fill up the category with romance novels (two are part of the set, but that seemed sufficient). Apart from classic literary fiction (Brookner, Updike, Lessing, Malamud, Ingalls, Bellow, etc.) there is also crime (I picked four novels by women with a female private eye, which was a novelty then), a few hard-to-classify books like Audre Lorde’s Zami a New Spelling of My Name, a few science fiction novels, and three pornographic novels in the set.
Why 1982?
It could have been any other year. I came across a German edition of Kosinski’s Pinball, got the original, and developed the concept from there (even though I disliked the book). I just stuck with the year that book was published, and then got more and more books from the same year until I decided to set the cut-off point at one hundred. I have in the meantime gathered another set of one hundred novels from the year 1981 and out of spite perhaps, have begun doing the same thing all over, trusting in repetition (while at the same time making attempts to escape the prison of the next set by trying other things simultaneously).
An short excerpt from “Reading Matter”: Paradise
This was a summer that could never be repeated. The way everybody was involved in everybody else’s business, there was a moment of truth when they were overcome by sheer astonishment: ‘So that’s where I’m living and the sort of people I’m living with! So this is what they’re capable of!’ Now suddenly they were a family, a closed, mysterious organism where they could disport themselves and pretend to be peasants, could get their hands dirty planting potatoes.
They understood only that they were free, in the company of their own kind, and they all went on, each completely expunged of all thoughts and reasoning. How much more alive one became when one had something to believe in! A photo, taken at the hay-making, shows a happy, smiling group in front of a horse-drawn cart. Louis has a scythe slung over his shoulder; Paula is holding a hay rake. Her son, in the photograph, looking half mutinous, half pleading, stands eerily alone. John looks morose, grinning. Melanie turns her head away as if to avoid another kiss. She appears in the picture as a whitish blur. Charlie’s face wears its customary cool, taunting look. She stares impatiently at the camera. Cindy and Deidre present an almost eerie picture; the two young women are so different in expression and stance. And the children are all sitting cross-legged on the ground.
The colony prospered; all worked – noting that it didn’t feel like it – in fields and trees, collecting and storing food, seeding and caring for gardens, or putting up pickles. They often enough changed roles, did different kinds of work: they shovelled muck on to the fields; they broadcast seed from a basketwork ‘lip’; and even did their threshing with a flail. No one had time for anything else. It was curious: hours and days could seem infinitely long, either looking ahead in the morning, or living through them. Then, once over, they dropped into the void of the past. There was always a consensus, an understanding among them all: so-and-so will see to this, and such and such will be done – by someone, and no one cared a tap who slept with whom.
The heat was everywhere. Partial nudity or nudity itself was the fact, the concept, toward which all aspired. Most irritating of all to outsiders, daily routines were carried out almost absentmindedly; most of them were stoned out of their heads. Cindy and Deidre stopped working and then asked for a banana-beer break, giggling to themselves and strewing the conversation with strange, almost sexual innuendoes. Women walked around half naked and were dancing naked, slowly, in love with their own bodies; they would not have walked half the length of the orchard, only about a hundred yards away from the pond, when one or the other of them would say, giggling, ‘I think this is far enough, don’t you think? We don’t want to overexert ourselves.’ Somehow they never seemed to get any closer. A group of women were talking and brushing their hair at once, lolling, peering from behind each other, lying recumbent in a warm sun as if they hadn’t better things to do. They were on a natural high from laughing and moving in an aimless way that seemed designed, unconsciously, to prolong the pleasure of their conversation and intensify their attractiveness as a group. And in the midst there was the tree of life in that place, on which God rests when he comes into paradise. And this tree cannot be described for its excellence and sweet odour – there are no words for it. Couples sat in the nude, enjoying the delicious food and drink and all sorts of displays of affection and cuddling. In possession of a secret that resolved the mystery of those hours, they put aside for a little while their puzzlement and uncertainty. John smiled at everyone with glazed eyes, dodging among the mock-skirmishers of the two Women’s Defense League squads, some of who yelled at him amiably and threw ripe fruit at his legs. The fact of their existence, their indifferently deadly otherness, brought on a spasm of sharp awareness that one was alive. Some girls were getting tattooed, indulged one another, groggy from outrunning pursuing males all day, and as the sun went down, lay down in the fields and fornicated so that the land would be fertile; or, too tired for that effort, made themselves at home on the benches and the grass. Some were less enthusiastic than others; they went out to watch, just watch the people screw, see how they did it. In her own private haze, Ollie, her hands full of marks and cuts, had tied one of Charlie’s dildoes onto her in some way and was inexpertly fucking Deidre who was helpless with laughter.
Why subscribe?
Yes, why indeed. I have criminally neglected building up a network and did not realize that today, literary agents would want to know what kind of presence an author has on substack and other social media (especially those with few prior publications — I have only Secret Ballet to offer). So the immediate reason is that by subscribing, you may indirectly help me find an agent and eventually a publisher. Some people may find it more convenient than annoying to have a short piece in their inbox, but I fully understand if you’d rather not subscribe.
Publication
Reading Matter is currently unpublished, and I do not intend to serialize it here on Substack. Should anyone, on the basis if the excerpt above or an appreciation of the concept, want to see the full text and consider publishing it, please get in touch.
