BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

From a blog:   "the Book Slut."  

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_03_018728.php

I get into the bathtub with a few novels, a bad self-help book, An Accident of Hope: the Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton, which makes me delighted not to be Anne Sexton, and some books of letters and diaries: Joseph Roth’s letters, Rosa Luxembourg’s letters, Spalding Grey’s diaries, John Cheever’s diaries. I notice that even when the letters and diaries are heavily-edited, they’re more plotless in a way than even plotless novels. Characters disappear. Relationships drift away without closure. People who are important become unimportant, things are left unchanged and untransformed and unresolved, things, some things, are left endless and meaningless, amounting to nothing. As a reader I feel like a creepy stalker, like a voyeur, I can force a plot and a conclusion around things when no plot or conclusion is there, I can get deeply inside these people’s lives and feed on whatever’s been revealed. Anything left private, I can invent. And as a writer. Well, as a writer I can take that sunny day in the movies and pin its wings down so it can’t move again. It might not make anyone bite their fists to suppress all their joy and glee, it might not make them lean out the windows and throw figs and apples onto the streets, but I can fix and freeze it. I can have it, even though I’ll never have it. It’s the most unsatisfying thing in the world, but there it is. Exsultate, jubilate.
One of the novels I bring into the bath starts with an epigraph, a Kafka quote: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside of us.” The death of one we love better than ourselves. The bad self-help book explains to me -- and I’ve already heard it -- that if we obsess about someone, that person can feel it psychically, even if we’re nowhere near them, and they will be completely turned off and repulsed. We have to love ourselves first, and better, says the bad self-help book. But I don’t not-love myself, I just already have myself -- do other readers of these self-help books really get satisfied having sex by themselves without another person’s body involved, or having conversations with themselves? I mean, I wouldn’t be Happy with Ivan or whoever if I weren’t here, I’m just already here, I want to be at the movies with Ivan and kissing Ivan and talking with Ivan with myself too, myself and Ivan. I’m not frozen inside either, I’m trotting and galloping and burning, I’m almost 100 degrees and even though I’m minor, there’s so much of me here that eventually each of my systems will give out and I’ll be inchoate atoms in the plotless universe again. Which happens to everyone. Would we really be happy with no books? Or writing ourselves happy books? Could Kafka have written a happy book, an Exsultate Jubilate, if he’d wanted to? Maybe he wrote a happy book and burned it, and we don’t even know about it.
I don’t not-love myself, but I hate the bad self-help book. The bad self-help book doesn’t think that my life, my beauty, my conversation, my ideas, my warm blood, that anything about me would have worth to another being -- the bad self-help book sees the only measure of my worth in another’s eyes as managing to detach and not want him, to go to the movies alone or with some guy I love less than Ivan, to have nachos alone or with someone who I’m less excited to talk with than Ivan, to have sex alone or with someone I want less than Ivan, to sit in the bath and, instead of obsessing about that day at the movies, think about astronomy or Austrian literature.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_03_018728.php    

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

From a blog " the Book Slut"