18. The Reading Life – Melissa Febos
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian (1566)
Lately, I’ve also been returning to the texts of my childhood—probably for the added element of comfort, but also because the images and plots and worlds of those works were the formative ones for my own imagination…
I almost always begin a writing day by reading. Sometimes that is enough. There is the list of books I love, and then there is the much shorter list of books that turn over my creative engine in an instant—I think most writers probably have both categories. For me it is nonfiction that blows the roof off of what I think my work needs to be—something unexpected, something that defies convention, or at least the conventions of my own creative thinking when anxiety gets in there. Some reliable jumpstarters for me are Jeannette Winterson, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Renee Gladman, and Roland Barthes.
Lately, I’ve also been returning to the texts of my childhood—probably for the added element of comfort, but also because the images and plots and worlds of those works were the formative ones for my own imagination and informed the fundamental way that I relate to image and plot and world-making.
– Melissa Febos
Prompt:
Make a short list of texts from your past, even better if you can select particular passages or moments that meant something to you. Without necessarily revisiting the book (you can do that later), start writing about your relationship to it, in narrative terms. When did you read it? What was your life at the time? Write a scene of your reading it, replete with all the ways it made you feel. Then, consider why you needed it at that particular time. Follow it from there—feeling free to depart from the text.
If I were to make such a list for my last book, Abandon Me, I would choose (I did choose): The Story of Ferdinand, the films Labyrinth and Heavenly Creatures, The Chronicles of Narnia, D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, and Rilke’s Book of Hours.
Most recently I did this with Jack London’s White Fang, and the scene I used ended up getting cut from the essay, which is a thirty-page ode to my hands. You really never know what is going to find its way to the surface if you create an opening.
Lorelle Mariel Murzello
Location: Mumbai, India
About: My name is Lorelle and I am a Teacher-educator, researcher and writer from Mumbai, India. The Isolation Journals has been that window to my soul and helped me understand this (crazy!) world and my place in it!
Age: 25
My Anthropological Eye
My love for reading actually began in First year of B.A., from my sociology and anthropology classes. As a child my parents didn’t get us to read so much----there was an occasional Goosebumps, Famous Five, Secret Seven—but nothing helped me drown into the world of the author, like when I would read an ethnography in Anthropology Class. Be it the one on sports ethic and English boarding schools by Pierre Bourdieu or that beautiful ethnography where Nancy Scheper Hughes dissects global inequality, organ trafficking and ethics of Anthropology. I felt like I was entering into a magical intellectual world and uncovering the art of knowing the truth. In that moment, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Whenever I’d attempt to read through a jargon-laden ethnography and manage to derive some meaning from it, I felt like I was entering a world and discovering something no one else could. (Haha, I’m glad my 18 year old self had her moments of feeling special) I’ve grown up to become a little more critical of academic jargon, even though I can get through some of it with a little more ease. But, one text that really stuck with me, resonated with all the other reading I’ve done after and helped me become the kind of anthropologist I want to be--- was this reading by Clifford Geertz that spoke about the significance of ‘thick description’ in ethnographic work. Basically, ethnography is a research tool used by socio-cultural anthropologists (and other social scientists) and thick description (If I’m not wrong) are literally thick (detailed) descriptions of phenomena used to uncover levels of interpretative meaning, weaving through socio-cultural symbolism (Um, I sound like one of those pretentious anthropologists yuck!)
Let’s be honest, I was never great with numbers or math or science or equations. I was great at balancing chemical equations for a bit in 9th grade because daddy would make me memorize the valencies of elements while we waited for our school bus to arrive. But, I think something changed in me when I got to know that an anthropologists’ job, not very different from a physicists’ or mathematicians’ is like solving a puzzle, but a very intricate puzzle that keeps changing and there’s actually never one answer. I also liked Geertz for how chill he was--- unlike many other anthropologists that (*cough* Taussig) I was introduced to in college; he was just really easy with his words. Also, his pun game was so strong (Read: Balinese Cock fights). I heard the words “thick description” many times after graduating; medical anthropologists like Dr. Arthur Klienman (my future husband) and others talk about the same interpretative socio-cultural layers that persist in patient illness narratives.
I also understood the value in this idea of thick description--- there’s no way it’s not unbelievably valuable if you’re a researcher---but I’ve tried to keep it at the center of my work as a mental health practitioner, now as a teacher-educator and sometimes (I try) even as a friend. Understanding the people you work with, understanding where they’re coming from, what they need, what they expect and being compassionate and just listening is a value that I’ve learnt from Geertz and his work (And maybe, he will deny that he had anything to do with the learning I’ve derived—you can count on anthropologists to make everything a philosophical dilemma!).
There is something really human about un-puzzling the puzzle of interpretation---we may never get it right. AND THAT IS OKAY.
Marigrace Bannon
Location: San Francisco, CA
About: My inspiration for all my entries were the prompts, my life and a great deal of introspection.
Age: 65
The book was Joan Didion’s, The Year of Magical Thinking. It was 2005, Five years after my youngest brother Billy died at 34. Suddenly, September 7, 2000. The baby. I am the oldest of my seven siblings. I grieved, benefitted from short term grief therapy, swam in a cool lake in Livermore with my sisters Kathleen and Sabina for a month or more. It was a 1 hr. drive each way, and our Indian Summer was scorching. We listened to Emmy Lou Harris relentlessly and I cried incessantly. My friend Wave convinced me amidst my fervent protestations, to agree to an RX, for Paxil, which helped me become upright, make coffee, put on a bra and vaguely remember the day of the week.
When I read the quote from The Year of Magical Thinking, it stopped me cold and sweat dripped from my eyebrows, Five years after Billy’s death.
“Life changes fast
Life changes in the instant
You sit down to dinner and
Life as you know it ends.
“The question of self pity.”
20 Years later, I still miss Billy, and wonder how his life would have unfolded. I will rush out of a grocery store if someone has a box of Lorna Doone’s in their cart. The tears will begin, again.
Today, April 18, 2020, is my 65th birthday, and day 33 of Shelter in Place in San Francisco.
“The question of self pity.”
No. I cannot go there. I am alive. I’m not in a hospital on a ventilator or waiting for one. I have food and Zoom. Words and music and a telephone. How eerily and timely Joan Didion’s words are today, encompassed in our global epidemic, The Corona Virus.
“Life changes fast
Life changes in the instant
You sit down to dinner
And life as you know it ends.”
We are all experiencing life changing fast. Today, the U.S. death toll exceeded 40,000. And there is China, Iran, Korea, Italy, France, Spain. The world sits down to dinner, if they have chairs, if they have food, if they have each other and…
“Life as you know it ends.”.