recognito | chill reads to bug out to

A lot of my reading time got cannibalized by film/travel. shout out to Metaphor Refantazio for also contributing to my diminished urge to read. sorry to beautiful James for suffering.

I am in the middle of reading a few bigger books–Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann–and a few other library books I grabbed on recommendation. Hoping for a beefier November post, if everything lines up.

The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm - Malcolm is salty as hell in this book, and I kind of love it. Malcolm explores the relationship between another journalist and the subject of his book, the murderer, and tracks the development of this relationship from friendly rapport to friendship to betrayal, leading to a defamation case. As Malcolm describes it, journalists offers publicity and fame, the chance to make one’s private story public and on record, while subjects offers financial and professional opportunities for the journalist; the balance, Malcolm notes, is never in the subject’s favor.

What makes this book really fun for me is Malcolm’s increased presence on the page as a professional writer, consciously highbrow and literary and more than a little snobby, a little embittered, consciously manipulative–a good fit for a book about the dance between journalist and subject, and how the outcome is, inevitably, one of betrayal. This marks the end of Malcolm’s Superfreud era, but she never really lets go of psychoanalysis. Her sense of relationships as being inherently manipulative is highly Freudian: everything is projection, everything is a mystery. and there’s a lot of delight in watching Malcolm hop outside the incestuous/inward world of Freud. She gets more groups and different types of people to speak to, new dynamics and new ways to apply her skills.

Okay there are a lot of favorite pieces in this book but there’s one bit that I love where Malcolm analyzes the dynamics of the jury on the defamation case.

… the judge was forced to declare a mistrial. The trouble had started early in the trial, when Dillon, an animal-rights activist, brought animal-rights literature to the jury room and wasn’t able to interest the other jurors in her cause. She became the weird Other to the majority, and they became the Oppressors to her. When the time for deliberations came, the majority realized too late–like other majorities who have ignored the warning signals of annoying minorities–that they had scorned this woman at their peril and were now powerless against her.

Malcolm describes meeting the juror in her home and let me tell you, it is EVEN WEIRDER of an encounter than you’d expect. “Oh, so the justice system’s outcomes sometimes rely on one woman being a total fucking weirdo?” Really a fantastic moment.

While waiting for my library to cough up more Malcolms for me, I reread Psychoanalysis: the Impossible Profession and it just hits really really well… Do you have Malcolm books lying around? Why not read them and make me happy?

Blackouts, Torres - I read this on recommendation and on the strength of one of Torres’ short stories. Blackouts is a great book. It pulls off a rare trick in its use of archival work and research, which is that it brings something genuinely new to the reader–at least, it brought something new to me. This is going to sound mean. I think it is very rare for contemporary fiction to do research that goes deeper than what I already know or can look up on google. One of the deepest disappointments I experience when I’m reading a book or listening to a podcast is if I open up the Wikipedia page and see major plot beats, images, and dialogue laid out in the exact same order as the scene or story I’m reading. It totally ruins the illusion of the author as a knowledgeable and trustworthy figure. I should not be able to locate the Reddit thread you used!!!

Torres does a great job with the research. Maybe if you’ve done more work into historical texts on gender and sexuality than I have, you're thinking, “This guy is too easily impressed” … that’s fair, I’m just happy when I cannot mentally imagine the series of JSTOR searches. Really fun book framed as a conversation between two men, one young and healthy and one old and dying, both Puerto Rican and gay. Between conversations, the book includes segments from the actual 1941 report (Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns) that have been blacked out and turned into poetry; the book also includes illustrations by figures mentioned in the book, posters, and even a zine made by the author. I think the one element that really landed wrong for me was the inclusion of Torres’ 2011 short story, "Reverting to a Wild State"–notably separate and different from the main text, and in the context of all the rest of the novel, I don't think it has the same impact or power given the larger history surrounding it. Maybe it'd be better if it had appeared earlier. Whatever. Maybe no one else noticed it. Really enjoyable and unexpected read for me.

I read a few novellas, In the Act by Ingalls and The Appointment by Volckmer. In the Act is a bit schlocky but not an awful two hours of reading time. The Appointment is fine… “for fans of Otessa Moshfegh” is how it’s billed, but I feel like Moshfegh is more fun. Twisty and sexual, but kind of tiring as a narrative voice. Not sure I can recommend either.