What I’m Reading
Middlemarch
I’m working my way through Middlemarch and that’s been good. English countryside marriage mechanisms and such. I had started reading that back in January of this year (‘22) and it was all going well, I was into it, partly because the book was so good (Dickens elevated up to the next level as it was bound to happen because he was DEAD), great characters, and setting, great sentences, and soap opera drama, but I was into it otherwise because of this other thing that was going on. The used paperback that I had purchased was marked up by a reader, lightly highlighted in pencil. Usually when I get a book marked up like that in the mail, I throw it away and order another one. But this time the previous reader had underlined the same things I would have, I think. Or close to it. I mean, I don’t underline anything anymore, I should say that, I box text in, usually with a bold pen, this way it stands out better to me, and since I have such a terrible memory, I love to refer back to things that I think are important to get the most out of the story, as I progress, or after I’ve finished, looking back. As I read, I do extensive write-ups in the margins and headers and footers. So I was enjoying reading Middlemarch back at the tail end of winter, but I had to stop. It was all because I put up a tweet saying how funny it was to be reading this marked up book in this way with this stranger’s underlinings and I felt like I was having a conversation with them about it in a way. There was a book plate sticker in the front of the thing and so I had a name and an address. In the tweet I put that I thought I might want to get in contact with the person. An hour later I got an email form a fancy podcast place and I couldn’t believe they wanted to produce the thing as a serial. All I had to do was reach out to the person and get them to agree to finish reading the book with me (where their underlinings had stopped, I had stopped reading) and then we’d do a bunch of these podcasts with the fancy place producing it. But when I began trying to find the person from the book plate online I couldn’t track them down properly. I found a bunch of people with the same name, around the same location, and one or two of the people stuck out as the most obvious marker-upper-culprit but then when I sent an instagram DM to the most likely of all people, they never wrote back. As we weren’t friends, my message probably wound up in their spam folder in Instagram. I knew this and figured out that I could probably just call the place where I thought the person worked and get them on the phone that way. But you know, you start to feel like a stalker over nothing, or at least an annoying freak, because the person had stopped reading Middlemarch at around one third of the way through the book and I started thinking maybe they never wanted to read the book to begin with in the first place (some professor assigned or many worse scenarios ran through my mind), and here I would be on the telephone, some doofus on the telephone giving an unsolicited phone call about jumping back into reading a book they never really wanted to read in the first place, and they’d be at work, and the co-workers like ‘who is that on the phone? what’s the killer’s name?’ and even more irritating, I’d have to explain to this person, we’d be recording the whole thing, for the whole world to hear. I just let it be. The messages are still in the person’s inbox marked unseen and if they ever see them one day, it’ll be fun to at least talk about the book and maybe we will do the podcast one day. But yeah, I’m about halfway done with Middlemarch and just doing twenty pages a day like I often do with longer books—while reading another book on the side.
Tao Te Ching
This is one of the other books on the side. Other ones I plan to read on the side during the long slog of Middlemarch are: Van Gogh’s Letters, Bruno Schultz’s Crocodile Street; Kindred; King Lear; the stories of Lu Xun. I don’t know, all kinds of stuff. Depends on which way the wind blows. But listen, I’m always reading Western stuff, am not well versed in Eastern philosophy, Eastern thinking, Eastern religion. Coming right off the heels of reading two of the most influential books of the Western Cannon, the Torah (Pentateuch/the five books of Moses), and The Odyssey, I picked up Lao Tzu’s foundational text which lead to the creation of Taoism. Tao Te Ching is a slim book, five thousand words. Ying and Yang. Emptiness. Myriad Creatures. Do less. Even less. Do nothing so nothing has to be undone. After finishing my reading of it this afternoon I put on some YouTube clips while lifting weights to understand more about Taoism itself. There are no priests, or temples, just a method to attempt to understand the universe. I believe Tao Te Ching will be something I’ll be flipping through, re-connecting with, growing with, the whole rest of my life. The YouTube clips were pretty heavy on using the teachings in the book to get into a flow state, the whole ‘be here now’ thing, which everyone needs more of in their life, including me. I get in the flow state a lot when I am working on my writing, but it is the exact opposite of ‘here’ and ‘now’, I’m off in a make believe cloud somewhere. I think you’re supposed to get out on a little boat in a clear lake and go fishing, I think that’s what you’re supposed to do. Or if you have ear plugs, and a helmet, you can hop on your dirt bike and rip down the trail. That’s being here now, going eighty miles an hour down a narrow sugar sand trail and at any moment you can be killed by a pine tree knocked over by a storm. Me I just read and write, never here or now, oh well. I’ll try harder!!
The Odyssey and the Books of Moses
Like I mentioned above, I read these two suckers. Amazing, of course. Bedrock of so much art I love, that everybody loves. Our chosen ones, our weird heroes. Odysseus after the Trojan War, trying to get home. Cursed by some gods, but helped by one, Athena, the goddess of war and a trickster herself. I read bits and pieces of this for high school, like everybody else, but never read it as an adult. Of course it’s great. A big story of deception after deception, and Odysseus being a real punk, getting all his men killed by a Cyclops and then sea monsters (directly through his mistakes). The story starts in medias res with Odysseus’ son being annoyed by suitors who want to marry his mother, his father long presumed dead, and Odysseus stuck on Calypso’s love slave island. This was a surprise that the story began that way. Emily Wilson (the translator) has a great introduction to her Norton edition where she explains why the story begins in medias res. ‘in the middle of things’ the proper starting point of any epic story, according to Horace.’ But the story really picks up 141 pages into the telling, where Odysseus finally begins to recount his misadventures after the Trojan War, beat by beat. All the familiar famous encounters wheeled out, sirens and lotus eaters and cyclops and on and on for seventy five amazing pages. Of course it’s not all heroic sword swinging, time and time again, Odysseus has to weasel his way through the situation, lying, deceiving, pretending a lot to be from Crete for some reason, often getting everyone around him killed, till he’s the only one left standing. I’d just read the Torah/Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) and was really interested in how close Odysseus' misadventures lost at sea paralleled the stories I had just read in Exodus. Just like the Israelites in Exodus, Odysseus’ crew are urged on by a person chosen by the Gods (in the case of the Greek) and God (in the case of the Hebrew). The Odyssey in some ways is a polytheistic telling of Exodus, whereas Exodus is a monotheistic telling of The Odyssey. I have no religion in my life, nor ever had any schooling in it. So it was fascinating to see how these ancient texts blended together. I wondered how closely the texts were ‘written’ next to each, drawing from other common legends and myths. Just as Epic of Gilgamesh has its flood myth mirrored in Genesis, the story of exile captured in Exodus is mirrored in The Odyssey. The Israelites not listening to a direct order from Moses about entering the Promised Land and taking it by battle right now, they are punished to wander the desert for forty years. The same thing happens in The Odyssey, to a degree, when their captain (Odysseus) gives a direct order, given to him via the Gods, not to eat the sheep of the Sun God while they are there starving on that island, the crew of course doesn’t listen to Odysseus and get themselves cursed to never be able to return to Ithaca. It takes Odysseus twenty years—the Old Testament bumps the curse of wandering/exile up to forty. Both stories are about trying to get home, to a place that is never the same as when you left it. In the case of the Old Testament, we are talking Paradise on Earth, the Garden of Eden as re-formed into the Promised Land, in The Odyssey, we’re talking about our own beds, with our lovely young wife who has wondered where the fuck we’ve been all this time. When Odysseus finally does get home to Penelope, he immediately busies himself with the task of committing endless slaughter in his own home. When all the suitors are dead, oops it turns out he just remembered another quest he has to go on in order to make sure he will live a happy and long life of ease with his wife in Ithaca, so the epic ends there with Odysseus about to head off on another fool’s errand of a quest—as all quests really are. Didn’t you listen to the Taoist monks? They said you should just stay home and do nothing, take a nap. I was struck by a related thought while reading Middlemarch, there is an ‘old’ stodgy researcher, Casaubon, who has married a young, beautiful woman named Dorothea, who wants to aid him on his quest for knowledge, but he cannot stand for this. He believes she cannot help him truly with his work, which is to find a link, a Key to all Mythologies(!!!). He’s turned her away, says she should find something else to do with her time. Knit or something, he’s busy with these goddamn hieroglyphics, goddamnit. Casaubon can never understand myth because to understand myth is to understand people in some prototypical way that is useful to all of us in our forever lives. He is a man who does not understand his own little modern life, he’s shut in, closed off, miserable—you need life to find life—therefore he can never hope to understand a single myth, let alone unearth a key that links all mythologies. He’d be better off making his wife laugh and finding a way to laugh with his wife. And Moses, poor Moses, he understands it all too well. He knows people. He tells God to please pick someone else to lead the people he is too weak, he stutters, he stumbles on his words. God doesn’t let him weasel out of that one, Moses is tasked with an ever increasing weight of tasks until he finally fails enough at these impossible tasks (on technicalities) that the Hebrew God says, “I’ve got to kill you now and bury you in a secret valley, but first train your replacement, and then climb this here mountain and get a glimpse of the Promised Land, the home you’ll never get to.” The Books of Moses conclude with Moses’ rousing farewell to all of the Israelites, a speech that stretches on and on, detailing their exile, why it happened, where Moses tells them they are pretty much responsible for getting him future-murdered by God, but he hopes when they get to the Promised Land they will appreciate it for what it is. The prize that has hurt so much to attain again, lost in Genesis, and now about to be gained 270 something pages later.
All Right, Goodbye for Now
Thanks for reading some of my thoughts on what I’ve been reading. I’ll try to hop back every few books and give updates like this, regularly, on and on. This newsletter will also continue to feature creative writing/essays/not very much news, or badgering to buy my books, like Teenager, which maybe you should buy, actually, or ask your library to get it, that’d be nice. But I will say this, I’m going to be doing some in-person prose writing workshops out of my apartment in Jersey City this fall. 7pm-10pm, Tuesday nights. Nine weeks, November—December. If you or anyone you know in the New York City area would like some more information on that, shout my way.
Much Respect
Bud Smith
budsmithwrites@gmail.com
twitter: @bud_smith
instagram: @budsmith