I'm bothered by the amount of junk in my life – by which I don't mean anything that Bukowski or Burroughs would talk about – but more like what's meant by junk mail, junk television... junk yard dogs. Well not exactly that last one, but you know what I'm saying.
Over the years my reading has drifted back and forth – from the kind of reading where you really engage, where you learn something and think and get involved or excited, to something more passive. I have a great many books – about, let's see, twelve bookcases in the house (plus seven at work), all about three feet by six or so, plus about another bookcase's worth stacked in the storage room. So, for years, there have been masses of texts available to me – in fact, that's how I live: from the rich density of the shelves I casually call 'philosophy' (actually philosophy, cultural theory, semiotics, all that kind of stuff) through the delicate sophistication of the shelves of poetry, which have grown to be a substantial part of the whole, to the vast shelves of massed literatures, which run from the complex and intellectual (which are, frustratingly, often also depressing) down to the relatively vapid.
Unfortunately, although I used to graze over a wide range of these books and not worry too much about whether any reading habits were good for me or not, a distinct decline started in the mid-1990s, when I was living in a miserable apartment building in San Francisco, one full of druggies and people on the edge of homelessness, and bashing my head against the concrete wall of finishing my dissertation. The second stage of this decline has been here in northern England – in the wake of the frustration of being rather unceremoniously dumped here by circumstance, and the lack of people around to talk to for too much of each day, I've tended to read only what won't bother me – i.e. what won't challenge me, and what won't be too depressing.
(Finding something to read that's 'not too depressing' can be pretty tough, too – it's amazing how much fine writing tends towards tragedy and disaster; one of the many reasons I love Byatt's Possession so much is that it has a gratifyingly happy ending. And one of the reasons I so hated her Still Life is that the favorite character, the one sensible person, just when she decides to go back to school, has a refrigerator fall on her. I mean, really....)
An even more problematic habit is an increased indulgence in repetitive, predictable television: favorites include CSI and its offshoots, Simpsons, South Park, the various Law & Orders – not such a bad bunch I suppose, but I'm not watching for the detail, I'm just watching to pass the time. Passing time, wasting time, killing time: the edginess of those phrases recalls a scene in that most wonderful of children's books, Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth, when Tock, the dog whose body consists of a large clock, reacts angrily to Milo's excuses about his own listless, pointless wasting of time.
Not to mention junk food – I'm feeling especially guilty over this; after various rather hard and largely successful work from Monday to Thursday, I ordered two pizzas and ate them over about a twenty-four hour period – how ridiculous, and what a poor idea from several angles (one of which will come up below...). And then felt lousy, of course. And then there's those long winter sleeps, and the deadly temptation of computer solitaire....
I did grab Barthes' New Critical Essays off the shelf – an essay collection being an easy and often even fun way back into a thinking literature; it's a bit hard that the first two essays are on subjects I don't know well (structuralist interpretations of La Rochefoucauld and the Encyclopédie, all very French of course); but I did get a certain intellectual alertness from them, almost like the mental equivalent of breathing eucalyptus oil. And I put away the books that had been on the table – a long, probably well-written but entirely unimportant novel compendium by Jack Vance (Alastor) and one of Juan Goytisolo's more bizarre pseudo-literary parodies (A Cock-Eyed Comedy, where he makes a strange tour de force out of combining Catholic hagiography and gay pornography). Okay, neither of those is exactly dumb – but they're both really intellectualized timewasters, and my whole point in reading them was to do, basically, nothing.
***
All this has gained a bit of urgency, because I'm suddenly not feeling very well – Wednesday I had a beer with the guys, and ended up exhausted and toxic the next morning; and the past two days I've been sleeping all day, with various weird muscle aches (not flu I think), frequent headaches, and darkened urine – not to mention the burst of zits in unexpected places over the past few weeks. All of which suggests liver problems, one more time: I see the doctor next Friday, and am wondering if he will get dictatorial again – forbidding me vitamins, blood tests every three days, and such. V– and I discussed it over lunch – she also has liver concerns, and heart concerns (her surgery delayed yet again); the slight oddness of trading anecdotes about chronic illness over lunch was ameliorated by the sense of mutual, hard reality: we both seem to be more willing to consider bad futures for ourselves than the people around us, and we both usually try to plan ahead for the consequences (it's one of the reasons I love her so much). This is also why my ridiculous pizza suddenly looks so bad in retrospect: for an ailing liver, the fats and preservatives in cheese and sausage are obnoxiously toxic. No help when you're trying to not get ill.
It worries me (my eldest sister says I worry too much – she's probably right, but that's not something that's going to change any time soon). It's almost like the way they used to explain the power of the ending/climax of Miller's Death of a Salesman: that because he seems to be so happy in the next-to-last scene, his death is that much more poignant – if something awful is going to happen to a character, make them optimistic, or resolved to improve their lives, first. Sounds like that damned refrigerator, doesn't it?...
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