read everything you possibly can. figure out what you think is good and then be vocal about why. do not pretend to like things you think are bad. your taste is all you have, and it matters. i think taste is a serious thing and i pay close attention to who i think has it and who doesn’t. when i see someone regularly promote or endorse work that i... See more

SOME BRIEF THOUGHTS on starting a reading/writing life IN THESE TIMES

this is only tangentially related to the thrust of this blog post but I thought i’d drop it in here because it feels a bit scammy to make a whole separate paid post about, like, HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL NOW. I hate those posts, and think they’re usually written by people who are... See more

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• I believe in beating the fuck out of a book. Annotation helps me focus. It also helps make the text legible even when I can’t quite focus as hard as I need to — I often underline passages or sentences that I can’t quite fully grasp at the moment but want to come back to later for another pass. This is especially helpful when I need to read a book

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• As I said, I believe in trying to trick your brain to do stuff it doesn’t want to do. but I also believe that the natural limits of your attention, memory, and desire can be a really valuable tool. I’m not a rigorous note-taker or archivist; I annotate my books to help me find what I need on a re-read, but beyond that I generally like the idea that

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My general rule is when I feel the twinge of distraction or boredom or exhaustion that urges me to put down my book, I must read ten more pages. (you can of course do five, or two, or twenty, or whatever feels right.) Typically i get so re-engaged over those ten more pages that I end up reading twenty or thirty. When talking about this to my... See more

For this purpose I also recommend Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik, Heartburn by Nora Ephron (when you find out it’s about the guy who broke Watergate ...!!!!), Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus (this one made all the Semiotexte books feel like part of an extended cinematic universe). I’ve heard that Kathy Acker does this sort... See more