“For the sentences that pull me in with all their teeth.”

bookworms unite

the first person on earth who instilled in me a reverence for reading was my mom. i dimly remember our trips to the library in San Francisco, exiting with a stack of picture books. later, when we moved out of the fog, we spent hours spent browsing at Pendragon on college avenue, and alternated between the Montclair and Rockridge branches of the Oakland library. the visceral delight she expressed toward books was contagious by osmosis.

theorist and translator Gayatri Spivak said, “I call reading “a prayer to be haunted”—a prayer to be haunted by the text.”¹

Oliver Burkeman echoed this sentiment, “Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you,”²

Of his favorite texts, poet Brian Blanchfield writes, “Each of them, midway, I put down and looked up to find the world was changed, a little. That’s what I’m looking for, that transfer, a new attunement.”³

the books keep giving that rush of simultaneous surprise and recognition.

my mom’s enthusiasm for books is matched in intensity with her sincere curiosity about the people around her. she will talk to you on a plane, in line for coffee, from the next table, etc. as a shy child, I balked.

but by now i know. the sources of intel and beauty abound. open the cover, open your mouth. the stories wait to greet us, to pass through and leave us altered. how bleak it would be if we were left with only ourselves.

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if you’re in the NYC area, i’m hosting a show on February 28th - What Else? Comedy Toward the Solidarity Economy - we will laugh a lot and ticket sales go to the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City. Come! Or pass it on!

1. https://www.aesop.com/us/r/the-fabulist/gayatri-spivak/

2. Meditations for Mortals, 30

3. Proxies, 124

Title from Laura Brown-Lavoie p. 18 of my mom’s copy of A Velocity of Being