Observation

I just finished Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd, a collection of essays. Rachel Kushner is a novelist, and I have not yet read any of her fiction. I will remedy that very soon. 

Kushner is a few years younger than me, and had similar experiences as a young woman in the 90s, although she was much much much wilder. She shoplifted and rode motorcycles and worked in dodgy bars in the Tenderloin. I didn’t do any of that. But I did live in student apartments in West Philly and rode the subway and took the train to New York on the weekends and worked in a series of dumb jobs that paid just enough to cover the rent and nightlife and books and subway fare. Like Kushner, I hung around with bohemians and punks and a few scary people and a few plain old weirdos. Like Kushner, I knew what it was like being the soft one in a hard crowd.

*****

Kushner is a polymath. She writes about Italian (Nanni Balestrini) and Brazilian (Clarice Lispector) writers whom I had never previously heard of, and is obviously familiar with Brazilian and Italian life and politics during these writers' lifetimes. Italian cinema, history and politics of the Middle East, Marguerite Duras, the American prison abolition movement, motorcycles and trucks, the bar and underground music scene of San Francisco’s Tenderloin in the 1990s - all of this is part of Kushner’s experience and so she writes about it. 

When I read other essayists who write about music and movies and books, I often want to run right out and become familiar with whatever they’re writing about. I’ve often mentioned, for example, that I read or watch or listen to whatever Zadie Smith tells me to read, watch, or listen to. This is how I ended up reading Middlemarch and Howards End and Goodbye, Columbus; and how I ended up revisiting Joni Mitchell, too. Nora Ephron is usually spot-on with reading recommendations, too - that’s how I ended up reading The Woman in White. And if I ever go to a Hungarian bakery that sells cabbage strudel, I’m going to buy one. Nora wrote a whole essay about her pursuit of cabbage strudel, and it’s a page-turner. 

At first, I didn’t feel the same immediate compulsion to read the same books and listen to the same music as Rachel Kushner. This is not a criticism. She writes about her own very particular intellectual and artistic experience and if the rest of us want to come along for the ride, we can; but if not, that’s fine too. The more I think about it, though, the more I want to read Lispector and Balestrini. This is what I love best about reading great essayists. The pleasure of reading the actual essays is only part of the equation - the introduction to something entirely new is even better. I don’t know a thing about labor disputes and protests and general upheaval in 1970s Italy but now I’m going to read all about it, beginning with Balestrini’s novel We Want Everything.

I do want everything. I just don’t know what everything is. 

*****

I marked several passages in this book; things that I want to remember or parts that I want to revisit. Here’s one: “To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home." 

If it’s night time, especially a weeknight, I’m getting home pretty early by anyone’s clock. But of course, that’s not what Rachel Kushner means. And just as I understand what it’s like to be the soft one in a hard crowd, I also know what it’s like to be part of something and to participate fully, but then to exit early and then quietly observe. But observing is not just watching others live. Observing is a way of living.