Whatcha Reading For?
The Summer Syllabus
(from the Maison d’Art page; the Twombly/Speck exhibit has :( closed)
I spent the end of last week finishing a book proposal, and purchasing a grip of books that I really hope to read soon. I’m poring over some of them now. My summer list so far looks like this:
Mike Rogin, Fathers and Children (for the book proposal)
David Golumbia, Cyberlibertarianism (making progress!)
Erik Olin Wright, Interrogating Inequality (just started)
Ken Knabb’s Situationist International anthology (reading the section on détournement)
Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine (just finished)
I have taken to using the millennial slang grip, because in fact I do grip these books with one hand, whenever I go out to drink coffee and read, which is almost every day. I saw a tweet the other day as well that mocked this habit. Some online dad’s daughter was imitating him by walking around with a grip of books in one hand. I want to be like him. In fact, I think that’s the theme of today’s post: aspiration. I want a certain life. I want to talk about what “wanting” looks like to me, and probably ask some questions about how those aspirations map onto cultural expectations about a productive life.
In the latest Artforum, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer writes a really compelling review of a new Cy Twombly exhibit at a gallery in LA. The exhibit, titled “Fragments of an Adoration” emerges out of a kind of extended conversation between Twombly and his physician friend Reiner Speck. What I love about this art — or more specifically about the way Lehrer-Graiwer describes it — is the way it arises out of ordinary, daily life: visits to Twombly’s home in Italy, shared meals, postcard and letter correspondence, photos, collaged work submitted by Speck’s young daughter, and so on. She says this about the two men:
I love the description here of working with a book in one hand and a “piece of chalk” in the other; Speck was not only a physician but a literary collector, so clearly the world of manuscrita matters to both men. Twombly’s paintings are so close to (hand)writing; the term scribbling is maybe more appropriate, if we can think of this word denoting not a hurried reflection of compressed time and urgency but its opposite, as something that gains immediacy because of its proximity to ordinary lived experience.
Lehrer-Graiwer concludes her review poignantly by observing that “(t)he stark power of Twombly’s chaotic yet restrained compositions, in combination with a behind-the-curtain look at his domestic and interior life, drove home a sense of endings, of our distance from the bygone era and culture he embodied.” Indeed, I think about this loss or absence a lot, on several levels at once: not just the time of leisure which allows for travel and meals together with friends and family, but the capacity to make art during/out of conversation and correspondence which is itself artifactual and textual, which is to say which arises out of the material world of books and reading. Letters, postcards, books, all hand-written and in fact done so in an emphatic manner, i.e. in order to draw attention to its manual aspect. This stands in contrast to the airless, artificial and disposable world of text on various screens, whose order and arrangement seem to invoke different (and more toxic and transactional) sorts of exchanges, interactions that don’t seem worth being called conversations. The “domestic and interior life” of Twombly and his physician friend is of course protected by a cordon of wealth. And yet to refer back to the question of aspiration above, it’s not the wealth one aspires to, but the capacity to be present to ordinary experience of friendship, to be up to the challenge of carrying-forward the conversation with Petrarch and Proust and all the rest. We are in fact alienated from this, distanced from it; I am becoming more conscious every day — in light of the very recent experience of the Bloomington bloodbath — how difficult it is not only materially, but also (more importantly) culturally, how simple aspirations to this kind of life not only draw stares of incomprehension, but venom and hostility. Readers are enemies, so it seems, even as we are advised to “do your own research.” There’s no time for meals together when one has to “catch up on emails” alone at one’s desk during lunch. There’s no time for conversation when even the defenders of so-called great books hate culture (I’m talking to you Chris Rufo). Tech and administration have combined forces to erase these sorts of aspirations and replace them with business models, investments in human capital, neoliberal competition and so on.
Just to conclude with a bit of juxtaposition, you’re probably familiar with this bit from Bill Hicks, which looking back from 2025 seems inappropriate and inaccurate in one particular sense.
Hicks’ point is to poke fun at the redneck culture of his own American South, but our problem is different. “Whatcha reading for?” isn’t just a question for Waffle House servers. It’s now something potentially asked by your dean or provost or even your professor. What’s the point of reading? What’s the point of an aspiration to have a life which revolves around texts, their transmission, their artistic transformation? Those who aspire to be cultural elites — to stand in the place of Twombly and Speck — are confronting us with this question and not in a friendly way.