Dear readers,
I rely heavily on books as multipliers of reality. Usually this means psychological reality; other times it means geographical reality. Today’s destinations are of the second kind. One will take you to Antarctica and the other to Mexico City.
¡Vamos!
—Molly
The best writing about the color (or “color”) white will always be Chapter 42 of “Moby-Dick”; this truth cannot be disputed. But “Skating to Antarctica” is a strong runner-up.
Jenny Diski begins her memoir/travelogue by noting that she is “not entirely content with the degree of whiteness” in her life. This despite decorating her bedroom to resemble a snowy expanse, with white sheets, white blinds and white walls. “In the morning, if I arrange myself carefully when I wake, I can open my eyes to nothing but whiteness.”
Diski traces her preference back to an adolescent experience of being an inmate at a psychiatric hospital, where the contemplation of white sheets was as close as Diski could get to oblivion. Her fixation culminates in a voyage to Antarctica, which she envisions to be the whitest place on earth.
To get there she jets from London to Buenos Aires to a town called Ushuaia, then boards a tourist transportation vessel. On the ship she drinks a Manhattan cooled with chips of glacier ice and learns that a human body, if chucked overboard, can last 10 minutes before hypothermia sets in.
Readers of this newsletter will notice a Jenny Diski leitmotif. What can I say? Diski died in 2016 but if you’ve never read her, begin here. It is an adventurous book about how to live when your instinct to do so is unreliable.
Read if you like: Pitiless self-examination, derelict landscapes, elephant seals, this Caspar David Friedrich painting
Available from: Check your library or a used bookstore if you can’t find a copy elsewhere
“Horizontal Vertigo,” by Juan Villoro, translated by Alfred MacAdam
Nonfiction, 2021
I’ve grown increasingly worried (over the past 30 seconds) by the amount of time I spent as a literate human having not read Juan Villoro. Perhaps you are in the same boat. One solution is to start in reverse chronological order, with this study of Mexico City.
Villoro offers this note about the book’s organization: “Structurally, it follows the criterion of zapping. The episodes do not move forward in linear fashion, but, instead, follow the zigzagging of memory or the detours endemic to city traffic.”
You can zap, therefore, among chapters written as memoir, sociology, music history and city planning theory. By the end of the book you will possess an idiosyncratic knowledge of a very special earthquake-prone metropolis.
Villoro’s writing has a density of beauty and meaning that you usually expect from poetry. All that — plus, he’s funny! On his parents: “Both came from separatist traditions — he from Cataluña and she from Yucatán. So it wasn’t at all odd that they separated when I was 9.”
Read if you like: Geoff Dyer, learning new words that will be nearly impossible to incorporate into your vocabulary, the films of Charlie Shackleton
Available from: Penguin Random House
Why don’t you …
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Ask yourself whether “the way to perfection is through a series of DISGUSTS,” as the critic Walter Pater averred in his study of Leonardo da Vinci? (Also covered in this volume: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde and more!)
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Display ZERO QUALMS about reading Tom Perrotta’s comic novel even if you’ve already seen the movie version?
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Find yourself CHEERFULLY DEFENSELESS against the charms of a gardening collection that contains such phrases as: “Nevertheless, moss is and often remains suspect by those who should, for myriad reasons, love it.”
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