{ bibliophilia isn't actually the right word. }

[delga]

This week, in between marathoning Homicide and fending off my family, I've been reading like a madwoman. I read a lot anyway, and I don't mean I read a lot of books. I mean: I read a lot. I read the small print on packaging whilst I'm eating my lunch; I wake up, I get dressed, and I slog through the hundreds of RSS feeds that I'm subscribed to via Google Reader (which, by the by, equals ampersand-hearts). I find I need a synonym for a word, so I end up reading the etymology for it. I'm watching TV, a DVD, a film, and I'm reading the credits, or I'm reading the signs in the scene. I read poetry in droves these days - quickly, not taking it in properly unless I'm particularly taken by it. I read fanfiction for fandoms I'm not involved in. I read the newspaper, and the magazines inside it; I read the magazines that my parents read - a bit of People's Friend, a bit of Convenience Store. I read The [Local] Advertiser.

Everybody does this, I think, so it's not a great feat. And I don't read as much literature as most of my flist does. But this week I've read nearly a novel per day. And right now I'm reading Philip Roth's The Dying Animal. Once I've finished I'm going to sit down with The Time Traveller's Wife and read that properly. I'm going to go back to the beginning and be serious about it this time instead of getting distracted. It isn't that it's not good or that it's not to my taste; it's actually that it's exactly to my taste so far and I'm worried (stupidly) that I'll like it too much.

--

I came across The Dying Animal a month or so ago when I saw the trailer for Elegy. It's ridiculous - and perverse - how much this appeals to me, but there you have it. I've bought the book. I'm finally reading the book.

I've yet to see Venus although that sounds like it's my kind of thing, too. But the more I read these, the more I'm finding that it's more that the subject matter is reaching towards what I want from it and being waylaid by the author, or the narrator, or the perspective. It's not really what I want. It's a little bit frustrating.

Which is not to say that I haven't found something from these books, or these films. I can't say that Memoirs of a Geisha, once I made the connection, didn't strike me powerfully (which is difficult considering how much I loved it anyway). I can't say that I'm not getting anything from The Dying Animal. Because there's something open and crass in the language here, something lightly disgusting - not overly so, not so perverse as to lose the sheen, but something that I'm enjoying all the same.

I've just read the last page three times. I can't pinpoint the poetry; maybe that's half the point.

   How do I capture Consuela? The thought is morally humiliating, yet there it is. I'm certainly not going to hold her by promising marriage, but how else can you hold a young woman at my age? What am I able to offer instead in this milk-and-honey society of free-market sex? And so that's when the pornography begins. The pornography of jealousy. The pornography of one's own destruction. I am rapt, I am enthralled, and yet I am enthralled outside the frame. What is it that puts me outside? It is age. The wound of age. Pornography in its classic form has a kick of about five or ten minutes before it becomes kind of comical. But in this pornography the images are extremely painful. Ordinary pornography is the aestheticising of jealousy. It takes the torment out. What—why "aestheticising"? Why not "anaesthetising"? Well, perhaps both. It's a representation, ordinary pornography. It's a fallen art form. It's not just make-believe, it's patently insincere. You want the girl in the porno film, but you're not jealous of whoever's fucking her because he becomes your surrogate. Quite amazing, but that's the power even of fallen art. He becomes a stand-in, there in your service; that removes the sting and turns it into something pleasant. Because you're an invisible accomplice in the act, ordinary pornography takes the torment out while mine keeps the torment in. In pornography, you identify yourself not with the satiate, with the person who is getting it, but with the person not getting it, with the person losing it, with the person who has lost.

- from The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

I'm pretty certain this isn't what people expected me to post from the text when I was talking about being taken by the language. Often I'm taken by striking and pretty images and ideas; I'm easy and superficial that way, and I make no excuse for liking things that are aesthetically likeable. But this book contains lines like "Then she's past you, she's gone, and the pornography spins out of control" and I just don't know, but I'm really, really enjoying it.

--

The tiresome part is the part where you look for the thing that matches your need - your request, boon, desire - exactly and can't find it. It has to exist somewhere but I'm just not there yet.

--

In the meantime, The Mother has decided that she wants to clear the bookshelf downstairs (why? None of the books are hers, nor the other things that are kept there. She doesn't even own a book) and is now haphazardly throwing my and my sister's things into a large black bin bag. Bloody hell.