Volume 4, No. 30: On Slow Rereading
July Reading Reflections
Greetings, book and treat people! The “state of the newsletter” update is long today—have you met me?—but I promise this is the last one. Thank you for being here with me through this period of change.
Back in May, I made the decision to stop writing this newsletter unless I was fairly paid for it. Working for free had started to feel like an enormous burden. The stress of it was draining all the joy, creativity, and passion out of work I used to love, and that’s no way to go on. So I gave myself three months to see if I could meet a modest financial goal. I’ve been talking to you about this process for three months now and I bet you’re sick of it. Well, you’re in luck. After today, I’ll be done talking about it!
I didn’t meet my goal and I’m sad about it. I genuinely wanted to keep writing this newsletter each week. But I’m also relieved. Hugely, wildly, giddily, wide-as-the-sky relieved. Books & Bakes was on a trajectory that was spinning out of control. I figured that out and told you about it. I took a risk and now I’m on the other side of it. To be honest, it feels incredible.
As I mentioned last week, while I can’t afford to continue writing a weekly newsletter, I now have enough paying subscribers to write a monthly newsletter! I can now devote two work days each month to this newsletter without feeling like it’s a burden or a disaster or an irresponsible financial choice. I couldn’t do that before. So thank you, thank you, thank you to each and every one of you who made this possible. A monthly newsletter wasn’t a possibility I considered back in May, probably because I’m prone to extremes. I’m working on that, and I’m genuinely so excited for this new iteration of Books & Bakes.
From now until the end of the year, the newsletter will come out monthly on the last Wednesday of the month (or thereabouts). These newsletters will be free for everyone. Putting my work behind a paywall did absolutely nothing to increase paid subscriptions, which leads me to believe that if you’re paying for the newsletter, you’re doing it to support me and not for perks.
My original plan was to switch over to Ghost if I continued writing the newsletter. I like Ghost for a lot of reasons. One is that it isn’t Substack. Another is that, instead of taking a cut of each subscription, they charge a flat yearly fee based on number of subscribers. The fee increases in increments of 2,000-3,000 subscribers, which makes it much more economical for small newsletters like mine. However, it also means that switching over to Ghost right now would cost me $480 up front, which I can’t afford. Switching over to a new platform also requires a huge amount of behind-the-scenes work and I simply do not have the bandwidth for that. I’m struggling to feed myself, take care of my dog, and get through my workdays. I cannot take on a huge project.
If you pledged to pay for a subscription when I switched platforms: thank you! If you’d like to support me now, you can tip me on Venmo (@Laura-Sackton) or PayPal (losackton@gmail.com).
I want to see what writing a monthly newsletter feels like. I want to see if it brings me joy and delight. I want to give myself time to settle into a different writing rhythm before committing to it. If, at the end of the year, it still feels nourishing and generative, I’ll relaunch the newsletter in January on Ghost.
July was a weird reading month. Weird reading months are becoming a theme this year. I didn’t read that many books in July, and I also didn’t love a lot of the books I read. The standouts were How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith (brilliant) and The Foghorn Echoes by Danny Ramadan (haunting and beautiful). I also loved Swan, the Mary Oliver book I read (of course). I had mixed feelings about Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley and was hugely disappointed with The Palace of Eros by Caro De Robertis (boring & without substance). I mixed things up with The Chromatic Fantasy by H.A., a graphic novel that came highly recommended by some of my favorite readers, but I struggled to finish it. I did not understand what was happening, nor did I care.
However, on June 30th, I embarked on a slow reread of Martyr!. I’ve been reading a chapter a day and writing a reflection about each chapter. I’ll finish on Saturday. This experience has been transcendent. Incandescent. I’m noticing new layers in every chapter, every paragraph. Spending a whole month with this book I love so much has brought me more joy than I can adequately express. It has also changed the way I think about reading. It has done something to my body.
There is a part of me that misses the way I used to read, the pace at which I devoured books. But the bigger part of me is more interested in what I’m doing now: slow rereading, relationship-building. I want to give books I love my careful and spacious attention. I want to learn them down to their bones. I want to follow them down every muddy, misty, tangled, treacherous path. I want to write with and about them. I want to think with and against them. I want to carry them with me through my days. I want their words reverberating in my chest, my feet.
This is how it has felt rereading Martyr! this month. It has been with me in the lake, in the river, in the car driving to the grocery store. It has been with me while I make breakfast, brew tea. It has been in my poems. It has been in my hands harvesting flowers. It has been in my tears, my exhaustion, my anger, my wonder. It has been growing and singing and rooting inside me. All of this feels momentous. In this fast-fast world, this more-more world, this everything-now world, choosing to slow down my reading also feels, a little bit, like refusal. Refusal, and an opening.
I’ve been sharing my Martyr! rereading journey on Instagram, but I want to share some of it here, too, because this is what my July felt like: these words, these questions, these reckonings. What follows is a collection of snippets. Links will take you to my longer daily reflections.
THIS READING JOURNAL CONTAINS SPOILERS!
I’m thinking about the strange, brilliant immediacy of opening a book about a man yearning for meaning in life with a conversation in which he is pretending to be dying. And I’m thinking about how he is dying, how we’re all dying, but differently. And I’m thinking about how Kaveh Akbar is a death poet like Mary Oliver is a death poet, though they approach what it means to want to live (or not) in wildly different ways.
The chapter ends with a paragraph that includes this line: “He thought about all the poets he’d read whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it.”
I’m constantly thinking about how poetry is about the failure of language, and so much of this book is poetry, and here it is laid out in Chapter 2, this fleeting feeling of wanting to be saved and overwhelmed by words and realizing words can only take you to the edge of the cliff, they can’t teach you to fly.
I’m rereading this book of my heart and this morning the chapter I read felt like a little poem. I’m thinking about how the deliberate slow reading of this book gives me space to sit with its music and sorrow for a whole day. I wonder how this ritual will affect my life. I wonder if it will inspire new devotions.
So much of this book is about what makes us real, what makes us alive. It’s about the lines between memory and dream and reality and longing and where the get tangled. And here, it’s all tangled, blurred, people and their lives bleeding into each other.
Something about Cyrus creating people to relate to, to make meaning with, when he has no one. Something about the blurring of tenses, about the contradictions of how to live in multiple tenses. The layering of fiction and fantasy and reality. Something about the hilarity of Lisa Simpson explaining that her life is full of dramatic cause-and-effect actions and the gut punch of her telling Roya to stop being so philosophical and symbolic—coral is dying because people in power don’t care about coral. All of this meaning-making in Cyrus’s sleep. I don’t know. Poetry cuts the world open for me, and these dream conversations are poetry. And maybe Cyrus and I are both looking for a knife, and thread to mend the wound with.
What I’m getting at is that the queerness in this book, and the queer lineages, are tangled. Roya’s especially. Freedom comes with sacrifice, regret, strings. You can imagine a life with no kitchens at age ten—what a wild expanse of possibility!—but what do you build in that empty expanse? What is there, where the kitchen was?
There’s a line in this chapter that I’ve written about before, that I can’t stop thinking about. Cyrus is describing his martyr project to his friends Zee and Sad James, and he’s talking about the meaninglessness of his mother’s death. Sad James says, but her death mattered to you. And Cyrus says:
“But that level of tragedy wasn’t legible to the U.S. or to Iran. It’s not legible to empire. Meaningless at the level of empire is what I mean by meaningless.”
And maybe what Cyrus is looking for is aliveness without meaning, and death without meaning. Maybe being illegible to empire is the point.
In an interview with Akbar I listened to, he talked about how one of the things he wanted to do with the book was turn an unfathomable number (290 people killed on the Iran Air flight Cyrus’s mother was on) into a story that means something, fathomable. And one thing he said was how this act by the US, the shooting down of a commercial plane, the people who died on it, have this incredible effect on Zee, this Polish Egyptian man who doesn’t have any connection to Iran or to the flight. Until he meets Cyrus and loves Cyrus and then suddenly he’s caught up in this ripple of grief.
Cyrus, for a million reasons, is hung up on meaning, symbolism, on the why of it all. He wants his death to mean something but he can’t convince himself—yet—that his living means something. So when Orkideh rejects the grand gesture, when she refuses the easy fix that isn’t easy or a fix, I don’t think it’s just in service of the plot. I think it’s also in service of the book’s vision: the beauty of aliveness is in the details, in the actions of loving, in the accumulation of small moments between people.
This is a book about art and the limits of art. I think all the best books are about the failure of art, the absolute necessity of art. That contradiction. It is obvious, from this list of art/artists mentioned in it—so wide-ranging!—how much and how deeply Akbar loves art, wrestles with it.
So I don’t know how different these two ways of being in the world really are. Cyrus doing thought experiments on the streets of NYC, trying to tether himself to the world with his mind. Ali causally doing poetry in the midst of a monologue about the mechanics of living.
Maybe language is the uncrossable space between them. Maybe that’s one of the things this book is about. Getting language out of the way long enough to see the the bearing hearts and struggling lungs and breakable skin it hides.
I’m trying to express something about the endlessness of being, of stories. We are made of each other, we are made of each other’s stories, we carry them like stones, water, breath. We carry them invisibly and with old grief, we carry them buoyantly, we carry them like spells and secrets, like familiars, like bread, like books. There is no Cyrus without Arash. There is no Arash without Roya. There is no Roya without Cyrus. It goes on and on forever.
Sometimes Akbar writes these sentences that I just cannot believe. As in, they are perfect. In this chapter, Cyrus is talking about what it was like to be Iranian in the Midwest after 9/11. The way white people looked at him. These two perfect sentences: “It was like Americans had another organ for it, the hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart.” I don’t have anything else to say about that. There’s no follow-up. It stands.
There’s so much in this novel about queer lineage and how it breaks. And how sometimes it is queerness itself that breaks it. Roya chooses her own queerness, and in doing so, she cuts herself off from her queer son. Cyrus grows up with this haunting, this grief, this shadow-grief. Roya lives a life made possible, in some ways, by that haunting.
“His whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.”
The stakes are our lives. The scale of our lives is beyond imagining. The scale of any life is beyond imagining. I think maybe the work of loving is trying to imagine anyway.
“It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.”
Isn’t this what the whole book is about? A man desperate to make his death into a conflagration that will bring down empire? Isn’t it about all the pain that desire causes him and the people in his life? Isn’t it about him figuring out that maybe there’s another way to be? A smaller way?
I actually don’t think I can write about this chapter, Arash during the war, riding his black horse through fields of dying men, pretending to be an angel, commanded to appear to them, to become to them a vision, a reason to continue suffering and not to kill themselves. It was chilling the first time I read it. It was chilling again. It’s a poem, a dark, breaking poem, the way Akbar uses commas, again and again the failure of language, and will this book ever stop piercing me? Piercing me and opening me which is what it feels like to be alive most days.
What I’m really trying to say is that love isn’t perfect, our lives aren’t perfect, nothing we do that matters is perfect. I’m not interested in whether books are perfect. I’m interested in how it feels to read them. I’m interested in what they turn you into.
Here’s something Cyrus tells Orkideh: “I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to. It’ll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It’ll never bring my mother back, you know?”
Does any artist ever answer this question? I don’t think so. But we keep making art. As if asking the question is the thing that matters.
I’m dying to know what everyone thinks about what’s going on here. To me it feels like another part of the conversation Orkideh and Cyrus are having. A third perspective. Important context. Is Ferdowsi a martyr? An earth martyr? He gives his life to poetry, but he does so partly because of his life for the material world. His poetry becomes something solid. Was it worth it? Does it matter?
I’m thinking about queer lineage and queer love stories across time, what stays the same and what doesn’t. What makes language possible, what geography invites intimacy. I love how Akbar messes with the timeline. Queer lineage isn’t linear. Roya doesn’t sacrifice herself so that her queer son can have a good life. She doesn’t live a tragic love story so Cyrus can live a triumphant one. It’s a whole lot more muddled than that. There’s something about these two queer people, living their inextricably linked lives so separately, that cracks me wide open.
“He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool.”
Can we talk about this knife of a sentence? This book is so heartbreaking. I mean, of course it. I’ve been thinking about that today, because I read this sentence and I couldn’t even cry, I just felt this ache all over my body, like the words were pricking me. The despair and loneliness and pain of this line.
Every day I read a chapter of this book and it breaks my heart, no matter what happens. It’s not a dark or despairing book. It is sad, and it hurts, and it is very serious, and it’s not easy, and it’s hopeful. But it’s not bleak. Reading it breaks my heart every day in the same way the opening line of Cameron Awkward-Rich’s poem ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ does: “I wake up and it breaks my heart.”
In this chapter, Cyrus calls his uncle in Iran, and Arash tells him this incredible story about how he used to listen to Allegri’s Miserere on repeat because the cassette was stuck in his car tape player. So it’s time for another roundup of art and artists mentioned. This book is so deeply of the world. Scan this list of art (pages 112-230) and you’ll see it.
I don’t know how to hold it. How many times have I written these words since October? Here they are again: I don’t know how to hold it. I think Cyrus and his mother are both looking for ways to hold it. I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about Roya calmly allowing the clerk in this dream to sever her finger in exchange for this painting. President Invective running away screaming when he discovers the cost of the thing he covets. I am not advocating for the cutting off of fingers. But I think there is something important, something for us to study, in the material finiteness of Roya’s gesture.
Roya and Leila kissing in Tehran in 1987–in so many ways, it’s the beginning of Orkideh’s life. It’s where Orkideh starts, maybe. And there is death in that moment, too, Leila’s death looming, wound up inextricably in Roya’s life. The ending, Cyrus and Zee in the park with the birds and the snow, it’s the beginning of Cyrus’s life, and there’s so much death in that moment, too. The scenes feel like rewrites of each other, like parallel universes. So much resonance.
What I mean is that I see Cyrus, in the present of his life, feeling the deepest feelings, awash with wonder, earnest to his bones and beyond. I see him taking the world inside him like every fucking moment matters the most. I see that and I feel that and I think Zee sees it and feels it too, but Cyrus doesn’t, he’s having a different experience. He’s not in his body yet. And I think that is where the book goes, in the end, him finding those moonlit weeping nights again.
This morning, this idea of practicing as if your head is on fire, this idea of being consumed with flame—it feels more like it means: Pay attention. A lot of wisdom, a lot of art, a lot of poetry, for me, these days, boils down to this: pay attention.
And what I’m thinking about is translation, all these little moments of translation. This book—all books?—attempts to translate the things other people make us feel. Is that why it feels so thin to me, as in, I feel so thin, so unprotected, when I read it? Is that why every chapter hurts so much, even the chapters that are sweet and hopeful? I’m trying to translate this feeling and I can’t.
“I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?”
It is so hard to make anything. Construction is excruciatingly difficult. Creation. The presence of. The doing of. Love, home, art. Safety. Revolution. Healing. A meal, a place of refuge, a garden, a community. Whatever magic there is in this world, whatever witchery, whatever hope, I think it comes from this unbelievably difficult act of making.
Art matters. Even when we don’t want it to. Even when it feels trivial. Even when it hurts us, even when it’s obfuscating and petty. Even when we finally understand all the ways it fails and fails, and that breaks our hearts. It still matters. This is a book for us, the people who can’t stop talking about art. Even now. Despite despite despite.
Obviously I haven’t finished the book yet—you can read my final reflections here (when I write them). I’m already planning my next slow reread for August: Lote by Shola von Reinhold. I don’t know what August’s newsletter will be about yet, but it will likely contain a lot of poetry, thanks to the Sealey Challenge. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your July reading.
Yay! Excited that the newsletter will change forms and not go away. 💕
I'm so glad you'll continue the newsletter on a monthly basis! All the cheers to you for figuring out what you needed and asking for it, and then sticking to what you need to do for yourself.