Eat: Asparagus season is in full swing and you can’t go anywhere in Paris without seeing bundles of thick green and white stalks for sale. I picked up a fistful of spears in La Grande Epicerie, a magical food store that I’ve mentioned before. I steamed these for a few minutes, coated them in butter, and topped with a poached egg and a bit of salt.
Drink: English breakfast tea with honey.
Read: After I finished Bird by Bird, I looked at my stack of books and hesitated before selecting Girl with Curious Hair. Part of me wanted to take a longer break from David Foster Wallace (I finished Infinite Jest at the end of February), not because I’ve grown tired of him, but because I didn’t want to binge on him.
But I picked him up anyway because I’m currently revising a short story to send out to magazines, and for some reason DFW helps me write more than the other authors in my stack of books. Sometimes I worry that I just have a habit of mimicking his voice, but I think his influence on me is less specific; it’s a more general urge to write and to work hard. I thought of opening Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fiction, but as much as I love Borges, his stories send me down intellectual roads rather than creative ones. Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch has also been begging me to read it, but I think reading a structurally intricate stream-of-consciousness novel would encourage my short story to grow and to grow more complex, beyond my ability to manage coherently or meaningfully.
So I’m reading Girl with Curious Hair, at the risk of coming across to all of you as completely DFW-obsessed. I’m reminded of something Zadie Smith wrote:
“I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if my sentences are baggy, too baroque, I cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If I’m disappearing up my own aesthete’s arse, I stop worry so much about what Nabokov would say, and pick up Dostoyevsky, the patron saint of substance over style; a reminder to us all that good writing is more than elegant sentences. The only rule is quality.”
Nutritionists say that if you listen to your body, it will tell you what to eat. I often find myself craving fruit and salad if I’ve been eating too much bread and cheese (easy to do in France), or wanting some red meat if my diet’s been too low in protein. Sometimes I do the same with books. There are authors I love, from whose writing I have so much to learn, but right now I need to consume some DFW.
What were your literary cravings this week?
