Reading Materials With Ross Scarano

There’s fresh hell every day. Morning, afternoon, and evening we’re invited to look at something horrible, if we’re lucky; most often, this violence arrives without warning or consent. And that’s just the news. Art has its own knives and hammers, and it’s a long-held belief among many artists and critics that we the audience must be shocked into a better apprehension of our reality. But what do we gain by absorbing these blows? What can we learn by turning away?

Those are some of the primary concerns of Maggie Nelson’s book-length work of art criticism, The Art of Cruelty. In the past few years, Nelson has become a fan-favorite among the people who read this sort of thing. (Bluets, her singular meditation on romantic loss and the color blue, is often the point of entry.) She’s widely beloved, enough that there’s already some backlash—stray shots at her memoir of queer partnership and parenthood, The Argonauts; complaints that she’s actually not very radical, that for all her dedication to nuance, she’s got the same frustrating blind spots so many other whites do.

Amidst this conversation, there remains The Art of Cruelty,a book I find every bit as remarkable as Bluets for its curiosity, multidisciplinary appetite, and first-person perspective. This is Nelson’s taste, the idiosyncrasies and contradictions are never less than her own. For a young critic reading Nelson for the first time, it was especially freeing to watch her work so fluidly, with such a wide range of material, from Kara Walker to Sylvia Plath, Nao Bustamente to Karen Finley. It’s my favorite kind of model—the kind that can’t be replicated but nevertheless invites you to imagine your own.

The thing is, literature is as meaningful and convincing as it is bitterly useless and esoteric. Roberto Bolaño understood that sentiment with a vengeance; this deflated balloon of a paradox is the sad heart of The Savage Detectives, first published in Spanish in 1998, and then in English in April 2007, where it launched the cult of the drawn-faced Chilean expat into the literary mainstream. By then, he had been dead for nearly four years.

If there’s a funnier, more ambitious and sorrowful novel about what it’s like to have the world wring your faith in art out of you, I haven’t read it yet. At first, though, the novel doesn’t let on what it’s capable of. Imagine encountering a stick of dynamite without recognizing it—that’s how streamlined and tight the story appears to be, initially. It’s Mexico City, in 1975, and our narrator is Juan García Madero, a wannabe poet and wannabe bad boy. He finds the trouble he’s looking for in the form of the Visceral Realists, led by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, doubles of Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago, respectively. Drama with a pimp and a journey into the desert to find a missing poet lights the fuse on what’s been typical A to B to C storytelling, and when the bomb explodes, the novel goes with it. Madero’s first-person storytelling is replaced by 400 pages of new narrators, like shrapnel raining down slowly around the globe and across the ensuing decades. The energy and conviction of youth slides into a bummer, where your dreams go kaput and your friends no longer speak to each other. Chance lays claim to more of your life than any nourishing prose can.

ego trip’s Book of Rap Lists is your grandma’s attic, but for the history of hip-hop. Like its cover art suggests, this compendium from the short-lived rap magazine is an entire world jammed with ephemera, tchotchkes, and knowledge. Irreverent and informative, its lists document classic venues, samples, unreleased Mobb Deep cuts, lyrics about boobs, stories from Greg Mack, program director of the great L.A. radio station KDAY. At 13 or 14, when I first took it home, from a Borders in suburban Pittsburgh, it made me think about hip-hop and, crucially, race in critical ways. Before you even open the book you have to deal with its canted angle: “ego trip’s Book of Rap Lists Is More Popular than Racism! Black and Whites All Agree” reads the back cover, before proceeding to the blurbs from critics and celebrities. (There’s also a chapter called “Race.”) For lyrical content alone, it should be impossible to be a white hip-hop fan without thinking hard about what that means—with this book as my primary text (along with the Okayplayer forums), it simply was impossible.

Not in my wildest dreams did I believe I would one day encounter the folks responsible for this gold mine. I’ve met or emailed with all of them at this point, if not worked together substantially. Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, Brent Rollins. I drove around L.A. with Brent before a photoshoot, listening to his stories. This guy, who designed the logo for Boyz N the Hood, who designed the entire Book of Rap Lists —he was speaking just to me in an air-conditioned sedan in sight of the Hollywood sign. When Prodigy passed, I edited Gabriel’s obituary for the Queens MC. Noah Callahan-Bever, Rob Kenner, Dave Bry (RIP), three incredible writers who are thanked in the intro—they all played significant roles in my life. Thirteen year-old me couldn’t have imagined loving hip-hop more, but I do now, because it’s family.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is a memoir and academic argument for pleasurable, productive interclass contact as a means to deal with our current mode of capitalism. The problem is, capitalism is always working “for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and of the institutions holding those practices stable.” It’s based on Delany’s experiences in the porn theaters of Times Square in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where gay men went for sex, conversation, and shelter. In the soft projector light of Vanessa del Rio bobbing through head, Delany and the other theater goers enjoyed each other’s company and made connections that would have been unlikely, if not impossible, in any other space.

Blue tenderly, and with much discursive wisdom about sex and desire, recounts how he met hustlers, closeted drug dealers, construction workers, drag queens, social workers, aspiring students, homeless New Yorkers, and disabled New Yorkers in the brown wood seats. Men who became, in many cases, long-time friends, some who he even helped make inroads with their schooling and careers—his time there fulfilled him in numerous ways, made his romantic life, social life, and professional life richer. The porn theaters made him a citizen.

Not including this book would be tantamount to lying, like some dishonest try-hard in a comedy of manners trying to mask their past, when they were something common. Jesus’ Son is widely taught in undergrad writing classes—it’s short, the voice is immediate, lots of drugs. Jeff Martin, my first college fiction-writing professor, assigned it and I read it in just about one sitting, at a two-top in a Panera Bread, facing Fifth Avenue, in Pittsburgh. The prose made me put the book down every so often to let my brain buffer, and so I can recall hearing New Order’s “Age of Consent” out of the chain’s speakers; and at one point I ordered a hideously sweet bagel with plain cream cheese. There’s my origin story.

Johnson’s novel finds weird grace in the heroin and the small-time scrap-metal loserdom of the book’s nameless narrator. You’ll want to steal from it, and that’s part of the book’s trick: you think you could do it, too. (Write about drug misadventures, string your short stories together into something resembling a novel, and make simple, short paragraphs pop with an off-kilter surprise in the middle, or at the end, like laced punch.) Except of course the book is smarter than you, and it warns you plainly about mistaking its strange mechanics for a toolkit at the conclusion of its first masterpiece, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Thankfully, no one listens, and we all keep trying.

My induction into “media,” as ordained by a former colleague, involved drugs and a bathroom. John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead’s satire of the freelance hustle, would have been just as good. Much has changed in the decades since Whitehead wrote it, based in part on his time at The Village Voice, where he cut his teeth working up from editorial assistant to TV editor, but so much hasn’t. From the receipt chasing in the airport that opens the novel to the concise breakdown of the four types of magazine puff, John Henry Days is no worse for the demoralizing years of industry upheaval and technological upchuck since its publication—even though everyone who works in media definitely is.

Our hero J. Sutter is a junkie for procrastination, an open bar, and the “nurturing crimson light of the heat lamp over prime rib,” as visible at chintzy movie premieres and book parties. So he covers pop culture, the only job that can support those habits. Sutter’s latest assignment sends him from his homebase in Fort Greene, Brooklyn to Talcott, West Virginia, for the unveiling of a John Henry stamp—calamitous irony ensues.

Whitehead, who was 31 when he published the novel, crosscuts between Sutter and the “real” John Henry, including incarnations of the character across the years, in folk songs, a Broadway production, and elsewhere. Much of the book’s press focused on the retelling of the Henry myth, a prefiguration of the imagining Whitehead did in The Underground Railroad, but it’s Sutter’s journey through junkets and deadlines that strike hardest. (The set-piece about past-due copy, a bodega run, and some dope fiends is perfect.) Even if $2 a word is the stuff of legend these days too.

Anger must be one of the most difficult emotions to sustain across an entire book. It doesn’t seem like a question of rekindling that feeling each time you write—you have to be living in a state of rage. David Wojnarowicz was already dying when he wrote his memoir. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, he spent his last years creating art in a variety of mediums, writing, tending to (and sometimes dismantling) his relationships, and battling right-wing homophobes who tried to defund and censor his work and the work of his peers. Close to the Knives, published in 1991, the year before his death, at the age of 37, is a fragmented, hallucinatory memoir born of the brutal circumstances of Wojnarowicz’s childhood: abused within his nuclear family, he left home in New Jersey and lived on the streets, using sex work as an underage teen in Manhattan to stay alive.

Close to the Knives is an angry book, but not at the neglect of the other drivers in Wojnarowicz’s extraordinary life. (Cynthia Carr’s 2013 biography, Fire in the Belly, is an essential and devastating cultural history of the 80s East Village scene.) His Beat-inspired recollections of sex on the crumbling Hudson River Piers and at rest stops during a cross-country roadtrip are genuinely hot. There’s wonder and zest in his New York City squalor: “On nights that called for it every pane of glass in every phone booth from here to south street would dissolve in a shower of light. We slept good after a night of this in some abandoned car boiler room rooftop or lonely drag queen’s place.” The book is unmistakably alive.

Still, his description of AIDS is most urgent: “So I’m watching this thing move around in my environment, among friends and strangers: something invisible and abstract and scary; some connect-the-dots version of hell only it’s not as simple as hell.” During a time of despair there are invaluable lessons in perseverance and action to be found in the literature of AIDS activism and the culture wars.

At 10 a.m., on a Saturday in April, 2011, a collection of family, friends, fans, and the aspiring gathered in an auditorium off Washington Square Park to spend the day studying and loving the life and work of Ellen Willis, who served as the first popular music critic at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1975. She wrote seminal essays on Bob Dylan, Woodstock, Janis Joplin, and her beloved Velvet Underground, bringing to each her sharp eye for politics and intolerance for any kind of okie-doke. Out of the Vinyl Deeps, which focused on her music writing, was the only in-print collection of Willis’ at the time—its publication occasioned the symposium. Thanks to the work of her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, Willis’ legacy has been effectively revitalized this decade. Each reissue means she can wake up more writers to the possibilities of criticism, feminism, sex, and pop music. (It’s difficult to concoct a more prescient mix than that, no?) The Essential Ellen Willis, a more wide-ranging collection of her writing, came out three years later. But only one of these books contains a photo of Willis, her hair a curly mop that can’t hide her massive headphones, dancing in front of her mirror in her Greenwich Village apartment in 1980, eyes closed, blissed out. I was in the audience that day, approximately four months into my “career” as a “music journalist,” and I hadn’t a clue. In all honesty, I was most excited to see Alex Ross and Robert Christgau—critics I still appreciate, but given the women on the bill—Ann Powers, Daphne Brooks, Joan Morgan, to name a few—it illustrates just how underdeveloped I was. Like so many others, Ellen Willis saved me. Anxiety, sexual pleasure, reproductive rights, questioning white feminism, and how to get yours in the face of misogynist art—Willis takes it all on. She’d burn your Twitter timeline down.