One academic year has passed. I find myself in another year of keeping faith, staying curious. Last year, I churned out essays on theories I may never return to. With intensity I chased clarity through my writing, scribbling half-baked ideas that met the penetrating gaze of my supervisors. This year, my writing is sluggish. I am more easily devoted to the writing of others.
Online I am reading Lauren Alwan’s essay on the virtue of slow writing. I learn that Min Jin Lee wrote Pachinko in 28 years, and Edward P. Jones thought about The Known World for more than 10 years before writing the book. I am consoled. Somewhat.
Reading, testing as it may be, has not been as exasperating as writing. It is an indulgence. My days are filled with a hunger for more reading time. I have particular cravings: I want to read Lauren Berlant in bed, joined by a bar of Green & Black’s dark chocolate. This is not a flimsy wish.
I nurse a desire to read Berlant for the rest of my life—to have this become a paid and permanent occupation to which I submit, suspending the chore of ambition which Berlant describes as ‘one of the obscene affects of capitalist culture.’
Berlant’s writing fascinates. I have been reading The Female Complaint, savouring it. My fascination extends into frequent visits to Berlant’s blog, Supervalent Thought. I know this blog is among the vestiges of Berlant’s brilliance. I know it will not be updated with new posts. Still, I return.
I marvel at the intricacy of Berlant’s prose, the harmonious articulations, how the words travel together towards illumination. I enjoy the dissonance too—the ambiguities wrapped under Berlant’s claims and conjectures.
I like how Berlant warms up to the absurd and incoherent in ordinary life, attending to mysteries and miseries with matchless generosity.
I wish to echo Gregory J. Seigworth: ‘In Berlant, everything circulates, sticks, resonates, gathers, and dissipates—rhythms and registers and intuitions rise to the surface, find cross-patternings and interferences, exert palpable tensions and reliefs, come to cluster, and sometimes precipitate as events or episodes with distinct histories pointing toward new futures.’ In Berlant, curiosity throbs without end.
It is a pleasure to read. It is a unique pleasure to read Berlant.
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