Hi all,
Longtime readers – or anyone who read the December newsletter – will recall my intention to devote the final month of the year to re-reading. I’m sure the world is just dying to find out how it went…
Luckily for you, reader, so is The Business Bro. He has graciously agreed to stop in today and interview me on what transpired in December.
And as always, thanks for rereading.
Tim
TOA: Hi, thanks for-
BB: Right, so, what’s happening?
TOA: Well, I thought you were here to interview me about what I read in December.
BB: Sounds boring, why would I do that?
TOA: Well, for one, you said you would-
BB: Huh? When was this?
TOA: Yesterday, after I sent you that email.
BB: What email?
TOA: I sent it in the morning, asking if you’d drop by today and interview me about-
BB: I didn’t get that email.
TOA: What are you talking about? You replied to it.
BB: No, that can’t be. I must have been hacked.
TOA: Why would anyone ever hack your email?
BB: How should I understand the criminal mind? Maybe if you asked-
TOA: It doesn’t matter, just ask me some questions about what happened and you’ll be fine.
BB: OK, sure, whatever, so what did Hillary have to say?
TOA: What?
BB: Didn’t she write What Happened?
TOA: No, goodness, I meant ask about what happened in December.
BB: What? It's February.
TOA: Oh boy...
BB: Why ask, anyway? Aren’t you going to write those little ready reviews or whatever?
TOA: Yeah, sure, I’ll probably write them at some point-
BB: So why a separate interview? Am I gonna have to interview you for every book now?
TOA: No, it’s just that for this block I thought there were some interesting connections among the books I read that you might-
BB: What books?
TOA: Did you read the December newsletter?
BB: Uhh…
TOA: What the hell!
BB: I mean, did you email it?
TOA: Yeah, the emails go out every day-
BB: I told you already, I was hacked, I couldn’t read the emails.
TOA: It doesn’t matter. So what I said was, in December I only wanted to re-read old books-
BB: How old?
TOA: Can you stop interrupting?
BB: Interrupting? I thought I was interviewing you? I’m just asking the questions, here, if you need me to go I have a data breach to-
TOA: OK, fine, ask whatever you like, the books weren’t old, they were just books I’ve read before. It’s kind of like the book club idea you abandoned after re-reading just one book-
BB: Hey, that isn’t abandoned, I’m just taking my time, you have a hare mentality, what it takes in business these days is to think like a tortoise, one step-
TOA: Sure, sure, I’ll be here when you finally read Plain Talk again, anyway, the point is, I just wanted to limit December to re-reading, I just wanted to see how it went, and if it went well, I would make it into a tradition of sorts, because by the time the end of the year rolls-
BB: That’s a stupid idea.
TOA: What’s stupid about it?
BB: Well, the way you have it set up, if everyone did that in December, no one would read any of your December posts, since they wouldn’t have read it yet, so they couldn’t re-read it, you see, because they would have to wait a year to read it…clever, right? That’s why I didn’t read your stupid newsletter! How do you like your own medicine?
TOA: That’s an all-time load of bull from you, plus, you just told me you got hacked, so now you’re obviously lying, clever my foot, clever like a dumb-
BB: Hey hey hey! No profanity.
TOA: What’s this, no profanity? You trying to get into HR now? I wasn’t going to say anything, anyway.
BB: You never say anything. Anyway, refresh my memory, please, and remind me what you were going to do in December?
TOA: Right. So I wanted to exclusively read books I’d already read. There wasn’t any special criteria beyond my just wanting to read them once more. I ended up with this shortlist:
*Bluets by Maggie Nelson
*The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
*Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
*M Train by Patti Smith
*High Output Management by Andy Grove
*The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
*Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
*Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
BB: Oh, Andy, I’ve read him.
TOA: Right, like you're on a first name basis with him, well, I almost got there, I ended up finishing everything in December except for that one and Eureka Street.
BB: What happened? You gonna write a book called Low Output Reading?
TOA: Please.
BB: Or maybe you can make it a book you are not writing? Honestly, this blog, it gives me a headache some-
TOA: Look, it was just bad admin, for some reason I couldn’t renew High Output Management at the library when it came due at the end of the month. Some loser put it on reserve! So I had to return it. I’ll get it again soon.
BB: Who are you calling a loser?
TOA: Huh?
BB: Er, never mind. How in the world is it possible for someone to want to read that book?
TOA: Who knows? Maybe a lot of budding business bros made it a New Year’s resolution to stop managing like shi-
BB: Hey! Watch it! I’m not finishing this interview if you keep cussing!
TOA: Right, sorry. Wait, when did you start the interview?
BB: Right when I walked in, if you knew how to answer a question we’d be done. Plus, I’ll ask the questions around here, thank you very much!
TOA: Let’s just move on, shall we?
BB: Suit yourself. So you’ll read High Output Management again soon and write twenty-five hundred words of nonsense about it for us shortly. I’m sure your three readers are all looking forward to it!
TOA: Well, based on your recent revelations, apparently it’s been two-
BB: Quiet! I’m talking here! And what happened to Eureka Street?
TOA: Oh, I read it, I just finished it on New Year’s Day.
BB: You liar!
TOA: What? So I didn’t finish it in December, you see, and that’s the point, but you can ask me about it anyway.
BB: My only question is, why does the book have such a stupid title?
TOA: Stupid title? Like The Hard Thing About Hard Things? At least Eureka Street doesn’t sound like some low-budget porno. Next question.
BB: So you are counting Eureka Street in Reading Year 2018?
TOA: What is Reading Year 2018? Is that what the IRS calls it?
BB: I see it was written by a 'Robert'...not a good start to your ‘Hello Ladies’ index, is it?
TOA: Hey look, the numbers are what they are, and I’m not interested in using my re-reading month to fudge anything. Unlike you, I wasn’t in the kitchen the day we learned how to cook the books. And if my reading selections make me a sexist, then so be it, the only recommendations I get from you are all written by dudes wearing ill-fitting suits, plus if someone reads three books a year and two of them were by women, well, sure, the percentages work out, but that’s still like forty books less than-
BB: OK, OK, settle down!
TOA: What? I wasn’t going to curse!
BB: You were starting to sound like a business bro there...or, or...or...
TOA: Or what?
BB: Or Moya.
TOA: Oh, no.
BB: Oh no what? Who doesn't like a little-
TOA: No way.
BB: OK, whatever.
TOA: Well, I guess I wouldn’t know, since someone took High Output Management away from me before I got a chance to read it.
BB: Why didn’t you just read it before you had to return it?
TOA: Ah, well, that’s a good question, I basically just ran out of time.
BB: Pitiful. Time isn’t something you get from a benefactor, time is just the decisions you make. So you decided not to read the book, correct? So you hadn’t even opened it when you returned it, correct?
TOA: Right, more or less. It’s not a big deal. It’s sort of true, I mean, but I was busy wrapping up some of my other reading. Wind-Up Bird in particular was a beast, the thing was over six hundred pages and weighed more than all the other books I re-read combined.
BB: Oh, so you didn’t like it?
TOA: What? No, it was great, the book was just a lot bigger than I remembered.
BB: Sounds like this blog.
TOA: Quiet.
BB: So what did you like best about it?
TOA: Well, I’d kind of forgotten pretty much everything about the book. Longtime readers will recall how I used a character from the book, Mr. Honda, as an answer to one of my security questions. Reading this book again-
BB: Wait, what do you mean, security question?
TOA: You know, like when you log into a bank account online and it asks you some stupid fu-
BB: Hey hey hey! I just got hacked and you’re out here yelling out the passwords-
TOA: What! Pipe down, I’m talking here! Mr. Honda isn’t a password, you fool, it’s the answer to a question, and the only one I’ve been allowed to answer thus far, so listen up, Business Brick, I’m talking about those stupid security questions that ask you easily identifiable things like what school you went to or what your dad’s middle name is, it's ridiculous, and then the news goes on and on with wide-eyed surprise about data breaches, give me a break, like I’m supposed to believe these websites are secure because a hacker would never figure out what street I grew up on, morons, all of them, morons I say-
BB: Goodness, do I need to get Moya?
TOA: Who? His name’s Mamiya.
BB: What?
TOA: From Wind-Up Bird, that’s Honda’s buddy, Mamiya.
BB: I haven’t read the book yet, you see-
TOA: I figured, you don’t read anything, anyway-
BB: I got hacked, and even if I didn’t, I have better shit to do than read a six hundred page book.
TOA: What happened to the no-cussing rule?
BB: Oops.
TOA: Don’t sweat it, Business Butthead, anyway I did read the book again and realized why I liked Mr. Honda so much, the way Murakami describes the guy is really something else, equal parts hilarious and mythical.
BB: Equal parts hilarious and mythical? What does that mean?
TOA: Yeah, see, this is why I don’t review these books, because people who don’t read can’t figure it out, look, if you don’t watch the sunset, don’t question the colors I use in the description of it, OK?
BB: That’s why you never succeed, you watch sunsets instead of getting to work, right, well, OK, so you liked Honda, was he your favorite character from the month?
TOA: Oh, now we’re talking, let’s see, well, I liked Roche from Eureka Street, I liked the Colonel from Hard-Boiled Wonderland, I liked Jake’s cat…
BB: Jake’s cat?
TOA: Yeah, that one was from Eureka Street as well. The Shadow from Hard-Boiled Wonderland was pretty good, too, though hard to say for sure if I’m allowed to describe him as a character.
BB: No one from Bluets? And what was the cat’s name?
TOA: Well, see, the thing with that, I don’t think the cat had a name, and as for Bluets and The Argonauts and M Train, well, those books were memoir-like substances, so it’s hard to say one character or another was a favorite, it's hard to say there were any characters in those books at all, in fact. I suppose I could say Maggie Nelson was a favorite character, but that would be ridiculous, and quite frankly, also untrue, though it wasn’t like she was unlikable, just saying-
BB: I’m sure Patti Smith’s been described as a character at some point in her life.
TOA: Right, well, I’m not joining that club today.
BB: So, wait, memoir-like substance.
TOA: Is that a question?
BB: Yeah, well, what do you mean?
TOA: Well, I don’t really know, I mean, but since the books are about each author’s experiences and nothing in them is really made up, I’m sure they qualify as memoir. I just don’t think these books fit my working definition for ‘memoir’.
BB: What are you talking about? A memoir is just like you said, about the author.
TOA: Possibly, and it’s a fair definition, but in these books it’s less the author telling us readers, well, telling me, I should say, since I read, but anyway, in these books it’s not like the author is telling me what happened and how she felt about it, there is simultaneously more and less than that. It’s more like the pieces are put on the page and they are being constantly rearranged.
BB: You know, I started to worry when you said ‘simultaneously more and less’, but-
TOA: Why would you worry, you aren’t gonna read this, anyway-
BB: Stop interrupting!
TOA: You stop interrupting, anyway, when I started the month I kind of remembered this as a feature of Bluets and The Argonauts, that both of these books were not so linear as a reader might expect from a memoir, but I’d also forgotten how the book was organized to make this clear. No paragraphs, nothing traditional in the formatting, just blocks of text separated from each other. Sometimes a block would relate directly to a neighbor and sometimes the narrative would just jump a little bit. I really enjoyed the fluidity of the books.
BB: So M Train was also like this?
TOA: No, see, M Train, I’d forgotten, was written more like a standard old memoir, but the timing jumps just the same. And I think since I first read M Train a couple of years ago, my view has changed a little bit on the style. In a way, I was impressed as I read the book in a way I wasn’t the first time because the skill needed for Patti Smith to go from the present to the past and back again is something I recognize now as a massively difficult technique for any writer to master.
BB: The challenge, you mean, being the process of writing about different periods of time within the structure of a genre that, by definition, doesn’t allow for leaps in time?
TOA: Sort of, in a way, I guess I agree with that, and there’s more to it. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the Nelson books by what I'm about to say...but...I came away more impressed with M Train than I expected because the structure doesn’t help the author in the way it does for Bluets or The Argonauts.
BB: Or Proper Admin?
TOA: Huh?
BB: Never mind.
TOA: Right, well, anyway, I mean it’s hard to write a memoir that doesn’t follow a linear narrative progression, so in a way these books are similar, it’s just that M Train does it without strictly defining leaps in time by explicitly separating blocks of text and I’m more impressed by that now than I was the first time I read it.
BB: So did you see connections among the fiction-
TOA: Hold up, also, regarding Proper Admin, yeah, I hear ya, I think it’s right, the setup helped early on but these days it’s easier to write the blocks separately.
BB: Not for everyone.
TOA: What do you mean?
BB: Well, where’s Moya been? I mean, he used to get his monthly piece in on time when we were going full guns on Proper Admin, but I haven’t seen a post of his in months.
TOA: I thought you got hacked?
BB: Umm, well, until then, obviously.
TOA: Yeah.
BB: Well?
TOA: I’m not sure, he’s usually around and ranting and drinking whiskey, but he hasn’t really-
Moya: Who needs me?
TOA: Oh no, it’s him!
BB: Oh good, just the man-
TOA: Moya, you gotta go-
BB: What? I want to catch up a bit-
TOA: Well, go for a walk then-
Moya: A walk, a walk, you say, on these streets, where parked cars are given more room than the pedestrians, on Charles Street, maybe-
TOA: Here we go...
Moya: -a three lane street with two lanes for parking, that’s five lanes by my count, five lanes of metal and rubber and gasoline, the environment itself on four wheels, eight wheels, wheels up and down, nowhere to walk, nowhere to talk, nowhere to sit with a whiskey-
BB: Actually, this isn’t good-
Moya: -and the bikes, the bikes, who are these bikes, riding around, no helmets, no courtesy, no hope, sit, sit Moya, sit and have a whiskey-
TOA: Maybe we should-
Moya: -the bikes go up and down, it’s one-way for us all, it’s a red light for us all, but the bikes, oh the bikes, they go zippidy-dee-dah on through-
BB: I’m going to take him outside-
Moya: -and Beacon Street, four lanes, plus two parking lanes, six lanes, SIX lanes, duck boats and tour buses and crazed cabs, all zipping around Boston, going where, going nowhere, where to go when all I see is cars-
BB: I’ll come back next week, and we’ll finish up-
Moya: -and the width of these people, each bike almost wider than the car, do they even get exercise on those bikes-
TOA: Good idea, I’ll catch you soon.
Moya: -does anyone even care, it's the future in the present, for goodness sake-
BB: Come on Moya, out we go-
(THE BB grabs MOYA, who is still ranting on about who knows what. The pair exit, leaving TOA in the empty room, as the shouts disappear down the hallway…)
