Do I Even Have a Substack?

The Books I Read This Year

It seems like such - in my mother’s words, a crock of shit - to blame the fact that I had a book deadline for keeping me from posting here. After all, I did so many other things, things that were not me writing my book in 2025. I meditated in an actual cave. I sang karaoke with a live band. I went on a whale watch. Etc. But these things all felt like they could, in some secret trick of alchemy, somehow enhance my writing. Whereas the thing that actually does enhance my writing - writing! - felt like a waste of time if it was not in service to The Book. Now, at the end of the year, I see the folly of my ways. Is my New Years resolution to stick more closely to this so-called Diary? Last year my resolution was to think more mystical thoughts, and I found myself in India, vomiting into a holy river under the full moon. Intentions are powerful.

Transgressive literature is also powerful. I had to put Alison Rumfitt’s spooky, disgusting novel Brainwyrms down on occasion just to collect myself. Let’s be real - we all want to be cool enough to be able to effortlessly consume a story where the protagonist is contending with the perhaps karmic results of indulging her fetish for parasites burrowing into her genitalia, but such books hit best when we are not so jaded. I relished the sort of shaky, gulping feeling in my throat and belly, reading some of these grotesque and imaginative passages; it reminded me by ridding myself of a certain innocence by reading Dennis Cooper’s Closer while on the clock at a bookstore at the close of my 20s. I recall having to put that book down also, just for a moment, just to collect myself, to notice and yes enjoy the disturbing effect a book can have on a body. I fucking love Alison Rumfitt. Also, a whole piece of this book is repulsive literary vengeance upon JK Rowling, whose actions IRL remain more abhorrent than anything depicted.

I read Beowolf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley on my flight to India. I’ve meant to read Beowolf ever since, while assisting with admissions at an art high school I occasionally taught at, a super intense 13-year-old ballerina informed me it was what she was currently reading for pleasure. I guess I wanted what this kid had - a sort of aura of discipline, gravitas, great posture and a neat bun. I’m sad for her that she was too early for Headley’s translation, and very happy for myself. It made me positively giddy that she swapped out the Old English ‘Hweat!’ - Lo! - for ‘Bro!’, probably because the joy the translator felt in returning the tale to a bombastic brag among bros in a bar was palpable, and contagious. Come for the feminist reclamation of Grendel’s Mother, stay for the cocky, swaggering slang.

I found Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man in a pile of free books left on a stoop many years ago in Brooklyn, and I’m glad I finally dug into it. You almost certainly know the tale, but if you don’t - a promising young man in the literary industry falls victim to his insatiable appetite for crack; paranoia ensues. The scene where his partner, knowing his love has relapsed and scouring the city for him, finally finds him in a hotel about to have chemsex with a fellow addict, and stays, to see with his own eyes that sort of abject depths his beloved is compelled towards in his addiction (certainly, allowing his partner to stay and look on is one of those depths) is so thoroughly haunting, I’ve thought about it a lot since reading it. What it means to behold the lover in their perhaps most grotesque and abandoned moments, when they are showing you a certain aspect of their infinite selves that is hard, even devastating, to witness.

Ugh, my battery is about to go in the red. I’m sitting in bed typing this with a cold. That’s what it took! Bedbound, with a cold! A tarot reading I just performed on the state of my chakras points to a spiritual imbalance as the root cause of my illness, though I suspect a cough my lover blamed on a low-quality vape purchased in Florida may have been something more. Regardless, both things can be true; that’s the nature of a spiritual malaise. It’s true I am not as ravenous for spiritual things as I was this time last year, which I feel some shame about but I’m trying to just go with my life’s various flows. One can not be playing the same one note forever whilst in this swarming hive of influence that is life, can one? Or, is that the challenge? Maybe my New Year’s Resolution should be spiritual again? Regardless, I feel too yucky to get out of bed and fetch my cord so when this thing really threatens to die, I’m posting it. I can’t get through a year’s worth of books in one sitting anyway, not with my digressions!

I want to start by saying Sam Ace’s work is so spectacular

I Want to Start By Saying by the poet Sam Ace is such a really fantastic book. Like Joe Brainard’s I Remember, which asserts hits recollections line by line, Sam Ace utilizes his own phrase of choice with a hypnotic repetition that makes the whole work feel slightly ritualistic as delineates certain thoughts and truths of his life and mind, exploring love and family in a way that squeezes the heart. There’s also something about using this phrase, I want to start by saying, over and over, that makes me think of the little things you need to get out of the way sometimes before you plunge more deeply into what you think is the guts of a story, but here we see that those little asides are the story, linked like this they can tell the whole story - maybe because it’s fricking Christmas but I am imagining each I want to start by saying like a rope of tinsel tied to the next and all swagged around the thick green living tree. Sam Ace is a living treasure. Having just attended a reading for the publication of our deceased treasure Kevin Killian’s collected, I’m feeling extra tender to all of us still walking the earth: let’s not wait til we’re gone to express how beloved and meaningful someone’s work can be to our lives.

Okay, the battery has turned red. I am going to go drink a healthy, swampy drink with raw ginger and jalapeno my husband left for me before setting off to visit his 97-year-old grandmother. Perhaps it will cure me? If not I guess I’ll meditate.

Love, Michelle