PR: Walt John Pearce
Walt John Pearce (@waltjohnpearce) is a writer who lives on a mountain.
Last spring Walt organized a marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s tome The Making of Americans in New York City, reviving the annual tradition of Paula Cooper Gallery, from 1974 until 2000. I was one of many readers during the fifty-some hours. Walt’s answers note a number of PR beloveds (Bachmann-Celan; Proust, of course…) and have prompted me to open up The Waste Books (Lichtenberg), which has been in my bag for about two months and on my list for about two years…
The last thing you finished reading
Disorganization & Sex by Jamieson Webster.
The last thing you abandoned reading
I almost always read books all the way through and it is a compulsion. I made it 100 pages into Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright and then I put it down. I would not mind picking it up again at some point in the future but it is hard to say.
Next on your list
This question keeps me up at night and this answer changes by the minute. I just started A Book of Memories by Nadas. After that I might indulge in some Adalbert Stifter.
Something on your list but you never begin
There are a lot and this also haunts me. Prae by Szentkuthy. Women by Philippe Sollers. I am just looking at my shelves and naming things and there are a lot.
Something in which you have no interest
I constantly say I have no interest in something and then get obsessed with it at a later date and with this in mind I cautiously say that most Pynchon does not interest me.
Worst thing you’ve read cover to cover
Maybe Freedom by Franzen. A few summers ago I read The Corrections and I said you know what that was a good time so then I thought Freedom would be fun and a good time and it was not fun at all and it has aged terribly.
Something you reread
Proust.
Something you never forget
Catullus 85 (tr. Ezra Pound).
I hate and love. Why? You may ask but
It beats me. I feel it done to me, and ache.
Conditions in which you read best
Horizontal usually and sometimes sitting up.
Conditions in which you read most often
Horizontal usually.
Conditions in which you cannot read
If someone is looking at me too intensely with their eyeballs.
A favourite author
A few instead of a singular are William Gass and Gertrude Stein and Thomas Bernhard and Paul Celan.
A favourite genre, form, theme
Love.
A favourite title
Geography and Plays.
A favourite book cover
Geography and Plays (Something Else Press).
A favourite recent read
Love by Hanne Ostravik. A short and perfect little book. Nocilla Trilogy and The Book of All Loves by Agustín Fernández Mallo are also both amazing and touched me very much.
A favourite nostalgia read
“Nostalgia is a seductive liar.”
A favourite greatest of all time, personal canon read
Duino Elegies by Rilke. Ada by Nabakov.
Do you annotate
I do not annotate fiction but if there is a quote I like and want to remember I will copy it into a notebook. I will annotate non-fiction and it is usually just underlines.
Do your books tend toward any condition; do you have books that are prized possessions
I am generally a believer that books are meant to be read and I treat them as such. There are a few exceptions and these books look nice on my shelf because I do not treat them this way.
Nabokov, among others, in view A text that surprised you
Septology by Jon Fosse. I wanted to hate it and then I was incredibly moved and unfortunately I think it might be the best book of the 21st century.
A text that disappointed you
Most texts disappoint me in some way and this is part of the beauty and mystery of reading and the life that surrounds it.
A text that altered you somehow
Rilke and Proust and Stein altered me and they probably altered me more than anything else. Yeats altered me and Freud altered me. George Oppen altered me. Recently the Bachmann-Celan letters altered me profoundly.
Open up a text and copy a line at random
“The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.” — The Waste Books (#74, Notebook D), Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.
Thanks for playing:
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