THE FILIPINO SHELFIE: MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI
What are your reading habits and/or tendencies (e.g. favorite type of reads)?
A recurring tendency I consider a lifeline to my reading habits is re-reading texts that are memorable to me, in some way. I’m sure this is a common tendency among readers, especially for critics, researchers, and grad students who subject numerous texts to close readings, for the looming red lights of a deadline. In many ways, multiple close readings of a text underlines its significance, within the context of an existing canon; it offers clues to the interior lives of a cultural milieu, even the zeitgeist of an era. But at the more intimate level, re-reading a text without the oppressive banner of a deadline, underlines how it seduces the discriminating eye of the reading eye, frantic for beauty, music, and magic on the page, for its ability to transport that eye away from the noise of daily life, away from clickbait catchphrases, obligatory hashtags, news cycles, or, depending on one’s taste, away from reading matter with the life expectancy of a housefly. Am I talking about re-reading texts as a kind of ivory tower habit and past time? It can be, though it doesn’t have to be. In fact, re-reading a text is already a habit for thousands and millions who can’t pass a day or week without reading the Holy Bible and the Quran for guidance.
In my case, I don’t think I can pass a year without re-reading Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. I’ve been reading this novel for at least twenty years now, or maybe twenty-five, and its ability to seduce me has never waned, even though the French girl and the Chinese businessman in the novel are not quite memorable characters to me. They almost disappear in Duras’s prose. They’re simply pawns in her story, in a voice so insidious to anchor its tone and pitch in melancholy and nostalgia that, to those who can’t stand the prose, can easily be mistaken as sentimentality and melodrama. It’s the voice of longing as intense as the harsh world where the story is set, the colonial world of Vietnam, which, now and then, feels like a painting with echoes of Rembrandt’s hues, full of dark colors, and the occasional ambivalence of tertiary colors to emphasize the dramatic. I have read other novels by Duras, as well, but these other novels in her oeuvre somehow failed to capture my attention; and so, perhaps I should read them again, to find out if my perceptions about them have changed.
Now as someone who’s prone to scotch-tape quotations on a notebook cover or bathroom mirror, there is a passage in The Lover I’ve pinned on my room’s wall back in college, later as part of various email signatures, then eventually on my current website since its creation a few years ago:
It’s while it’s being lived that life is immortal, while it’s still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, it’s not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown.
“Something else that remains unknown.” Perhaps this phrase holds the clue as to why I love to read The Lover over and over again. Certainly, I want a certain voice - with a tone I can trust - to set a mood in my mind, when I’m working on a project, or when I want to be inspired on how to start a project. But I’d like to think that re-reading this novel offers something else besides mere inspiration, something that doesn’t quite exist, for me, in The Great Gatsby, or The Sun Also Rises, which I read again in 2023, something immortal and, to an extent, full or mystery and enigma that, upon further examination, might slip dangerously into hints of unnecessary autobiography.
What are you currently reading?
With a project in mind, I’m currently reading a short story collection and novel by Ninotchka Rosca: The Monsoon Collection and State of War. I haven’t read the collection before, but the novel I have, in college, for a class on postcolonial narratives.
If you’re a published book author, choose a book(s) and think about how you hope readers would read it?
I used the idea of life evolving from the verdant energies of youth to the looming shadows of old age as my guiding light on how to roughly arrange the poems in my first book, Hotel Pacoima (2021). To me, this arrangement moves like a recollection, a recollection in the mind of the characters in the poem Hotel Pacoima, from which the collection is named after. While the book hasn’t provided any instructions on how to read it, I hope for readers to imagine the poems as a kind of dream sequence happening in the characters of that poem, as they reflect on the state of their lives as travelers and as transplants from previous geographies, now trying to breathe or capture a more settled life in California:
There are many ways of moving / inward here. There are no rules of / penetrating the deserts of a body without / family in this country. The bedsheets / understand that. They are used to the / scent of whispers, acclimated in the vagaries / of love.
One hopes that the reader feels the city of Los Angeles in the poems, as well, a party-town palpitating with addictions, sentimental educations, and “the scent of whispers, acclimated to the vagaries / of love.”
Please share some favorite books.
The Lover (1984), for one, as mentioned above, a favorite in perpetuity.
Briefly - like love that means something for a few hours - Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal (1949).
For a while now, Major Jackson’s Holding Company (2010) aspires to be on the list.
The Master Bedroom (2007) and After the Funeral (2023) by Tessa Hadley demand to dethrone the secret masters on my faves list.
Ask yourself a reading-related question you concoct, and answer it.
Have you read Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel The Sparsholt Affair (2018)? If so, can you compare that novel to another novel you’ve read before?
How did you know I’ve read that novel? You must be psychic? You don’t look like an alumnus of the Nostradamus School of Clairvoyance and Telepathy, because you’re not the type. But anyway, it took me a while to read that novel. I kept putting it aside, since it’s a thick book. 432 pages. Eventually, I read it last year, in 2023, exactly a year ago, based on my reading log. And without giving away too much, the story is about a homosexual dalliance in 1940s Britain, around World War II, between David Sparsholt, who studied at Oxford for a brief period, and someone named Evert Dax, an artist. The novel’s thrust lies on how that encounter is being talked about over the years. In fact, David Sparsholt denies that encounter happened, when asked about it in old age. We only ‘see’ David in the story from a distance, about what he has become, through rumors and observations. One might say this novel is a story about how gossip becomes monumental in the imagination, because the subject is a sexual relationship between men. But more so, it’s about how a certain generation views homosexuality, and how those views shape the life of heterosexuality in Great Britain.
This novel reminds me of Elizabeth Kostova’s novel The Historian (2005), which I’ve read roughly a year after its publication. At 704 pages, it took a while to finish reading the novel. The novel feels like a rumor now. The novel is about Dracula. And what makes this novel unusual is the idea that Dracula - the vampire in physical form - exists only on the periphery of the story, a kind of shadow. It’s how the characters in the story talks about Dracula that holds the heart of the story, the same way the characters in Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair talks about a gay encounter, over time. There’s a recognizable absence of blood and violence in the novel, as though the idea of Dracula has been reduced to mere curiosity and academic gossip. Now while Kostova’s novel received mixed reviews, Hollinghurst’s received mostly positive reviews, no doubt courtesy of this prose; The Guardian thinks the novel is “beautifully observed.”
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From another unit of Michael's book cabinets:
*****
Michael Caylo-Baradi is an alumnus of The Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center (CUNY). His work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Galway Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Galatea Resurrects, Hobart, Eunoia Review, Third Wednesday Magazine, MiGoZine, and elsewhere. He has also written reviews for New Pages, The Halo-Halo Review, The Kenyon Review, The Latin American Review of Books (UK), and PopMatters, among others. His debut pamphlet, Hotel Pacoima, was released by Kelsay Books in 2021.
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