Priors

What informs who I am and how I see the world.

I like reading lists of who the people I am reading are reading. I’m not alone in this; it’s why “your favorite writer’s favorite writer” gets more marketing use than is statistically possible. I am nobody’s favorite writer; nevertheless, I have favorites. The people and works in this list have had profound effects on me, deserve wider attention, or both.

I considered ordering them by genre or form and decided against it; that’s not how this stuff lives in my head anyway.

This is a work-in-progress. I have a list in my head and different lists written down, and am reconciling them all here over time.

• Friends at the Table

  podcast, 2014-present

  Friends at the Table is, I think, the best storytelling on the internet today. It is an actual play podcast—this means it’s a recording of some friends playing tabletop RPGs. Unlike your friends and mine, these friends are more interested in what collaborative and improvisational stories say about ourselves and our conditions than in, like, winning. For example: a character declared their intent to perform an action, rolled dice to do so, failed, and Austin Walker said something like, “ah, a failure,” paused for what felt like ten minutes, then continued, “…you succeed, by all appearances,” in such a confident and knowing tone that my brain was forever reconfigured.

• Philtrum, Taije Silverman

  inchoate poem, 2009

  In the fall of 2009 I was a junior in college. I was learning to program computers because everyone around me said it was a sensible craft to learn, something that would pay the bills. I wanted to write poetry.

  The CS courseload left very little margin for electives but I found a way to take a poetry class. I wrote bad poetry, which is the precursor to writing good poetry, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I was assigned attendance of a reading by some visiting poets, including Taije Silverman. She read a poem she was still tinkering with. It was called Philtrum. She was the last to read and when she finished I remember sitting, stunned, beside the friend who’d tagged along. Neither of us spoke as we stood and left the auditorium with all the others. Night had fallen while we were inside and the world seemed new. Poems can do that, I thought. They can remake.

  I remember emailing Taije afterward to compliment her on the poem and ask if she could share a copy—it being a work in progress—but cannot for the life of me find the email. It’s possible I deleted it out of embarassment at having asked an artist to share unfinished work for free. I bought the collection that contains it, Houses are Fields, when it was published, but I will warn you that the Philtrum it contains is not quite the one I remember. It was remade.

• Traveler of the Century, Andrés Neuman

  novel, 2013

  I have not read widely or deeply, full stop. But from what I have read it seems to me that I can retain a novel in one of three ways. I can retain it structurally, like a postcard of a cathedral pinned beside a favorite window. I can retain its characters, letting them inhabit me, as they say, rent-free (see Ulysses, below). Or—and this is vanishingly rare—I can retain their sense-memory, gathering up their feeling-making, a thin gilt chain pooled in my palm.

  I can barely recall the plot of Traveler of the Century, but I can perfectly recall its uncanny positioning, its literally-and-figuratively Bohemian stylings, the vertiginous feeling I had every time I folded back the dog-ear. Sometimes I call up this feeling just to sit with it.

• A single moment from Jerusalem, Alan Moore

  novel, 2016

  This isn’t to say I didn’t like the book; I did. But it was this one moment that transfixed me. I imagine it, sometimes, as I fall asleep. I see it every time I look at massive ceiling murals in churches. I have always been an absolute sucker for artistic depictions of insanity, especially from inside the madness.

  I don’t want to spoil it; if you pick the novel up it’ll happen in the first twenty pages of Book One, page 57 in my copy. Read it, read until things get cornery.

• Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

  novel, 1962

  I was assigned Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ms. Brown, sixth grade English teacher and Magic: The Gathering Club sponsor. My core memory of Ms. Brown concerns a poem I wrote for her class. We must’ve been reading Shakespeare: the poem was in meter. I was at the time obsessed with all things medieval (and am still—just the other day I was driving to an H-Mart to buy barley tea and passed some sort of warehouse mid-construction; it was being built in pale gray stone, a cousin of cinderblock, and consisted of a narrow tower and what for all the world appeared to be a keep, suggested perhaps by the crenellation left by huge machines breaking off the day’s work early for rain) and wrote a poem in which I rhymed castle with hassle. She marked the poem down because hassle “wasn’t in the dictionary.” I got a B. I walked home from school. When my parents got home I was crying, inconsolable—my first B (yes I know but bear with me). A few weeks later we had our first meeting of the MTG club. My dad was the parent coordinator, and when he walked into Ms. Brown’s classroom she greeted him and he said oh, you’re the teacher who gave my son a B. She replied no, I didn’t give him a B—he earned a B.

  I learned a tremendmous amount from Ms. Brown. I learned a feel for language. I learned that dictionaries are an instrument of oppression and can be safely ignored. I learned that we hold within our heads kaleidoscopic impressions of everyone we’ve ever met, stacks of flat sense-memories that are more a reflection of who we were in that moment than who the object of our study ever was. This is also the principal lesson of Bradbury’s novel.

  I have probably read this novel more times than any other book. For a while I read it once a year on Halloween, and still try to each year if I have the time. When I started doing this I was in college; I’d found my old middle school paperback and, on a whim, reread it. I was charmed by all the places I’d underlined sentences and written in my shitty gradeschool hand (still shitty) foreshadowing or symbolism. I identified then, even as a twenty-year-old, with the protagonist, 13-year-old Will Halloway.

  My life kept unrolling before me and I kept acquiring neat and neatly inaccurate impressions of my peers. I kept rereading Something Wicked This Way Comes. I had a son. His hair came in blond, just like Will Halloway’s.

  The novel is told partly from Will’s perspective and partly from that of his dad, Charles Halloway, a man who had a child late (by his estimation) and ruminates constantly on his old age. He is nearly consumed by the feeling that life is largely behind him, and he regards his son as a kind of meteor, a brief bright star defined by the wake he leaves behind. In the past few years I have begun to feel impatient with Bradbury’s breathless prose during the Will sections, find myself waiting for the Charles sections to arrive. I have begun to identify with the old father shut up in the library with his books.

  This slow but inexorable transfer of self (see The Wheel of Time, below) aside, the mood of this book is unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Every paragraph feels freighted. I mean the first sentence of the book is The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. I could write only first sentences for the rest of my life and never arrive at anything so perfect.

• Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

  video game, 2001

  …And so it came to pass that the Countess, who once bathed in the rejuvenating blood of a hundred virgins, was buried alive…And her castle in which so many cruel deeds took place fell rapidly into ruin. Rising over the buried dungeons in that god-forsaken wilderness, a solitary tower, like some monument to Evil, is all that remains. The Countess’ fortune was believed to be divided among the clergy, although some say that more remains unfound, still buried alongside the rotting skulls that bear mute witness to the inhumanity of the human creature.

  I spent years of my life with this game’s writing bouncing around my skull. When I made my first character I’d been reading the Ender’s Game series (fuck OSC) and named my assassin Demosthenes. I haven’t played in the game in twenty years and could probably still get to Mephisto from camp with my eyes closed. Once, my high school girlfriend’s dad was dropping her off at my house; I had my bedroom window open and my desk was visible from the street. I was playing D2. She told me that as they’d pulled up they saw me framed in the window, lit by the screen. Her dad said, “what is he doing?” She replied that I was playing video games. He said, “yes, but why?”

  When she told me this I was deeply ashamed, and I more or less stopped playing the game after that. All these years later I think I have an answer: because it was fucking fun.

• Ulysses, James Joyce

  novel, 1922

  It’s nearly Christmas/Hanukkah and you must once again scrounge up a gift for your weird son. He says he likes “books,“ a category so broad as to be meaningless. You are convinced of his intelligence, more convinced of it, by far, than he is—it is a trait you attempt to work into conversation with the other parents when the subject of the kids all being away at college comes up. You walk into a Border’s because it still exists. There, in a display titled Conversation Starters, you see it: the most bizarre printing of Ulysses ever produced. Of course, you don’t know it’s bizarre, being not much of a reader yourself. Perhaps all copies of Ulysses are printed coffee-table style, in huge format with no copyright information or endpapers or anything at all besides the text itself. Maybe they’re all set in a justified columnar format, two columns recto and verso, with no discernible chapter breaks. You have the teen behind the counter wrap it and tell them yes my son will love this, he’s actually in college, a senior, yeah he got a big scholarship anyway have a good day.

  Coincidentally, your son will have just decided a few days prior to Christmas 2009 that he should probably read more broadly than the high fantasy he has read exclusively for a decade. He works his way through a few Murakami novels. Then he unwraps this. He is perplexed by its form, intimidated by it, and it sits on his bookshelf for three years.

  One day he gets it down. He’s started a new job and he’s actually going into the office and he needs some prop to prevent people from talking to him during his lunch break. There’s a little alcove in the office back by the printers, a quirk of interior design with a table and a single chair in a windowless niche. He reads there every day.

  The book annihilates him.

  He has no idea what is going on but is transfixed. Frank Delaney’s Re: Joyce podcast gets him through Proteus. He meets Leopold Bloom. It’s like meeting a friend and mentor and self adrift in time. A mind that has been occupied with fantasy’s mythopoetic is suddenly confronted with all the same moves boiled down to their essence, used like scalpels, operating within the most beautiful prose he will ever read in his life.

  You nailed the gift that year.

• The History of Rome, Mike Duncan

  podcast, 2007-2012

  It is empirically (not etymologically linked to empire) true that all white men in their early twenties hunger for Ancient Rome. I don’t make the rules, but I certainly follow them without ever stopping to question their provenance.

  There is something deeply intimate about a podcast’s delivery mechanism. A voice in your ear speaking in the imperative (etymologically linked to empire) as you walk the dog or do the dishes. I think I’ve listened to this podcast’s entire run five times. For a while I considered myself an expert on the Roman Empire. This was true only in the sense than an LLM is an expert on the written word: not at all.

  It is also empirically true that many white men in their early twenties must write a novel and in time I duly and dully did so. One aspect of my novel-writing that perhaps set me apart from my peers is that I landed on a system of drafting wherein I’d write a draft of the novel, shelve it for a month, take it out, read the entire thing in a day or two, then throw the manuscript away and write another draft from memory. This acted like a seive on the endless sluice of dross that was my brain. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the novel I produced resounded with weird echoes of Roman history despite being set in present-day Washington, DC. People had Latin names and were deeply concerned with systems of patronage. One character was convinced he was Caesar, come again. The final result, seven drafts and ten years in, was something I’m still vaguely proud of even if I never show it to anyone ever again. Which I won’t.

• Still to come:
  • The Wheel of Time
  • The Bas-Lag Trilogy
  • Brian Jacques hitting me in the head with a backpack while screaming Eulalia!!
  • Hild
  • Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
  • Book of the New Sun
  • Either Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots or The Soft Bulletin