The Elk and I Discuss What I am Reading in July
The Elk and I sit at the table with a mug of lavender tea between us. The rain has kidnapped the sky, and it sheds its liquid body on the ground. “What will you read this month?” asks the Elk. I tell him that I am behind in my great exploration of Russian literature. “I see,” says the Elk. “Dostoevsky does take up a lot of time.”
“Yes,” I reply. “I am still reading his biography.”
So over that mug of lavender tea, we talk of Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. The Elk is folded over the table, head tipped, antlers in hand, soft and velvety voice pitched to soothe and pitched to tremble. We agree that I will finish this superb Joseph Frank biography of the master of psychological Russian literature. “I read,” I tell the Elk, “that, despite his reputation, Dostoevsky did not consider his work to be psychological.”
The Elk murmurs evasively, seemingly staring at the tea as shapes emerge from the smoke and decay without a word. Finally, he ponders aloud, “What else will you read this glorious and fleeting July?”
“We’ll stay in Russia, my friend! You and I will be reading Natasha’s Dance! Orlando Figes has written a compelling history of Russian cultural life, and therefore how could we not scoop up our copies and hold them up?! You and I will immerse ourselves in the colorful cornices! We will have fun with Cyrillic! You see, we will flatten and curve our tongues accordingly around the beautiful Russian language.”
“Of course.”
“But first we must part with Alan Turing.”
“Alan Turing?” asks the Elk, whose eyebrows are arched. “What does Alan Turing have to do with Russia?”
“Oh nothing,” I demure, though I know that I am mad with the promise of literature, which pries me away from any sense of organization, tosses me into the chaos of excitement, almost in spite of the logic and rigidity of language itself. “You see, I must also complete The Man Who Knew Too Much. The book occupies a spot on my shelf with my Russian texts. How could I not? I am enamored of artificial intelligence. Should a woman in my position not read all she can of the father of that glorious program?”
“I think your love is bouncing about all over the place, then, because we are reading, too, The Wine of Wisdom. Don’t you remember? We read, curled into ourselves with a dull ache, all of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with tears clumping in our eyes. Now, we will read Mehdi Aminrazavi’s biography, as we delve into Khayyam the poet, the scientist, and the man.”
“I am entangled in science and art,” I agree.
“Indeed. This means that you and I are reading the dazzling Rhetorics of Fantasy from Farah Mendlesohn because there is the exquisite taste of literature stripped bare to reveal its secrets. Mendlesohn is showing us the bones of fantasy as a genre —”
“Oh, what a genre!”
“The book is, naturally, fantasy as a scientific endeavor with its own tracks and races of plot points.”
The Elk and I are babbling now, thrilled as we discuss the major storylines developed in fantasy, the portal-fantasy, the liminal fantasy. It is all so lovely. I confess to him that I am reading a fantasy in the flesh while I read Mendlesohn’s fantasy in the sinew and bones. “I will soon finish my first re-read of The Eye of the World,” I tell him. “The first time I read Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, I cooed over the language. Will you read it with me?”
The Elk is ever kind to me, his great friend. “A re-read! We are in the midst of another re-read, are we not? The masterpiece that is My Name is Red. Let us savor its brilliant themes yet again, this time stroking the tape that is holding the spine together.”
And now, all readers must know that the Elk and I are in a state of fluctuation in our new home. Library bookshelves are in construction. I have novels piled atop novels, library books begging to come to fulfillment. There are poetry collections waving their arms. Re-reading a fine book is always wonderful, but we must also enter a new landscape. The Elk, swirling the tea into a miniature maelstrom, states that there is always A Single Swallow awaiting in the sidelines.
I hop out of my chair, thrilled for a moment at this wonderful choice. “What will we conclude with this month?”
The Elk and I stand opposite one another, unbound by species, for I am human and he is the crown of the hoofed tundra. But somehow we have obliterated the distance between us, where the two of us have become friends, reading now books like Michael Tomasello’s Becoming Human and Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind over cups of steaming tea. Tonight, as we draw our day to a close, we agree that words unite us.
Let us read.
