The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives–not just when we’re confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community’s story come alive for the reader who’s come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage.
page 30, How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo
Table of Contents
Preamble
After six months of not reading non-fiction, I am making my return to the world of non-fiction with How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo. The last non-fiction I read was the excellent One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Have Been Against This by Omar Al Akkad, which in some ways took enough of a toll on my mental health that I needed to take an extended break from non-fiction as a whole.
I am pretty damn sure I first heard about How to Read Now from the booktuber Cindy of the readwithcindy YouTube channel through this particular video. So the book has been in my to-be-read pile for about that long. Now that my mental state has recovered sufficiently to be able to read more “challenging” books, I expect to read more non-fiction going forward.
I read a library copy of the book and this is my first time reading something by Elaine Castillo.
Without further ado, let’s get into the book.
The Book
Let’s start with the basics – How to Read Now is a collection of nine essays written by Elaine Castillo. Every essay in this collection deals with the subject of media criticism and literacy in one form or another. In the introductory essay, Elaine emphasizes that this book deals not just with the reading of books but also of TV, movies, and the world itself.
My notes for this book are divided into sections for each essay so I’ll write my review in that particular format i.e. I will provide brief thoughts on each individual essay.
On Author’s Note, Or A Virgo Clarifies Things
Most days when I look back at my childhood, it feels like first I became a reader; then I became a person.
page 3
This introductory essay was a strong start to this collection. As someone who also started reading fairly early in my childhood, a lot of my early identity formation revolved around reading. Unlike Elaine, my dad was not a reader, however he very much supported by reading hobby and would often buy me heaps of books. I have fond memories of running around book stores in malls finding books that looked interesting and bringing them to my dad so he could buy them from me. As such I read quite a variety of things, fiction, non-fiction, literary classics, fantasy, sci-fi etc.
This early reading was very much through the lens of a curious child who preferred reading a book to going outside. A way of inhabiting other worlds & learning new things. At that time I was of course not yet reading with a critical eye as I do now. For example – like many people my age, I grew up reading the Harry Potter series of YA fantasy novels and as a child I was not reading those novels with a critical eye.
The primary thesis of this essay is that the way we read now is “morally bankrupt and indefensible” and that we are doing a disservice to the authors and to ourselves. Essentially, that the way we read books, movies, art, the world is fundamentally flawed and we need to change that. The rest of the essays expound on this particular thesis at different angles.
I have some thoughts on this overarching thesis but I’ll leave that for later in this review.
On How to Read Now
This second titular essay is focused on how white supremacy creates the kind of flawed reading mentioned in the introduction. I’ll let Elaine explain this.
White supremacy is a comprehensive cultural education whose primary function is to prevent people from reading engaging with, understanding–the lives of people outside its scope. This is even more apparent in the kind of reading most enthusiastically trafficked by the white liberal literary community that has such an outsize influence, intellectually and economically, on the publishing industry today. The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.
page 14-15
I think the point made here is sound and more personally, the point Elaine makes about writers of colour having to cater to this particularly emotionally hollow and morally bankrupt form of reading hits home personally.
Writers of color often find themselves doing the second, unspoken and unsalaried job of not just being a professional writer but a Professional Person of Color, in the most performative sense–handy to have on hand for panels or journal issues about race or power or revolution, so the festival or literary journal doesn’t appear totally racist; handy to praise publicly and singularly, so as to draw less attention to the white audience, rapt in the seats too expensive for local readers of color.
page 16-17
As a writer of colour, I find myself not wanting to write at length about topics such as race, power, and revolution because I find that it very much attracts the kind of White Liberal attention that I don’t want. I am not interested in expounding on personal & ancestral traumas and tragedies for a audience that is more interested in me as a source of intellectual nourishment rather than as a human being. As Elaine put it so eloquently – I have no interest in being a Professional Person of Colour.
On Reading Teaches Us Empathy, and Other Fictions
The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives–not just when we’re confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community’s story come alive for the reader who’s come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage.
page 30
The core message of this essay – fiction does not teach us empathy – is sound and one I agree with wholeheartedly. I have always been a person with a high degree of empathy, and sometimes I think it is a little too much and I wish I could turn off the empathy section of my brain like it is a light switch. Reading as formative it is to me did not teach me empathy. If anything, reading created a better understanding of the world that provided fertile soil for my existing empathy to grow and flourish.
What I didn’t find as enjoyable about this essay was the long, and rather tiresome refutation of one Bret Stephens. I have gone basically my entire life without having to read the drivel that is often spewed in the New York Times’ opinion column by losers like Bret Stephens and I don’t appreciate having to read quotes from that man even if it is for the purposes of sharp critique.
On Honor the Treaty
The history of the word treaty begins with a violence, which then moves through something that deals with it–often writing. After which comes something like: healing. A remedy. All writing, then, and all art, is a kind of treaty–between the reader and the writing, between the art and the world, between the fires of the past that burnished us and the fire of the present that consumes us and the fire of the future we might forge. Honor the treaty.
page 117
I think this particular essay which deals with Elaine Castillo’s visit to New Zealand and her understanding and exploration of the Treaty of Waitangi is weakest of the essays in this collection. The overarching thesis of the essay as mentioned in the above quote, seems like a bit of a etymological stretch more than a insightful or meaningful metaphor for writing.
Here is where also certain stylistic quirks of the writer began to really grate at me – namely her use of very long sentences – extended with commas, and semicolons and filled with bracketed asides of commentary is something that I found rather tiresome to read.
On The Limits of White Fantasy
What I would point out, however, is that this very dynamic–taking stories of oppression and marginalization, stripping them of most of their racial and historical specificity (leaving just enough to add a frisson of exotic/erotic flavor), and recasting them with white bodies–is at the heart of most white fantasy, and thus is also the source of the incongruence that minority readers later struggle with, when those authors turn out to care little at all about the oppression they once so beautifully illustrated.
page 126
The title of this essay had me anticipating a scathing critique of the fantasy worlds created by White authors. As someone whose majority of fiction reading falls under the vast umbrella of “fantasy” I have a lot of Thoughts about how fantasy is written by White authors that I think would make for a whole different essay of my own.
Elaine however, after a brief mention of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling and the way it is emblematic of the very problems mentioned in the above quote dives into a critical analysis of two episodes of the Watchmen TV show from 2019. At this point she lost me. It is not that this critical analysis was bad or shoddily written, it is just that I found it hard to care about the analysis of this particular bit of media with the exception of one bit about intergenerational trauma.
When Angela experiences firsthand the devastation of her grandfather’s life, King telegraphs that grief and rage in a way that feels at once world-weary and newborn, like someone weeping from two different people’s eyes. And isn’t that, in the end what intergenerational trauma feels like?
page 133
I thought that simile/metaphor about weeping from two different people’s eyes is a very good way to describe intergenerational trauma.
On Main Character Syndrome
All of these early American anxieties are at the heart of Didions’s work: its conflict between privilege and risk, between safety and danger; its distinctly white upper-class obsession with social and psychic disintegration and the loss of boundaries, most of all the way it stares, administratively, into what it considers the subaltern, then turns back over its shoulder to report back to its colleagues.
page 175
My first tongue-in-cheek thought about the above quote is what does staring administratively look like? How does one stare administratively? More seriously, this essay initially did not mpact me at first, it is something I needed to sit with for a bit before Elaine’s critique of writers like Joan Didion really settled in.
This essay is an exploration of how the colonialist and imperialist mindset seeps into the writing style and patterns of authors like Didion and this particular quote below does a good job of summarizing the problems with their writing.
The fact that writers like Didion see writing as necessarily the tactic of a secret bully is telling: it’s telling about how writers like this think about writing, and the silent but inevitable combat they arm themselves for when they write, like a homesteader keeping a shotgun by the door. Writing as invasion, writing as imposition, writing as occupation.
page 194
I have never read Didion’s writing and at this point I don’t plan on reading any of it, even as an exercise in flexing my literary critique muscles. On the other hand, I do want to keep reading more in the vein of Tommy Pico whose work Elaine also talks about in this essay. Poetry is not quite my thing so I’ll settle for novels written by BIPOC poets instead (Martyr! and The Emperor of Gladness come to mind as ones I have read already).
On “Reality is All We Have to Love”
It’s of a piece with the train of thought that thinks engaging with identity politics in art is necessarily a diminishment of its artistic quality, because our working concept of identity politics rarely ever includes those whose identities, politics, and pasts get to remain unmarked, and thus are never seen as potentially contaminating (or, indeed, contaminated). But why can’t “Woven, Sir” vibrate, tautly, in the tension of all those things? It can; it does. We do.
page 232
This essay is a critique of academia and more specifically how mostly white male dominated institutions look at the reading and critical analysis. This is done by way of an analysis of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and John Berger’s Woven, Sir. As someone who hasn’t been in such an academic setting or read any of the aforementioned works, I cannot relate to this essay personally.
However, I am always here for a scathing critique of academia and this essay does a good job of showing how the morally bankrupt and indefensible way of reading mentioned in the introduction is perpetuated in institutions of higher learning. And the thesis of the essay regarding the concept of identity politics is sound.
On Autobiography in Asian Film, Or What We Talk About When We Talk About Representation
Representation Matters Art is still, ultimately, just another armed wing of the attritive arts of white supremacy: it’s the kind of art you make when someone has told you to prove you’re a human–and you agree. It’s art that makes us stupider, the way white supremacy makes us stupider: it was bad enough to rob us of life, land, and language, but style, too, babe? It’s the kind of art you make when every impulse you have is a conditioned fear response to some imaginary white specter in the audience, in the mirror.
page 278
This essay is a critique of so-called “Representation Matters” art and I found it interesting, not necessarily for said critique most of which I already knew about and agreed with but the way Elaine talks about movies. Namely, the works of Park Chan-Wook (The Handmaiden) and Wong Kar-wai.
Park reminds us that justice and violence are temporary friends, and that what actually makes justice meaningful are the same things that make life meaningful: love, repair, intimacy, connection, solidarity, and the promise of the daily.
page 271
I am not really a movie person but I have indeed watched The Handmaiden and of all the various personal connections Elaine makes throughout this book, I especially love the way she talks about movies.
On The Children of Polyphemus
I wonder what stories Polyphemus might have had to tell us; what the epic might have looked like from his vantage point; what any other one of those manifold voices, rumors, legends, and hymns may have had to sing to us. I wonder if they have anything to do with the knowledge Horace passed down, in that verse about heroes, and silences, and wine, and shelter.
page 314
Between currently playing Hades II and reading this essay, I think the Fates are reminding me that I should get to reading my copies of the Emily Wilson’s translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad sooner rather than later. There is a whole essay in me about the way Hades II tells the story of Odysseus versus how he is in The Odyssey but to write that I actually need to read The Odyssey.
This essay was also where I learned a bit about the history of the Philippines and the Spanish colonization thereof via way of the so called ClaverÃa Decree. And this is also where the author connects her Filipinx heritage to the history of Spanish colonization of the region in a way I found particularly moving.
On The Mentions of Astrology In This Book
I’ll preface this section of the review by saying that this particular criticism of the book is not an indirect criticism of the author or her personality and/or belief systems. This is purely a criticism of the book itself as it relates to a personal pet peeve. I debated even putting this section in my published review as I thought it may come off as a personal attack. Ultimately, I decided to put this in here as I think it would be intellectually dishonest not to talk about something that affected my perception of the book.
I dislike astrology and as a subject I cannot take it seriously at all and it is annoying to be exposed to it. In this collection of essays, there are several references to star signs and astrology. The most obvious example being the introductory essay where the author refers to herself as being a Virgo. Such mentions of astrology are also sprinkled throughout the book.
None of the topics of the essays have anything to do with astrology, even in an abstract sense. The tone of the essays is generally a mix of personal and academic and as such, the mentions of astrology are purely a bit of the author’s personality seeping into the text. My general dislike of astrology meant that when such a mention happened, it took me out of the text and made it a bit harder to take seriously the points the author was making in her essays.
I am putting this section near the end of my review so that it is obvious that I engaged with the text quite deeply and not merely on the basis of how much the author mentions something I have a strong distaste for.
Conclusions
I generally find that that anthologies of essays are my preferred style of non-fiction reading. This was first made clear when I first read the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hanif Abdurraqib and my appreciation of such texts grows even stronger with this essay anthology.
This essay anthology provided me with much food for thought when it comes to the topic of media criticism. I also think the overarching thesis of the collection as mentioned in the introductory essay was well explored in the collection. As someone who interacts with art more critically than not, some of it comes across as preaching to the choir but that is not something I can hold against the book.
I think this book will be far more useful for someone who is newer to the field of media criticism as it provides a useful framework when it comes to reading media more critically. Especially the first three essays provide the framework that the author explores in the later essays where she uses the framework to critique various works of art. I could have done a lot worse for my return to non-fiction reading.
That’s all from me. See y’all in the next one.
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