Bookselling at AWP

I'm at AWP in Baltimore this weekend at Table 536

Dear Friends,

I’m at AWP this weekend with copies of my book, The Uses of Art, tabling for dispersed holdings. If you’re in Baltimore, come say hi (table 536, catty-corner from Ivy Bookstore).

If you can’t be there, we’re celebrating with a 25% discount on all the books in the dispersed holdings web shop: just use code AWP26 at checkout.

In other happy news, I learned that one of my personal favorite essays, “Ambient Reading: A Method,” is going to be part of Bard’s Language & Thinking program, which means that it will be put into the hands of every incoming student this fall. I’m thrilled.

— Sal

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Ambient Reading: A Method

I want to be reading.

I want to be reading but right now writing prevents me.

Usually I write by reading: reading begins writing. Begats.

At the moment, I am constraining myself to read only what I am writing.

I am writing to you.

If I could be reading anything right now, what would it be?

Since I can write anything down that I wish to, I should be able to please myself. To please myself entirely.

In a book I was just looking at, I read the word “anise.” I was pleased, and jealous. That writer was sitting outside, out back, by the anise. The anise gave him something to say, a beautiful word to interrupt his thinking with.

In another book I picked up, the writer was tumbling around the word “maroon” and feeling for its puns, its associations. An unhappy color. An island you can’t get off of. A part of me is still stuck there.

Sometimes it is enough to open a book and read a single word.

I open the I Ching and receive the word “innocence”

And so I go forward, without expecting anything.

Ambient reading is going forward without expecting anything.

. . .

Read the rest of “Ambient Reading: A Method” in the post:

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Tell me about what you’re up to this week, and if you’re at AWP, tell me how to find you.

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Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara