TALES OF LOHR: SHHHHHHHHH!
On the ambiguous potential of communal reading; plus, "This Week in Warhol" takes the piss
It recently came to my attention that my current home city of Pittsburgh plays host to a chapter of what, for someone like myself, has to be one of the most intriguing products of the Meetup-driven “conscious connection” era: The Silent Book Club. Once a month, at a location determined by the size of the group’s RSVP list, a group of bibliophiles come together for a brief chat about all things literary. Attendees share favorite titles they’ve absorbed during the previous four weeks and change, new authors and books they’ve discovered, and interesting tidbits about the volume they’re currently exploring. This introductory portion of the meetings lasts about thirty minutes, at which point everyone in the group takes up their current reading material of choice, and for the rest of the time together, everyone just…reads. It’s an elective for-grown-ups iteration of the silent reading time so many of us experienced during our school days.
When I heard about this, I was naturally quite taken with the concept. I am, of course, a voracious reader, swiftly closing in on completing my seventieth book for 2023. To be fair, my regular gig as a contributor to Bookmarks Magazine, each piece for which customarily requires me to read upwards of a dozen books, makes maintaining this kind of yearly total virtually mandatory. But I was routinely knocking off this many books annually, and sometimes more, before I took up with Bookmarks late last year. There is also the enticing appeal of an event of this nature for a largely introverted person in early middle age who is nevertheless seeking to expand their social circle via new connections to potential peers with similar tastes and aesthetic inclinations.
In fact, there is only one issue that runs the possible risk of interfering with my enjoyment of The Silent Book Club. And it has nothing to do with the particulars of the Club itself. No, the “fault,” Brutus, lies not in our books, but in ourselves.
Or, to put it in less ambiguous terms:
I read weird.
My customary preferred reading practice is marked by two quirks that, were I to fully indulge them during The Silent Book Club, would violate the entire philosophical undercore of the group and, probably justly, result in my being asked not to return. My first avant-bibliophile behavior is one I somewhat attribute to the naturally jitter-enabling attention-span erosion so many of us have experienced in the age of the internet and social media. In short, sitting down with a good book is out of the ordinary for me, because when I read, I don’t usually sit. At home, I customarily read while pacing around my bedroom. If I’m out and about and taking a little time to read (this is not unusual behavior for heavy-duty readers, most of whom are seldom without the company of their latest tome of preference), I’ll usually favor a clear spot within a public park or communal green space where I can ramble in a relatively compact area while I indulge in my literary pastime. I’ve done this everywhere from hillsides in the large park near my current home, to stretches of relatively unpopulated beach during my residency in southern California. Sure, I am capable of enjoying a satisfying reading session while in a more sedentary posture. One of the most relaxing interludes of my fall 2022 visit to New York found me simply relaxing on a Central Park bench, enjoying David Robinson’s BFI Film Classics monograph on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But as a rule of thumb, if I can stand or pace while reading, rest assured, I will stand or pace while reading.
Part of this preference might be motivated by scientific studies I’ve encountered that suggest that standing or walking stimulates blood flow and neural activity more vigorously than sitting or lying down. Thus, reading on your feet potentially allows you to absorb the text’s information and appreciate the prose in a sharper, more receptive state of mind. But in all truth, this element of my reading practice has become so much my default mode that I haven’t made any genuinely clear comparisons between my upright and prone reading comprehension levels. One thing of which I am fairly certain, however, is that this unconventional reading behavior, which I have only truly taken up in the last decade or so, has been at least partially motivated by the other unconventional reading tic I’ve adopted, one driven by much more definable and disruptive developments in my own relationship with the world.
About a dozen years ago, during my aforementioned L.A.-area residency, I began to notice that my hearing was becoming increasingly compromised. I struggled to make out anything said to me in crowded or especially noisy environments; rolling down my windows while driving completely obliterated my ability to hear my car’s radio; I found myself embarrassingly aware of how often I was forced to ask friends and colleagues to repeat themselves during conversations. These challenges became alarming enough that I sought out the attentions of an audiologist, who informed me that there is, in fact, nothing wrong with my ears. It’s my brain that’s gumming up the sonic works. It seems that I harbor a condition known as central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), through which my brain generates an imbalance in how I process the sounds around me, leading to an enhanced intensity in background sound and other forms of “noise pollution.” When the doctor explained this condition (which is chronic and cannot be corrected by medication or surgery), so much about myself snapped into focus. The elevated volume of my natural speaking voice; my latching onto certain phrases and words that fit easily within my sonic profile (this habit, called “cluttering,” is extremely common for those with CAPD); my dislike of talking on the phone, a device that distorts what is, for me, an already problematic sound signal.
It also accounts for a practice that, even before my visit to the audiologist, had begun to creep into my day-to-day life. Not only do I usually read while standing, but that reading, whenever it comfortably can be, is aloud. When reading at home, I generally do so at my regular speaking volume (I don’t do accents for characters in fiction books or anything, but I don’t wholly remove emotional inflection or emphasis from my delivery). But when I’m in public, though I generally drop down to a more sotto voce register, the reading will still be audible to anyone who happens to pass me by. The cultural ascendance of the iPhone, where dozens of people now daily walk the streets seemingly conversing with thin air, has resulted in my looking far less disturbed than I otherwise might have while engaging in this reading activity. But seeing someone reading basically to themselves, out loud, in public…still atypical. Especially since it is a matter of cliche that an easy tip-off for identifying an imbecile is that they move their lips when they read.
But without my own voice helping to channel the words and flow of the text, the hard-to-manage barrage of surrounding sound, even filtering in from the external atmosphere through the walls of my home, can hamper my ability to fully absorb and savor the work that I’m reading. So, while you may see a weirdo reading to himself, what you’re actually observing is someone engaging in an ego-free act of self-care, a lover of words willing to look a little strange to the world if it allows him to better appreciate the books that give him so much joy. (And since it’s easier to speak when you’re standing than sitting or laying down, the up-and-about reading posture makes a lot more sense when wedded to the reading-aloud activity.)
Now, the communal promises of The Silent Book Club are compelling enough that I am willing to seek out the next possible local meeting. I fully recognize, however, that respecting the peace and comfort of the club’s other members will almost certainly require me to curtail these two unusual habits that, for better or worse, allow me to indulge my own passion in the utmost personal serenity and satisfaction. So, while my jury is necessarily out on The Silent Book Club, the possible rewards are a sufficient motivation to suspend these practices, at least for an evening.
And if worse comes to worst, hey, maybe the venue will have a parking lot I can pace around in…
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
NOVEMBER 13, 1978
On an otherwise fairly uneventful day in his late-seventies life, Andy Warhol opens the latest entry of his posthumously published diaries with a rather jarring sentence: “I think I may try brushing the piss on the Piss paintings now.” This is a reference to Warhol’s Oxidation series, one of the most bluntly elemental explorations to be found within the entire scope of his artistic practice.
The previous year, Warhol hits on the idea of expanding his approach by incorporating bodily fluids into his plastic art pieces for the very first time. (Such effluvia has already made its implicit presence known in his cinema via his more blatantly pornographic works, including several reels of Couch, Blue Movie, and the never officially released bathroom-rondelet film Three.) At the time of his commencement of the Oxidation pieces, Warhol’s art has already taken a notably visceral turn via his Torsos and Sex Parts photo series, “landscapes” captured after-hours in the back rooms of the Andy Warhol Enterprises offices, consisting largely of both nude male studies and hardcore images of gay sex acts. A number of the subjects of these photographic images are recruited by Warhol and his compatriot Victor Hugo among the community of street hustlers that ply their trade in certain Manhattan districts known for their expansive gay and bisexual nighttime scenes. Warhol persuades many of the Torsos and Sex Parts participants to likewise contribute urine for the Oxidation images. Some of them have their urine poured onto canvases pre-treated with metallic-finish copper or gold paint, while others choose to urinate directly onto the prepared surfaces. The resultant rust stains create spattery, swirling patterns that recall works by Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and other major early figures of Abstract Expressionism. Perhaps inevitably, given the sexually charged nature of the work from which Warhol has brought in his urine providers, the artist creates several similar pieces using semen in place of urine, the ejaculate dumped or hand-released onto pre-treated white canvases, resulting in equally abstract coffee-colored stain washes.
Hugo hires additional urinators at a by-the-hour rate from the storied Everard bathhouse on West 28th Street and the St. Marks Baths in the East Village. Warhol also talks some of the office staff into offering up their piss, noting that jack-of-all-trades assistant Ronnie Cutrone produces particularly interesting colors due to his high vitamin B intake. Of course, Warhol pisses on a few canvases himself, but prefers to entrust this part of his practice to others, as it is simply “too much work.”
Response to the Oxidation paintings at the time of their creation is largely positive. Interview Magazine editor Bob Colacello cites their connection to the increased foregrounding of gay male sexuality and the gay male body in art of the period, visible in both Warhol’s photo series of the moment and in Robert Mapplethorpe’s high-art images of gay BDSM practices. Art critic and theorist Rosalind E. Krauss praises the works as emblematic of Warhol’s deft intermingling of “high and low culture,” and the pieces have also been perceived as an essential stepping stone for the previously highly image-oriented Warhol into deeper explorations of abstraction, via his Rorschach paintings and especially his Shadows series, among the most celebrated of his serialized-image-driven cycles of works.
Of course, the Oxidation works have also maintained utility as a tool for those skeptical of, or baldly adversarial to, modern art, an easy example to unsheath when one seeks to denigrate contemporary art creation as a talent-not-required practice one can create by quite literally pissing around. Artist and late-Warhol contemporary Julian Schnabel, presumably sympathetic to Warhol’s aims, nevertheless uses the idea of the Oxidation series to score a laugh in his debut feature film, 1996’s art-world biopic Basquiat, in which a scene features Warhol, played by an appropriately effete David Bowie, supervising the creation of one such piece, asking an actively urinating “Ronnie” to “I don’t know…whiz over there.”
Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss another FREE arts and music newsletter, and join us back here on Thursday 11/16 for the latest TALES OF LOHR!