Kid's Stuff

I was a late arriver at the book-reading party—at least compared to people I know who’ve been doing it since they were four, and still others who were being read Grimm’s fairy tales while they were in the womb, little embryos already being infused with all that dangerous lore. Yet before I voluntarily picked up that hardcover copy of Harry Potter, I had read other things. Just not books.

Sure, I often read bits from my father's copies of The Thousand and One Nights, The Book of Virtues, Aesop’s Fables, and the Bible. Then there was a book that was mine, La Flora y la Fauna del Yunque, a picture-book of the flora and fauna in El Yunque, a mountain and tropical rainforest in Puerto Rico, one of the island’s environmental and touristic landmarks. The Puerto Rican boa, a constrictive snake; the Puerto Rican parrot, in danger of extinction; the bamboos, in that festive firework formation… I would pore over all of these so many times every day. And then there were the picture cards of all the animals in the animal kingdom!!! They had come in a box, and that must have weighed at least a pound. Countless hours going over the eating habits of the cheetah, the nature of the dolphin, and trying to draw the baboon exactly as it appeared on the picture. Don’t even get me started on the dinosaur cards.

And then there are the multimedia influences: the notion of a mythological universe as expressed in RPG video games, the Super Mario universe, movies with sequels. And films, with the unavoidable way in which they make the viewer want to be a part of the filmed world: wanting to be ET’s friend, the shark hunter in Jaws, wanting to be in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

           I still feel like reading is a childish activity. The exhiliration, the intensity it produces, the way it just activates all these little mechanisms in the mind, that muscle, that ticking little muscle—it’s all like being a kid. And I wonder if that’s what I want, at the end of the day.

          And when I think of it that way, I feel it’s so strange how adults institutionalize the pleasure of reading. College professors of literature are overgrown kids who talk about what they love, the same way a kid will talk to you about Barney. The “English” Department is the Kiddie department. Whether one reads children’s literature or not, as a child or as an adult, the elemental reading muscle is childish. It’s awesome. It’s silly. And so many lives revolve around it. 

Why I Write

 “I read the first ten pages of my leisure reading career while taking a shit. It was the first Harry Potter book, and I must have been nine or ten. The house was busy with the incessant Latin American energy of a family planning a quinceañero: the women’s dresses fluttering about almost as persons themselves; fathers, daughters, cousins, brothers, grandmas, and friends invited over, parachuted down from 707’s hailing from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York, landing finally in Maryland—all part of a family happy in its machinal effort to put up this event for the first girl of the family, while Chayanne’s voice echoed down the walls, emanating from the cheap radio that the waltzers used to practice the dance that would open the ceremony. The lucky girl with the crown was my cousin, always the center of attention. Especially then.

So I doubt anyone noticed that I spent a full twenty minutes in the bathroom, only five of which were actually dedicated to shitting.

I remember feeling at the end of it exhausted but pleased, like when you’re back from--

from a healthy morning run. You’re sweaty and your body’s sore, but it’s a welcome soreness. So did my imagination feel then: its book-cherry popped, a part of it otherwise unexplored suddenly excited, exhausted, exhilirated—”

Wait—it’s about writing. 

Ok:

“I guess I could wax Borges and tell you that I was a reader before I was a writer, or that I think that whatever a writer is, it’s the kind of person who besides dipping a blank page in his imagination—hoping to glean something more than a small anecdote from it—reads, reads, and then reads some more. And that, in this twofold process that is imagination-journeying, he arrives at a certain, oh, let’s just say it: a transcendence, building a bridge between his own experience and the experience of others.

“Which is why I’m not going to recant my Harry Potter anecdote. Because  that’s what it’s all about: sitting down and immersing yourself in your own imagination, hopefully interacting with something, a collective something that you’re in touch with beyond the words. And always yourself. Always yourself.

 “I love that word, by the way—imagination. It’s what the whole reading and writing gig is all about. About finding ways to gain access to the magical machine inside you, the particle accelerator that relentlessly likes to indulge in pure prettiness. When you read, you use the book in front of you as an excuse to create landscapes in your mind—to fill its silence with word-sounds, characters, all that jazz. And when you write, you’re scavenging your imagination for what it itself produces in between dreams. You’re picking up the pieces and playing; you’re the baby on the piano. The English language becomes a playground. And for a moment it seems endless. You’re in touch with something eternal.

“You put up a show. The curtains rise and you’re the thespian, so you don yourself with prose and quotation marks and you let it rip. And for a while, the energy of the quinceañero around you dissipates into nothingness, and you’re so absorbed, either in the writing or in the reading, that you can’t even smell the putrefied particles around you.”