{"id":4998,"date":"2026-03-31T11:05:31","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T10:05:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/?page_id=4998"},"modified":"2026-04-07T12:18:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T11:18:35","slug":"shola-von-reinhold-april-2026","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/shola-von-reinhold-april-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Shola von Reinhold, April 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What I am Reading Now\u2026
Shola von Reinhold
<\/strong>April 2026<\/p><\/div>

\u00a0<\/div>

In all truth, my reading has ground to a halt.<\/p>

This is due to two things over the past few years. The first: various so-called \u2018silent\u2019 migraine phenomena. Some are subtle and others just so familiar \u2013 never not known to me \u2013 that I presumed them to be universal, like Visual Snow Syndrome (not officially migraine phenomenon but mine gets more pronounced with them). I\u2019m not sure if they\u2019ve become more frequent or just more intense. Swirling auras and halos, static fractals through the brain and spine, rippling airs, pulsing visions and strange subaqueous pressures \u2013 at best they can almost<\/em> be sensorially pleasurable, albeit making it hard to function, but sometimes they are intolerable, accompanied by nausea, or by all-through-the-body sensory discordance and the vision in one eye acquiring an internal unshifting cloud and weird pulling sensation. Hard to read, and write, and sometimes even speak \u2013 these migraines affect my language processing, swirling phrases about, drawing unhelpful words to the surface, lending a strange syntax to my speech which I\u2019m not sure is now partly figured by trying to work around the linguistic depletion these migraines create. My reading thus, nowadays, often gets limited to research for books and other necessary things.<\/p>

As a tonic to all this, I\u2019ve taken to reading things in snatches, sometimes just a few pages or even a paragraph, and letting it swim or settle or otherwise find its place in the wool, mist and lightning spectacle of whatever migraine symptom is at play. This \u2018practice\u2019 has been bolstered by the second threat to my reading: domestic unfixity, bouncing around cities, peripatetically, sometimes precariously. It means I often leave books everywhere and have an ever-growing pile of unfinished or just started books that I had to stop thinking of as things to finish at all, but some cumulative mode of reading, just as valuable. And there is that great delight of throwing yourself at the mercy of someone else\u2019s bookshelves for the period you are there. Of pulling things out at random, of letting go of the steering wheel of perusal and letting things come to you.<\/p>

Here then are a few things I have read, or rather not read, that delight me and which I might finish one day. I give them in the context they came to me.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Clapton December 2025.<\/p>

Catsitting in a ground floor flat with a garden bedroom. It snows a little this day. Here I read a small portion of a book that has been circling me for so many years. I\u2019ve somehow just never come to sit down and actively read Toni Morrison<\/strong>. I suppose her appearance on lists to read, interview footage, photos of her dancing at Studio 54, her work as an editor, and the many anecdotes about her, made me feel I\u2019d in some way already known her work in a way that meant I was always more likely to go and find lesser-known writers. But, of course, I didn\u2019t know her work. I\u2019m glad, therefore, I started Sula<\/em><\/strong> in this flat and finally got to glimpse her love for strangeness and curious beauty that I prize in authors.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Clapton January 2026<\/p>

I spend the day cleaning the flat and, in a flurry, pack up my suitcase and bags and boxes of painting things. It\u2019s after midnight when I make it to my next place. I have to stand outside the flat, belongings strewn around me, trying to figure out the lockkey for about an hour which becomes an ever more fraught task as it gets later, and I worry that neighbours will think I\u2019m trying to break in. Not catsitting but the kindly offered use of a flat. I spend most of my time here researching the Black British Ballet company Les Ballet N\u00e8gres, founded by two queer Jamaican-born Ritchie Rilie and Berto Pasuka. The ballet debuted in 1946 and prematurely shuttered in 1952 after unsuccessful bids for Arts Council funding. They toured all over Europe to huge acclaim. It was not a lack of ticket sales but ultimately bureaucratic parochialism that led to the closure of Ballet N\u00e8gres. Pasuka\u2019s prescience is striking: before the corps collapsed, he had been planning a large-scale ballet about the Haitian Revolution, centred on King Christophe of Haiti. This was over a decade before Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire<\/strong>\u2019s play, The Tragedy of King Christoph<\/em>e<\/strong>, and might have come about with even half of the support less visionary projects the Arts Council funded at the time. There is no programme or ballet libretto so I instead read the opening of Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019<\/em>s play which is no less fascinating.<\/p>

Another of Pasuka\u2019s ballets centered on the real-life story of a prophet who tried to fly to heaven and was arrested. A strange echo of Toni Morrison<\/strong>\u2019s flying insurance man. I end up reading various snippets about \u2018flying Africans\u2019, of escaped people evading enslavement, flying to paradise or to home.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

February 2025<\/p>

I\u2019m now back in one of my favourite and semi-regular places to catsit. It is a friend\u2019s house and has become source of comfort and fixity in the past year. It also has a good library. I find on the shelves Heretical Aesthetics<\/em><\/strong>, a collection of Pasolini<\/strong>\u2019s writing on painting – serendipitous: I\u2019ve been writing about relics, ruins and nostalgia and the opening which touches on Pasolini\u2019s own (\u2018heretical\u2019) Marxism in relation to his love of the past, of local history of ruins and relics, throws an exquisite dust in my eyes, Exquisite but dust all the same – it might derail everything. I might have to reconsider the entire book project. And I haven\u2019t even read the book. I can\u2019t even remember if I finished the introduction \u2013 I left it by accident in my next flatsitting place in Borough along with a book I\u2019d actually brought with me from Scotland: Jessie Redmon Fauset<\/strong>\u2019s The Chinaberry Tree<\/em><\/strong>, which I was also enjoying.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

March 2026<\/p>

I\u2019m now back catsitting in the same house where I found the Pasolini book. It is late February and it is the first truly sunny day of the year. I\u2019ve been moving between the guest room, the living room and the garden partly as my laptop I\u2019m writing this on is downstairs charging, but my phone is broken and charging upstairs and keeps dying. I\u2019ve just been in the garden. Reading: Just as I was wondering what to include for my next book, something, like an absurd deus ex-machina, came through the door. Rosa Johan-Uddoh<\/strong>‘s book Practice Makes Perfect<\/em><\/strong>. It\u2019s been one of those books I\u2019ve been meaning to read for a long time. I\u2019ve just read a few snatches. It is the perfect format for my reading at the moment. It is also delightful and keen and sly and moves through Black history in Britain a way I find thrilling.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Shola\u00a0von\u00a0Reinhold<\/strong>\u00a0is a writer and artist based in Scotland (for now).<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Reading<\/div>
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Sula<\/em>, Toni Morrison (Alfred A. Knopf, 1973)<\/div>
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The tragedy of King Christophe<\/em>, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire,\u00a0<\/div>
(Grove Press, Inc., 1970)<\/div>
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Song of Solomon<\/em>, Toni Morrison (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)<\/div>
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Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting, <\/em>Pier Paolo Pasolini, (eds.) Alessandro Giammei, Ara H. Merjian (Verso, 2023)<\/div>
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The Chinaberry Tree<\/em>, Jessie Redmon Fauset (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1931)<\/div>
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Practice Makes Perfect<\/em>, Rosa Johan-Uddoh (Book Works, 2023)<\/div><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Please note the views published in\u00a0What I am Reading Now…<\/i>\u00a0are personal reflections of the contributors.
These may not necessarily represent the views of the University of Dundee.<\/span><\/p>

\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>

Home<\/a><\/p>

Previous Issue: Bahar Noorizadeh<\/strong>, March 2026<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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about projects What I am Reading Now\u2026Shola von ReinholdApril 2026 \u00a0 In all truth, my reading has ground to a halt. This is due to two things over the past few years. The first: various so-called \u2018silent\u2019 migraine phenomena. Some are subtle and others just so familiar \u2013 never not known to me \u2013 that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4998","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4998"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5026,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4998\/revisions\/5026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}