As I said somewhere else on here, my relationship with reading has been on the rocks recently. We’ve just spent so much time together recently, it’s begun to feel a bit smothering. At least for me. Reading isn’t very communicative, ironically, so I don’t know if that feeling is reciprocated. Reading and I are engaged in a bit of couple’s counseling this holiday season. We started with Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. The opening is online here.
I’ve read IOAWNAT before, I finished re-reading it this morning. I remembered that it was smart and sophisticated and all that. I forgot that it’s also very funny, especially in the beginning. The other thing I forgot is that it’s largely about reading. I may read it one more time in january, I’m not sure. I’d like to try reading the titled chapters (the interrupted novels) then the numbered chapters (the ones which are in second person and addressed to you the reader) in succession, to see if it looks any different that way.
One bit that struck me is the theme of mechanized writing and reading - the computers and techniques which can finish an unfinished work or create a wholly new work - and not just any work, but an Author’s Work, a book by some particular author despite that author not having written it.
There’s a passage where a student of literature speaks with an author. She tells him she can’t read the books he loans her because she doesn’t have a computer. She reads by having a computer count all the words in a book, then looks at the ones which occur most often (disregarding articles and prepositions and so on). This is how I read history books, or part of the way. I look closely at the index and table of contents and the other skeletal structures of the book - reading the intro and conclusion and the chapter openings and endings and so forth - in order to dissect the book before I really read it (if I really read it, sometimes I only get to the stage of reading the topic sentences after the dissection). This is part of why I’ve gotten tired of reading. It isn’t reading at all, in a sense.
There’s a bit in the Lewis Carroll anthology (the other part of my holiday reading) that relates to this, a short piece called “Photography Extraordinary.” It’s about a mechanical and chemical process like photography that produces prose from the minds of people without them doing any work, then through a series of acid baths and so forth makes the prose better in order to make them more salable.
In the Calvino when the author speaks with the budding literary scholar, the author writes: “I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact - for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes prove unrecognizable to me.” The scholar has read the books “only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.” That too is all too familiar. It reminds me of a post that SEK wrote at the Valve somewhat recently about psychoanalytic litcrit (I can’t find the post just now, Scott if you read this send me the link and I’ll put it in). And of course it’s what I’m doing in this paragraph.
Reading and I have a ways to go yet, I suppose.