The Reading Experience

By Daniel Green

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My Reading Year

Top five novels about flyfishing:

Rainbow Trout, Run--An intensely wrought account of a fisherman who finds the old methods of flyfishing too confining and flails out at those who would prevent him from devising new strategies. The character of "Racoon" Van Dyke is one of the freshest and most complex characters I've come across in years.

Hello, Duluth--A young flyfisherman tries to make his mark among the grizzled veterans of the far north. He falls for the daughter of one of the old coots, and tragedy ensues. This one made me cry.

Endless Japes--A flyfisherman experiences withdrawal when his wife forbids him to go fishing with the guys. It would seem it is possible to become addicted to angling after all! The wife is mollified when her husband convinces her that a "rod" can be more than a fishing pole.

Ferlin Fish-Boy--A kaleidoscopically experimental novel in which a flyfisherman dreams he has become a trout and must train himself to become one of the school. It becomes deliciously meta- in those scenes in which the fish-boy must learn to evade flyfishermen.

Stinginess: A Reduction--A world-renowned flyfisherman begins to lose his skills but ultimately finds recompense in a love affair with a bass. A little treacly, but it gets you in the end.

Top five novels featuring characters named "Lil":

Against the Wall M*****F******--The latest from acclaimed mystery writer J.D. Grafreichsermann, in which tough-gal detective Lil Zabrisky tracks down a serial killer targeting--I kid you not--flyfishermen. Somewhat contrived in places, this novel nevertheless once again made me hot for Lil!

Oops!--Cletus Bolch's novel, in which protagonist Lil has a sex-change operation and becomes Lyle. I will now forevermore cringe when I hear the word "scrotum."

None Dare Call Me Lil--A young man's struggle to cope with his unfortunate nickname. I deeply sympathized with this character, as in my younger days I was known to many as "Blanche."

Lil' Pictures--No actual character named Lil, but kudos to the author for the contraction.

Lil of the Arroyo--A sturdy Western in which gunslinger Fritz O'Shea fights for the honor of barmaid Lil. At the novel's conclusion, Fritz gives up his sharpshooting ways and becomes a flyfisheman.

Best novel of the year featuring lists of the best novels of the year:

Enumerations--Chronicles a day in the life of literary critic Sandy Prospect, who pauses at fixed periods to make a new list. By the end of the day Sandy realizes he has discovered an algorithm that allows him to name not just every novel published that year but every novel ever committed to print. This one really hits me where I live.

December 08, 2009 in Satirical | Permalink | Comments (5)

Application for Admittance

Dear Richard,

I have a Ph.D in English. Before abandoning academe, I published about a dozen academic articles in peer-reviewed journals and book collections. I have also published another dozen or so essays and some reviews in print magazines and journals. Finally, I have published a half-dozen or so lengthy essays in online magazines, of the sort you've probably even heard of. Most importantly, I have 3 1/2 years' worth of posts on this blog, many of which have been linked to and discussed by other bloggers, who thought they were pretty good, and about which I've received e-mails from real print writers telling me they also thought they were worthwhile. You can read these posts for yourself and tell me whether they meet your high standards for "logically reasoned discourse" rather "mere yammering." I did my best to meet them, I assure you.

Are these "credentials" sufficient? What else should I do to be granted your favor? Maybe you could invite me to some of your own big-time cocktail parties and introduce me to your cool Hollywood and publishing friends? Maybe I'm just a bon mot away from establishing my "right to an opinion."

In the meantime, please keep writing ignorant, uninformed, embarrassingly smug articles in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. They really keep us bloggers in our place and make you print "scriveners" seem oh-so insightful.

May 20, 2007 in Satirical | Permalink | Comments (11)

Triage

"Nothing like a 900-page book to make me stand up for what I believe in," writes Malcolm Jones, a Newsweek book reviewer. Apparently what he believes is that books are a nuisance, unless they can be consumed quickly, without undue claims on one's time and without usurping the place one has already set aside for the after-dinner cocktail.

My time is precious. Your time is, too. Who has enough time in the day to do all that we want? When I go home after work, it’s triage every night. I can listen to music. Or I can play music. Or I can answer letters or write. Or I can read a book. Or watch TV. Or watch a DVD on TV. Or go out to a concert or a movie. And those would be the nights that I don’t have to clean up the kitchen, do the laundry or help with homework.

It's unclear from Jones's brief essay whether he had taken on Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games (the 900-page novel in question) as a review assignment and decided to forgo it, or whether it was simply one of those books he tried to wedge into his otherwise busy evenings "after work." If the former, it's hard to see why he couldn't have forced himself through the book (although he claims to have found Sacred Games a good book, just not a great one) during the time he was actually at work. Is this not what full-time book reviewers for national magazines do during the day--read the books they then review? Or are they otherwise too busy taking lunches and doing meetings? Perhaps I'm not sufficiently informed about what the job description for a journalist-reviewer like Malcolm Jones really looks like.

Even if this particular novel was one Jones took home with him to read in the easy chair, it might be assumed that a book reviewer undertakes that job in the first place because he/she has some overriding interest in books that would make finding a slot for them in the evening's schedule not such a difficult decision, despite those other "entertainment options." But as Amardeep Singh puts it, Jones "comes dangerously close to admitting he'd rather be watching TV." Surely there are many people who do find that other responsibilities and time constraints deprive them of the opportunity to read, an opportunity they might otherwise take, but those who merely find reading a possible choice among others for spending "downtime" probably don't take books very seriously in the first place, and it's discouraging that a professional book reviewer would be giving them cover.

Also according to Jones, "there are few things more aggravating than getting well into a book and discovering that you don’t like it after all. You’ve wasted your time." Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "well into." Since Jones seems to prefer shorter novels, "well into" need only be, say, 25 pages. I put books aside at this point all the time, and I can't say I find it aggravating. If anything, I'm glad I can dispense with this book (and I may return to it later) and go on to one of the many (many) other books that seem worth reading, among which I'm going to discover that one gem that makes the whole process worthwhile. Jones says he abandoned Sacred Games after 100 pages, even though he thought those 100 pages well done. This suggests not a problem with the quality of the reading experience, but with the reader's attention span. As Amardeep also says, "a long novel is a qualitatively different kind of experience than watching a film, and thinking of them as interchangeable experiences doesn't speak well of Jones."

It's certainly possible that I, too, would stop reading Sacred Games after 100 pages, or even less. You shouldn't grind your way through a book "you don't like after all." But I think I can honestly say I would be discarding it not because I couldn't face its 800 additional pages but because it wasn't working for me whatever its length. I actually enjoy long novels, and one of the pleasures of such works is the pleasure of witnessing the author artistically redeem the large literary canvas. I enjoy short novels too, but the artistry involved is of a different order, an order of intensity and concision rather than breadth. In either case, they shouldn't be rejected simply because there's the Six Feet Under box set to watch.

January 29, 2007 in Satirical | Permalink | Comments (4)

Funeral Rites

Judith Halberstam thinks the Department of English needs to go:

I propose that the discipline is dead, that we willingly killed it and that we now decide as serious scholars and committed intellectuals what should replace it in this new world of anti-intellectual backlash and religious fundamentalism. While we may all continue doing what we do — reading closely, looking for patterns and disturbances of patterns within cultural manifestations, determining the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies — once we call it something other than “English,” (like cultural studies, critical theory, theory and culture, etc.) it will neither look the same nor mean the same thing and nor will it occupy the same place in relation to the humanities in general, or within administrative plans for down-sizing; it will also, I propose, be better equipped to meet the inevitable demands (which already began to surface after the last election) for an end to liberal bias on college campuses and so on.

I heartily endorse this idea. By all means, let Halberstam and her confreres establish a new Department of Patterns and Disturbances of Patterns Within Cultural Manifestations. This would allow them to do what they most dearly wish to do--distance themselves from the study of mere literature--and would further allow whatever renegade elements there are within the exisiting English deparment who still find themselves interested in the "merely literary" either to reclaim "English" as the name for what they study or perhaps to join in on the makeover fun and establish a Department of Literary Study, in which what actually goes on is the study of literature. The latter could perhaps be done by incorporating extant creative writing programs, and such a department would probably continue to offer traditional composition and linguistics courses. (Surely administrators would not want to entrust such courses to a department that otherwise focuses on "the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies." This very phrasing suggests that professors in the new department would not be the logical choice to teach courses the goal of which is to teach students to write.)

I believe that such a bifurcation of English would turn out to be a swell deal for us renegades. Given a choice between the PDPWCM department and its ersatz sociology and a Literary Study department honestly devoted to studying literature, I predict that many undergraduate students would turn to the latter. After all, most English majors have traditionally been drawn to the discipline simply because they like to read. If departments of English and comparative literature are currently suffering "massive declines in enrollment," as Halberstam herself allows they are, I'd suggest that one of the reasons is that what students find when they get there--and what they would continue to find in the PDPWCM department--is a pedantic, turgid, supercilious, and utterly joyless approach to reading. Should the new department of Literary Study reemphasize some of the pleasures of reading, and some of the delight of discovery in the study of literature, it would do just fine in a competition to avoid "down-sizing."

Michael Berube doesn't much care for Halberstam's proposal, for reasons that aren't very clear. "[No] kind of renaming or reorganizing is going to make English a coherent, tidy discipline," he writes. "It would be hard enough to make it coherent if it were devoted solely to literature. . ." Berube doesn't seem to understand: Halberstam is advocating that those very tendencies in academic criticism that make English as it now stands incoherent be transferred to the PDPWCM department. The English department left behind would be entirely coherent, despite Berube's doubts. Without those scholars more interested in "cultural production" and "hegemonies" than in works of fiction or poetry or drama, other scholars and critics who think studying such works as forms of literary art is a perfectly nice thing to do would be left alone to get on with the task. Berube continues: "literature, as even the most hidebound traditionalists ought to admit one of these days, is a terribly amorphous thing that touches on every conceivable facet of the known world—and, as if this weren’t enough, many facets of worlds yet unknown as well. . . ." I'm not a hidebound traditionalist--in my version of a Department of Literary Study, periodization and other manifestations of curricular slicing would be absent; professors would be free to teach what they want to teach, as long as the ultimate goal was to understand the literary qualities of literature--but in my experience literature is a perfectly morphous subject. Individual works of literature certainly do explore "every conceivable facet of the known world," but the study of literature concentrates on delineating the way they do this, not on using literature as an excuse to pronounce on such "facets" oneself.

What Halberstam and Berube share, ultimately, is a plain impatience with if not disdain for trifling old literature. Halberstam sneers at the notion of "aesthetic complexity," notes approvingly the way "queer theory, visual culture, visual anthropology, feminist theory, literary theory began to nudge the survey courses, the single-author studies and the prosody classes aside," recommends that the study of Victorian literature be replaced with "studies of 'Empire and Culture,' romanticism with “the poetries of industrialization.” Berube wants to preserve close reading as "our distinct product line," as "what we sell people" (so much for resisting the corporatization of academe), but reduces such readings to "skills in advanced literacy," something that promotes students' "own symbolic economy." Besides, "you don’t have to confine yourself to literary works, either. You can go right ahead and do close readings of any kind of 'text' whatsoever, in the most expansive sense of that most expansive word." Berube forgets that "close reading" was developed specifically as a method of reading literary works, which required close reading because they don't give up their intended meanings so easily, are not storage centers of "meaning" at all but occasions for a reading experience of a distinctive kind. His appropriation of "close reading" is really just a theft of the term for purposes to which true close reading is simply not applicable. (But of course the New Critics have become the collective bogeymen of contemporary literary study, returning now and then from their repressed state to scare the children. They and their appalling practices must be warded off.)

Really and truly, the best thing that could happen to literature would be, once the Department of Patterns and Disturbances of Patterns Within Cultural Manifestations (or some equally dreary equivalent) was actually created, for it to disappear from academic curricula altogether. After eighty years of experimenting with the study of literature as an academic subject, those carrying it out (myself included) have made a complete hash of it. Literature itself is held in contempt not just by the majority of ordinary people but by those professing to teach it. "Literature Professor" has become a near-synonym of "lunatic." That literary study would come to such an end was probably inevitable, since the primary imperative of academe--to create "new" knowledge--is finally inimical to something so difficult to dress up in fashionable critical clothes as serious works of fiction or poetry. Once it was perceived that "aesthetic complexity" was a spent force (at least as the means for producing new monographs and journal articles), approaches to literature that essentially abandoned its consideration as an art form were practically certain to follow. If Judith Halberstam is proposing that, in this context, everyone should acknowledge that the experiment failed, she's performing a useful service. Give literature back to the amateurs.

(Thanks to Scott Esposito for providing both of these links.)

July 03, 2005 in Satirical | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Meeting Strangers

Monday

This morning I woke up with diarrhea. Yesterday I'd read a book that really pissed me off. It was the memoir of a writer who began the book stating how much she hated memoirs but had decided that the day-to-day details of her own life would be plenty interesting to most readers because she, unlike all those other memoirists who just wrote about living their lives like everyone else, led a life of great interest well worth preserving in a diary format. I slogged through about 20 pages before deciding that no one's life was worth being recorded in such a format and then thrust upon the reading public, as if what one did first thing in the morning should be broadcast in the newspaper.

I knew I wouldn't write about this book in my blog, but then what would I write about? I could always write about how I went about deciding what I was going to write about!

There were no books waiting for me in the mail. There never are. Somehow putting up posts on your blog the burden of which is that most book publishers don't know what they're doing doesn't get you many free books to review.

Tuesday

I quit blogging early so I could take a trip out to the Waldenbooks at the mall, which is the only bookstore within a 150 mile radius. After finding nothing but trash to read, I decided to go back home and put in an order at Amazon. This allows me to continue pondering what I do when deciding what to write about on my blog.

Before leaving the mall, I am recognized by someone: "Dan Green, right? My brother had you for an English class. You're even uglier than he said." Before I could get out the door she added: "He said you were a rotten teacher, too!"

Wednesday

I chickened out. I didn't write about how I decided what to write about, but instead put up a post about how I hated books in which the writer just wrote about his own life without thinking clearly about how his life was really just about sitting around wondering what to write about, occasionally pausing to actually write about it. It's a very cutting edge post, I concluded, very self-revealing.

There's a talk tonight about new methods of attacking potato blight, but I can't decide if I'll go. Some of these agriculture lectures can be very avant-garde, but I'm getting a little tired of them. I let the television decide for me. If it was a rerun of the Andy Griffith Show I'd seen less than 75 times I would stay home and chill out--although it's 15 below zero outside, which is chilly enough--but if I'd seen it more than 75 I'd go to the lecture. It was the episode in which Barbara Eden (a real hot chick in 1962) wanted to give everybody in Mayberry a manicure. I'd seen it at least 100 times, but decided once more couldn't hurt.

Thursday

In looking at the New York Times Book Review I saw a review of a new novel by someone I've never heard of. I decided to write his publicist and ask for an interview. I don't know anything about this writer, but the idea of writing to a publicist seemed very exciting. Plus, I can now sit around thinking about how I'm going to interview the person I'm going to interview, the fruits of which might make an interesting blog post. Or maybe the Caribou Gazette will want to publish my musings in next week's issue!

I checked my e-mail. A really good one: "Saaxiest women in your area--Meaat now! Hi my name is roy and Id like to invite you to my favorite pick-up site. Since I fiirst sow this site, 4 months ago, I felt a MAJOR change in my ljfe - I met more womeen then I've ever dreamt of! You can enter now too, since the site is open to the public for free. Feel free to enter!"

Friday

There's just not anything to blog about today. (Although I could of course blog about how one decides there's nothing to blog about, etc.) I had almost concluded I'd spend most of the day making toast, when the doorbell rang. It was a complete stranger, very bedraggled-looking. I suddenly wondered if he knew I had a blog, and if it finally crashed in a deserted part of the blogosphere, would it still make a cyber-sound? He wanted to know if I'd been to the potato blight lecture, and was I aware of the Revolutionary Farmers Association--the RFA--and its anti-potato industry manifesto? Some days having a blog is a wonderful thing.

February 08, 2005 in Satirical | Permalink | Comments (12)

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