The art of slow reading | Books | The Guardian

Slow reading is now a movement:

"If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author's ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly," says Ottowa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).

All true. The ability to read slowly and attentively is a skill that few are able to really develop. Fast reading is either a third grade metric, or a flim-flam to help you "succeed in business" (scare quotes intended). Either way, people who are able to devour large books in a short time, are really just skimming, and not really (in my opinion) getting much out of the experience. They're either missing the point or reading stuff that's so superficial that you don't really have to read at depth. Either way, slowing down and really sinking into long difficult writing is much more rewarding.

Reading List

A reminder to read Yellow Blue Tibia, The City and the City, and Asterios Polyp.

Old People Totally Don't Understand Twilight

I guess it's easy to ignore sweeping generalizations and indulge in oversimplifications and stereotypes when you're not part of the target group being written about. See, I thought Caitlin Flanagan's article was a pretty fair and insightful take on the girl culture of Twilight until I read this and drilled down through the links to read all the exasperated responses.

There's two things I know:

1. Flanagan is sort of notorious for her prelapsarian views on the feminist movement and her unpopular articles on the Mommy wars.

2. Young people hate being talked about by teh Olds (who should just crawl off somewhere and, like, die or something).

So, it's really a lose-lose situation here, and really why spill anymore ink on Twilight. Someday it will have all of the impact of a stack of Flowers in the Attic library discards. Which is to say, meh.

What I liked about the article (and the thing that seems to rile the Youngs the most) was the way it looked at the psychology of why we read what read. The way it took seriously the notion that people are motivated by emotions and ideas that they may not even be aware of. This to me is pretty interesting and shouldn't just be dismissed.

When you think about it, the conscious mind is a powerful engine and a very busy machine that does its level best to get you through all the things you need to be and to do during a given day. One thing it does not like to do, is look at itself. It does not like to examine its own processes. It does not like self-awareness. These things are dangerous and crippling and are likely to throw everything out of joint. Instead it prefers balance and stability, so it will rationalize whatever is going on in your head in order to keep things moving and all those dark, scary thoughts get smoothed over and ignored.

Let's face it, you'd never get out of bed much less go to school or work if your brain let you sit around and think about how stupid and pointless everything is all the time. The rationalizing mind keeps enough of "the happy" bubbling up to keep you moving, getting your work turned in, the bills paid, and food in your stomach.

Similarly, when you read, you might think that what your doing is for pleasure, or for escapism but that's just your ego trying to keep things light and happy. What you're really doing is looking at your mind, getting under the covers to look at all of those nameless creepy crawly things in your brain that drive you and motivate you even if you don't know it. Literature is a tool for examining minds, looking at how other minds solve problems, make judgments, reach decisions, and achieve goals. The details of any given story are the examples used to support the mind's argument. They are the evidence presented in order to persuade you of whatever was in the writer's mind at the time she was writing it.

So if Flanagan wants to argue that the readers of Twilight, or the readers of YA fiction occupy a different headspace than the readers of Ulysses or The Road, I'm inclined to accept that as a given. And I'm also sympathetic to the idea that those same readers are trying to satisfy different emotional and intellectual needs in different ways. What she forgets to acknowledge is that readers don't know that that's what they're doing when they're doing it.

Readers prefer to think that they're reading for pleasure or reading to learn. They want to remain at an intellectual remove from whatever's percolating in their id. They want to engage emotionally and empathetically with what they read, but they don't want you to talk about it and trivialize it. Reading is a great pleasure, but it can also be really, really embarrassing.

So yes, the Twilight series probably does use vampirism as a romantic metaphor for how girls blossom into women, but don't talk about it. That just, like, totally gross.

Now go lock yourself in your bedroom and listen to the Vivian Girls or something.

The Lunatic is on the Grass: The Echo Maker

I finished Richard Powers's The Echo Maker yesterday and it turned out to be a fantastic book. Even with all the accolades (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize Nomination) I was still afraid that the novel would be dry, dull, and dreary. And at first it is, but intentionally, as Karin Schluter comes to Nebraska in the wake of her brother's catastrophic car accident, we meet a woman who is not really well equipped for the challenges of life and who easily falls victim to her own moods, emotions, and false hopes. When brother Mark regains consciousness he no longer recognizes his sister but insists that she is an impostor, a cleverly crafted simulation designed to trick him. From here the book surprisingly turns from mere medical drama to an engaging psychological thriller. A page turner, but like nothing I've read before.

The characters in The Echo Maker don't act like characters in books and movies, but more like people you know. They behave inappropriately, say the wrong thing, react emotionally when logic is needed, abuse cool rationality when a kind heart is what is required. They engage, but fail to engage, and conversations that would take two lines in an episode of House take months of introspection to get out. The plot itself, and the central mystery of what happened to Mark the night of the crash is revealed but not in the linear mechanistic way we've grown to expect from the movies. There are clues to be chased down, pieces to be put together, but in the real world there is no one to play detective and put it all together for us. There are bills to be paid, and therapy to go to, and the maddening presence and demands of other people to deal with.

Instead we have a book that evokes genre conventions and then knocks them down. It is a thriller without a hero or a villain, a conspiracy without a They, a ghost story haunted by the living, and horror novel where the only monsters are those in our minds.

The rational savior of the book is Gerald Weber, a neurologist and popular author, who has become famous writing on the bizarre neurological cases he's worked on (a la Oliver Sacks): people who suffer accidents and can no longer form new memories, who can only see things on the left side of their bodies, who believe their close relatives have been replaced by robots, who can no longer distinguish individual faces, etc. But when Dr. Weber comes to Nebraska to save Mark, he suffers a crisis of conscience. His cool rationality is a facade, and he begins to doubt everything he believes about identity and consciousness. He has become more of a storyteller and myth-maker than scientist, and ultimately he fears that his life's work is unethical. It exploits the powerless, gives false hope to broken minds, and can neither provide a cure nor expand our understanding of what's gone wrong.

Throughout the book, neurology is explored in great detail, highlighting the fragility and unknowableness of human consciousness. What we consider to be our coherent selves, is nothing but an illusion created by the complexity of the brain. One break in the system, and the self that we thought we were blinks out of existence, or becomes someone knew and unrecognizable. There is no identity, no memories inside our heads, except the story that we tell ourselves over and over again to make our lives seem coherent and meaningful. Frames in a film that give the illusion of movement.

The cranes that gather each winter on the Platte river in Nebraska become a metaphor for human memory and its fragility. These are creatures that have gathered in the same spot year after year since the time of the dinosaurs and their annual movements provide a symbolic map in the mind of nature. As time passes and humans exploit the resources of the Platte, the ecosystem is threatened, and the birds grower ever closer to extinction. What will become of the Great Plains when this memory is lost, how will the mind of nature be damaged or impaired?

In Margaret Atwood's review, she finds The Wizard of Oz encoded into the story (and why not? OZ is in many ways America's ur-myth): Mark as the Scarecrow, Dr. Weber as the Wizard, Karin as Dorothy. It's a clever reading but not one I caught onto. Perhaps next time I'll listen to Dark Side of the Moon while I read and see what happens (synchronicity, coincidence, anarchist miracles). After all it too speaks of the mysteries of the human mind.

The Myth of Class

This is interesting:

The "cultural elite" brought up on opera and the higher arts, which supposedly turns up its nose at anything as vulgar as a pop song or mainstream television, does not exist, according to research published by Oxford University academics.

According to the article there is no longer a class system, but there is a status system based on your occupation and your education. The higher your status and level of education the more likely you are to be interested in things that were once considered high-brow like art and opera.

What can this mean for the future "reading class" as universal literacy gives way to video on demand and touch screens interfaces?

Secondly, as the middle class loses access to higher education, won't job status once again reinforce class differences based on wealth and family?

Oh, Nevermind

Just as I was speculating on the total democratization of all human knowledge, purple monkey dishwasher, the new New Yorker arrives with dire statistics on reading:

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society.

So writers are becoming smarter at the very moment readers are getting dumber. Or something.

There's an irony here, but one I'm not yet ready to chew on.

Culture Warhorse

Better news still, is Michael Berube's latest guest appearance at Crooked Timber. He has an update on his family as well as the latest from the canon debates. So what's new? Not much:

You know, I thought I was fairly careful about naming names here. I tried to pick writers who were intellectually complex and historically important, and I subtly suggested that people who would try to argue against the study of such writers were surly curmudgeons. But I forgot that in Canon-Debating World, it’s always 1987, and we always have to be on the lookout for the possibility that some black writer, somewhere, is getting too much attention at some dead white guy’s expense. (Odd, isn’t it, that the allegedly overrated contemporary writer is always black? And if people don’t want to make an issue of this, then they shouldn’t complain about the attention being paid to writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe. They should try complaining instead that everyone has read Don DeLillo’s Underworld but few people have read Book VI of the Aeneid, or something along those lines.) It’s the last part of this formulation—the “at the expense, some argue”—I forgot: since I inhabit a sane and sunny world in which it is reasonable to expect people to read more books every year, I completely overlooked the fact that because the Department of Surly Curmudgeons actually don’t have any good arguments against studying Equiano or Barnes or Hurston, they pretend, instead, that the study of these figures is a “zero-sum game” that will distract us from the real classics. This is—how shall I put this decorously, so that even the surliest curmudgeon will understand it?—ah, yes, I know: this is horseshit.

Indeed.

Once again, it's not about culture at all: it's class and race that fuels the resentment of Surly Curmudgeons on the right.
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Listening to: XTC - Funk Pop A Roll
via FoxyTunes