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Feb. 12th, 2009
in which I am a bad, bad reader
Feb. 12th, 2009 08:37 pm(or, Lines, Words and Enculturation in the Practice of Reading)
Over at another place in which I read and occasionally write, someone asked about the difficulties of reading so-called "classical" work, and whether others have problems with dismissing things because of beliefs and practices of the writer or the writer's culture, and whether he was teh only one who often threw out the baby with the bathwater. For me, the answer was 'yes', or more specifically:
I find it almost impossible to engage with "classical" works. All I see are lines, unspoken ideas and convention that underpin any larger meaning the author, no matter how esteemed or unknown, attempts to communicate. I stumble and crash into these lines, run pell-mell into the dead ends and boxes they create; I do not have the practiced ease of moving among them because I lack, refuse, sometimes furiously reject, the cultural assumptions and contexts through which the author and hir assumed readership swim so effortlessly. For me, it is often baby, bathwater, basin, soap and sponge.
And this... kind of bothers me. It's not like I don't know how to read; I've spent years and years training to read as an academic, both in school and on my own. It's a very aggressive kind of reading, one that makes the most brutal of internet fisking look like a shallow papercut. For years, critical theory, philosophy, rhetoric and a bad attitude bought me breathing room and sometimes hid the fact that I wasn't really for anything, but could flay all sorts of things I was against.
I've been reading Virgina Woolf's The Waves at lunch lately, in large part because Jeanette Winterson loves it so much, and I love Winterson's work. I can see why it's such an important book to her; there are structural and perspectival similarities, though of course I prefer the contemporary to the modern. Woolf can write some amazing sentences, but they're surrounded by fussy, stuffy early 20th century... yuck. I find myself unwilling to put myself into the setting of the characters, into even that tiny sliver of time and place and culture that has become emblematic of so much I find wrong with so much.
I think some of the problem is that while I can read critically, aggressively, with blade firmly in hand, I don't always want to. The pleasure of cutting things up is at best grim, nihilistic and shallow. It's not a connective pleasure; it doesn't go anywhere. I try to read more from my gut, which relies more on resonance, empathy and maybe even intuition, but it's not as reliable; I can't always find an in, or at least not an entry point with which I am satisfied, and my aesthetic sense, while not a cutting tool, can be solid and unbending.
I don't know how to connect the reading of my head with the reading of my gut. I'm not sure it's possible, or if it is, if I'm willing to possibly compromise between them. I don't eschew critical reading; it's invaluable in approaching politics, economics and the news, for example. The thing is, I'm not sure I want to track that in to my pleasure, to my love of words and language. But that makes me worry that I come across as a shallow reader, a reader lacking rigor, one painfully unskilled and/or naive. It's not that I can't, it's that I don't want to always have to. Maybe I'm just unskilled as an aesthetic reader, or maybe it's not a thing of skill.
I want to have cake and to eat cake. If I liked cake, that is.
EDIT: I guess my question is, does anyone else have issues, either with access to writing of the past through the lens of now, or with switching between modes of reading?
Over at another place in which I read and occasionally write, someone asked about the difficulties of reading so-called "classical" work, and whether others have problems with dismissing things because of beliefs and practices of the writer or the writer's culture, and whether he was teh only one who often threw out the baby with the bathwater. For me, the answer was 'yes', or more specifically:
I find it almost impossible to engage with "classical" works. All I see are lines, unspoken ideas and convention that underpin any larger meaning the author, no matter how esteemed or unknown, attempts to communicate. I stumble and crash into these lines, run pell-mell into the dead ends and boxes they create; I do not have the practiced ease of moving among them because I lack, refuse, sometimes furiously reject, the cultural assumptions and contexts through which the author and hir assumed readership swim so effortlessly. For me, it is often baby, bathwater, basin, soap and sponge.
And this... kind of bothers me. It's not like I don't know how to read; I've spent years and years training to read as an academic, both in school and on my own. It's a very aggressive kind of reading, one that makes the most brutal of internet fisking look like a shallow papercut. For years, critical theory, philosophy, rhetoric and a bad attitude bought me breathing room and sometimes hid the fact that I wasn't really for anything, but could flay all sorts of things I was against.
I've been reading Virgina Woolf's The Waves at lunch lately, in large part because Jeanette Winterson loves it so much, and I love Winterson's work. I can see why it's such an important book to her; there are structural and perspectival similarities, though of course I prefer the contemporary to the modern. Woolf can write some amazing sentences, but they're surrounded by fussy, stuffy early 20th century... yuck. I find myself unwilling to put myself into the setting of the characters, into even that tiny sliver of time and place and culture that has become emblematic of so much I find wrong with so much.
I think some of the problem is that while I can read critically, aggressively, with blade firmly in hand, I don't always want to. The pleasure of cutting things up is at best grim, nihilistic and shallow. It's not a connective pleasure; it doesn't go anywhere. I try to read more from my gut, which relies more on resonance, empathy and maybe even intuition, but it's not as reliable; I can't always find an in, or at least not an entry point with which I am satisfied, and my aesthetic sense, while not a cutting tool, can be solid and unbending.
I don't know how to connect the reading of my head with the reading of my gut. I'm not sure it's possible, or if it is, if I'm willing to possibly compromise between them. I don't eschew critical reading; it's invaluable in approaching politics, economics and the news, for example. The thing is, I'm not sure I want to track that in to my pleasure, to my love of words and language. But that makes me worry that I come across as a shallow reader, a reader lacking rigor, one painfully unskilled and/or naive. It's not that I can't, it's that I don't want to always have to. Maybe I'm just unskilled as an aesthetic reader, or maybe it's not a thing of skill.
I want to have cake and to eat cake. If I liked cake, that is.
EDIT: I guess my question is, does anyone else have issues, either with access to writing of the past through the lens of now, or with switching between modes of reading?