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by David L. Ulin, November 12, 2010 10:27 AM
Last night, I started reading Paul Auster's novel Sunset Park. I made it through 100 pages before I fell asleep on the couch -- although this is more a reflection of my own exhaustion than any particular comment on the book. To be honest, I'm not sure what I think of the novel yet; it's too early to tell. I'm not sure what I think of Auster, either. I admire some of his books immoderately (The New York Trilogy, The Invention of Solitude, even The Brooklyn Follies) while finding others (Moon Palace, The Music of Chance) relatively impenetrable. But here's what I want to tell you, which has more to do with me than it does with Auster. I was struck, from the beginning of Sunset Park, by two elements he wove into the narrative: first, a connection forged between two characters by a common reading of The Great Gatsby, and second, a fascination, bordering on obsession, with the arcana of major league baseball. Both are also elements in The Lost Art of Reading, and while I don't mean to claim a confluence between the books, it's the kind of coincidence that delights me because it suggests a critical mass. Among the themes of Auster's novel is "tangibility"; as one character suggests, "The world is tangible. … Human beings are tangible. They are endowed with bodies, and because those bodies feel pain and suffer from disease and undergo death, human life has not altered by a single jot since the beginning of mankind." I agree with that, and think it's worth repeating, especially now, when technology encourages us to think we live in a never-ending present, where the rigors of the body can be forgotten beneath the weightlessness of electronic life. Here, in a nutshell, we have the reading experience, the way we come to books with our own stuff, which we then watch play out in the pages as we find a way to connect. For another reader, Auster's Gatsby riff, or his discussion of Herb Score and Donnie Moore (tragic pitchers both, the first a shooting star whose promising career ended early, after a line drive hit him in the eye; the second a suicide who never got over giving up the momentum-turning home run in the 1986 ALCS) might be flat or insignificant, his notion of tangibility irrelevant. For me, though, these are ideas of consequence, speaking as they do to how I see the world. Again, talk about empathy -- although this is a slightly different sort of empathy, I'd argue, than that of which Jane Smiley writes, one based on commonality, reassurance even, an empathy not about challenging but sharing a world view. Either way, it requires an openness, a willingness to be connected, to acknowledge and engage with the tangibility of another person's mind. This is what reading offers; this is why we do it -- to build a frame around the chaos, to help define a point-of-view. We construct a universe, we construct a meaning, we construct a story. We
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by David L. Ulin, November 11, 2010 11:50 AM
Besides Tablet & Pen and Just Kids, here are some books I’ve read in the last month or so: Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, Life by Keith Richards, Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin, Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela, Great House by Nicole Krauss, By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham, Nemesis by Philip Roth, In His Own Write and a Spaniard in the Works by John Lennon, The Silent Season of a Hero by Gay Talese, Room by Emma Donoghue, Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King, A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton. All of them were read for work, but almost all of them were books I wanted to read anyway, which raises some interesting questions, I suppose, about what the nature of work is. There are times — 10:30 on a Tuesday morning, say, when I’m reading on the couch with a cup of coffee and the dog at my feet — when I half-expect the work police to kick down the door and drag me away... but then, that’s also how I felt when I was spending more time in an office, wasting time on the computer, checking Facebook and the latest baseball scores. Perhaps it all gets back to that question of engagement, of what we want (or are lucky enough) to spend our time doing, the meaning we bestow on our lives. Why do I read? I ask again. To get lost in it, to feel that tickle of anticipation and excitement that comes from the direct connection to another human mind. For me, of course, this gets tangled up with what I do for a living — reviewing books. The last time I read a book for pleasure (a strange designation, don’t you think, since reading is both work and pleasure, no matter who you do it for) was over the summer, when I re-read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time in many years. I was in the house where I had first read the novel as a teenager, and there was something about that layering, that sense of what had changed and what had not (in the house, in my reading, in myself) that seemed to reverberate, if not in a way I could have imagined when I began. As it turns out, I wrote about that also, which suggests how blurry the line between work and pleasure really is. What does it mean when you turn the thing you love into your vocation? What happens when your passion becomes your job? In some sense, this was a factor in the difficulties that inspired me to write The Lost Art of Reading — both the essay and the book. If you read all day to make a living, how do you prevent it from becoming a chore? You find yourself distracted, pulling away, as we all do from the tasks that are required of us, looking for a bit of respite in the noise. And yet, the noise is just a lot of sound and fury, smoke and mirrors, sturm und
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by David L. Ulin, November 10, 2010 11:41 AM
This morning, while driving Noah to school, I caught an interview on NPR with Reza Aslan, author of No god but God and editor of the new anthology Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Aslan's collection, put together under the aegis of Words without Borders, represents an attempt to frame (or reframe) our understanding of the Middle East through the filter of its literature. Talk about empathy — this is exactly what Jane Smiley means in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel about how literature enlarges us, leading us to internalize a variety of perspectives, which, in turn, encourage understanding as opposed to calumny. On the radio, Aslan read from the book's opening selection, an excerpt from "The Future of Arabic Literature" by Khalil Gibran. This was new to me; like most of us, I suspect, I know Gibran entirely through The Prophet, which I read through, somewhat dreamily, in high school and no longer remember much at all. Here, however, we see a revolutionary Gibran, determined to make the connection between language and sovereignty, between literature, poetry, and identity. "The poet is both the father and the mother of language," he writes, language travels the same roads he travels and stops to rest where he stops to rest; and if the poet dies, language sits on his grave crying over the loss, wailing until another poet passes by and extends his hands to it. And if the poet is both the father and the mother of language, the imitator is the weaver of the shroud and the digger of its grave. The passage reminded me of something I'd read recently, in Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. There, Smith recounts a conversation with Gregory Corso, who, during a visit to the loft she shared with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, noticed a crucifix embellished with the phrase memento mori. As Smith remembers: "It means 'Remember we are mortal,' said Gregory, 'but poetry is not.'" For Gibran, as well as for Aslan, this is the point precisely, that language not only moves through us but also engages us with a more expansive cause. It may be metaphysical, as Corso suggests, or it may be political, but the implications are not dissimilar: that this is the connective fiber, a way to reach across the distance that divides us, between our frail and fragile selves. That, of course, leads to certain challenges, as Aslan suggested on NPR. Many of the writers, after all, who espoused Arab nationalism in the early years of the 20th century became the targets of the very leaders for whom they'd agitated, seen as dangerous for their free expression, for their language and ideas. There's a lesson in this, both for politicians and for authors, which is that true writing belongs to no one — or better yet, that it belongs to all of us. It begins deep down, in that well of solitary perception and expression, in, as Gibran so evocatively puts it, "the power of innovation that lies hidden in [the]
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by David L. Ulin, November 9, 2010 10:12 AM
So why is reading important? For me, there are many layers to that question, some going back to childhood when I read as both escape and immersion, and some having to do with adulthood, when I read... for escape and immersion, again. Or maybe that's glib, an attempt to categorize the uncategorizable. Let's just say it plain: I read because I love it, and because it enlarges me. That was the impetus for The Lost Art of Reading, which started out as an essay last summer in the Los Angeles Times. I had noticed, in this culture of constant distraction, that I was having trouble pulling back from the present, trouble disconnecting myself from all the noise and humming, trouble quieting down to read. This could be a personal affliction; in fact, it's certainly a personal affliction, whatever else it is. I can only see the world from my own perspective, can only report back on the experience I have. Still, based on the emails I received in the wake of that essay, I began to think I might not be alone. In 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley suggests that one reason to read long fiction is that it instills in us a sense of empathy. We are required, by the nature of the form, to enter into another's personality, another's attitudes, another's way of engaging with the world. Smiley's right, of course — and if we can agree on that, then we can also agree that reading is (or can be) a corrective for a public culture that thrives on antipathy, on conflict, on angry shouting rather than informed debate. Reading, in other words, is important because it helps diffuse that sense of being right all the time by drawing us into another's point-of-view. This quality of standing against prevailing sensibilities is why despots have always found reading dangerous; it can fill our heads with subversive ideas. To think otherwise is to reduce the power of literature to a chimera, to suggest that art is tame and inconsequential, that the autocrats really do have nothing to fear. Such a belief has become common in the industrialized west, where dissent has long been a kind of shadow play, but its converse may be the only thing the totalitarians ever got right. Just look at Vaclav Havel, Isaac Babel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; look at Voltaire and Thomas Paine — all of them vindicated (celebrated, even) by history, not just for the acuity but for the influence of their words. And yet, if that were the only reason to read, we'd be a poor reading culture, for reading doesn't have to have a point. It can be isolating, antisocial even, as Alan Bennett suggests in his short novel The Uncommon Reader; it can take us away from the world. This, too, is what it has to offer, a way to pull back from the tumult and to withdraw, if only for a moment, into ourselves. Once again, escape and immersion... after all this time, in the most fundamental sense, still the essence of why I
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by David L. Ulin, November 8, 2010 9:44 AM
Here's a question I think about a lot: What are our expectations of nonfiction? I'm not referring to the morass stirred up by the term "creative nonfiction" because it goes without saying that all nonfiction is creative, as is all writing, all attempts to frame the chaos of existence and give it a shape. But more directly, do we come to nonfiction looking for a narrative, and if so what does that mean? I've spent much of yesterday talking (or virtually talking) to students about these issues, about the need for writers to shape material, even (or especially) if that material is true. This was one of the challenges I faced in The Lost Art of Reading, how to give an idea that was, in essence, abstract (why is reading important? what does it offer us?) a concrete form. For me, the solution was to frame it with a story, the story of my attempt to read The Great Gatsby with my teenage son Noah, a story that, for me anyway, catalyzed the larger issues I wanted to address. It made sense because one of the fundamental arguments in the book is that we need story, that we are hard-wired for it as a species, that, as Joan Didion wrote more than 30 years ago, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Yet Didion, it must be said, also recognized the limitations of that argument, the way the same stories that shore us up us also let us down. She follows her famous line with one far less remembered: "Or at least we do for a while." What this means, of course, is that even the most developed story is just a construction, and, like all human constructions, it will collapse beneath the weight of time. In the face of that, it's hard to believe in story as a permanent ideal. But to me, that only makes our need for narrative more valuable because it offers us a bit of freedom — from ourselves, from posterity, even, in some fundamental fashion, from the truth. What is truth, after all, if even stories cannot sustain us? How can we know where it lies? In our discussion yesterday, I offered up two quotes to my students, the first from Denis Johnson: "But everything is like we think it is, don't you get it? Out of the million little things happening on this beach, you can only be aware of seven things at once, seven things at any given time.… We never really get the whole picture. Not even a microscopic part of it.… Our delusions are just as likely to be real as our most careful scientific observations." And the second from Johnny Rotten: "I don't believe illusions / 'cos too much is real." For me, nonfiction writing exists somewhere in between those two ideas, asking us to be as honest as we can, using the tools at our disposal, while also recognizing that those tools are inherently
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