Ron Silliman has written an interesting post about, among other things, how he reads:
I’m always reading a dozen books at once, sometimes twice that many. [...] In part, this reading style is because I have an aversion to the immersive experience that is possible with literature. Sometimes, especially if I’m "away" on vacation, I’ll plop down in a deck chair on a porch somewhere with a big stack of books of poetry, ten or twelve at a time, reading maybe up to ten pages in a book, then moving it to a growing stack on the far side of the chair until I’ve gone through the entire pile. Then I start over in the other direction. I can keep myself entertained like this for hours. That is pretty close to my idea of the perfect vacation.
I’ve had this style of reading now for some 50 years – it’s not something I’m too likely to change – but I’ve long realized that this is profoundly not what some people want from their literature, and it’s the polar opposite of the experience of "getting lost" in a summer novel, say. Having been raised, as I was, by a grandmother who had long psychotic episodes makes one wary of the notion of "getting lost" in the fantasy life of another.
(This reminds me of something Alice Munro wrote in the introduction to her Selected Stories: "I don’t always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction.")
Hearing how someone else reads can be, for me at least, both exciting and alienating. Exciting because it often explains at least something about their reading taste; alienating because it reminds me what an individual experience reading is. I first encountered this most forcefully when I read Samuel Delany's early essay "About 5,750 Words", in which he presents his own very visual way of interpreting a text as if it is the way everybody reads -- the essay was a revelation to me because I don't build a text in my brain in anything like that method.
For me, a text is an aural experience first, and the first bits of meaning I get from words and sentences are not visual, even if the word itself has a visual meaning: the phrase the blue room to me is first its related vowel sounds, then a meaning that it's hard to represent with words, but is basically "a space of color" (with the room part taking precedence in my mind, the actual color blue nowhere in sight yet), then finally a vague visual image in my mind, sort of like you'd get in one of the first computer games to have graphics, or in a really basic CAD drawing. If the room becomes an important part of the paragraph or page, I'll probably visualize one of the four or five prop rooms I keep in my memory: the living room at a childhood friend's house, an apartment I once lived in, a set from a movie I've watched a lot, etc. (One of the reasons I think I respond so strongly to movies is that they allow an experience I can't get from reading -- a visual experience.)
How we read determines, I expect, a lot about what we read. My indifference to Victorian novels comes partly from my indifference to scenes that are described in detail; because my brain doesn't create vividly visual scenery, all the detail is clotting matter. (I love the first pages of Bleak House because of the rhythms of the fragmented sentences, but that's enough for me. I wouldn't want to read an entire book written that way, and the rest of Bleak House makes my brain feel like my stomach would if I ate a couple pounds of pure cholesterol.) Dialogue, though, is something I respond strongly to because the fi
1 Comments on Ways of Reading, last added: 12/1/2010
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 2/5/2010
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Ron Silliman, poetry, Quotes, Bolano, Add a tag
Ron Silliman on Bolaño's poetry:
The pose of Bolaño-the-poet may well be more important – and certainly more powerful – than the fact of the poems themselves, but what might be most useful here is to note the whole notion of Bolaño posing. The unifying – indeed distinguishing – element of these poems, written in a post-Beat free verse that might be closest in English to Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Ray Bremser, is the consistency of the pose: the intellectual as tough guy but one who is, at all moments, hard as nails & deeply sentimental. Think of upper limit Jean-Paul Belmondo in the films of Godard, lower limit Charles Bukowski (not as Mickey Rourke so much as Johnny Depp or, had he lived, Heath Ledger). Imagine Kerouac mixed with Camus.
5 Comments on Bolaño and the Poetic Pose, last added: 2/7/2010
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I've bee reading my way since I learned to read. I read the book once, going with the flow, and hoping the pace is not too slow. I do not worry if I think I have missed some deeper meaning or allusion. I try to finish the book(not Dickens or Tolstoy) in 2-3 days. Then after a day or so I re-read it and then try to be the ideal reader. This works for me.