fiction files redux discussion

Here's two posts about being well read, I'd love to hear what everyone thinks about being considered well read.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/20...

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/...

Truth in both articles.

I particularly like the point about "culling," a skill (?) I seem to constantly do (and, it feels like a type of on-going, violent whirlwind).

I liked Ebert's observations and laments—with an exception: Ginsberg's "Howl." That IS the poem to take away from Ginsberg. The rest . . . well . . .

Forsaking the literature side of my English major for the Writing side, I've been 'band-aid'ing' what I feel I already SHOULD HAVE 'under my belt.'

But, as I go on, I see that many folks seem to be in the same boat. "'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true.'"

Oh, one last point . . . re: the "culling" for ONLY "good, important, or lasting" work. I find it extremely instructive to pick up a "trash piece" (as the author phrases it) once in a while. It is by contrast, by relief, that an exquisite craftsmanship becomes visible or comes into sharper focus.

And sometimes, albeit rarely, what appears to be 'trash' can, upon reflection, become quite a gem.

Neat Topic &
Good reading !

So we are upset because there are too many choices? We can't do everything that it's possible to do before we die? How is this a problem?

I think what's really being lamented is the loss of common ground. There was a time when some folks thought that you might be considered well-read if you had read Milton, Shakespeare and the Bible, and nothing else. It's not because they are edifying, I don't think, but because it gave the "community" a common basis for understanding each other.

"Well-read" seems to me one of those outdated idiomatic phrases that has lost it's mooring because the cultural context for it has disappeared.

That being “well-read” has lost its mooring may be true with society at large, but I’m sure we can all agree (well, the English majors of us here, which I’m guessing is most of us) that college English professors—hopefully—are doing a great job of keeping students and individuals mindful of what being well-read actually means. I hope that professors continue to instill in young people the sense of pride that comes from being versed in the literary canon and other great works from contemporary artists. From another stand point, being well-read should remind people of power of words and well-structured sentences, which ultimately contributes to our (English major or not) ability to communicate effectively in daily life. It is sad to think that so many people go without reading these books particularly, let alone experiencing all the books/art/music in the world. But this is why we go to universities, teach at universities and participate in online book clubs (or live ones with alcohol), to keep our own passion for good literature sparked and to pass that spark along to others. I don’t want being “well-read” to die. Thanks for posting the links!

I've often been told, ususally by someone who only knows me casually, that I seem "well read." I like to be thought of that way, but I also know it is SOOOOOOO not true! There are so many facets of arts and literature of which I am ignorant.

I continue to purchase books and add them to my "to be read" shelf even though it'll take me YEARS to read even the ones that are already there. I continually download more music than I can ever listen to. My DVR is constantly filled to the brink until I am forced to delete things without watching them. I buy DVDs of movies I've seen and movies I've never seen and boxed sets of TV shows I love that I never get around to watching.

It's a sickness. An affliction. And I will be a lifelong sufferer.

maybe being well read just means having read enough to know that you'll never be able to "finish"

Interesting post, Dan. I quite agree with the lovely Patty on this issue. I especially enjoyed her use of 'idiomatic'.

I too am in agreement with Patty it is most likely the loss of common ground but in many ways I can see that as a good thing. I know I've read a lot more outside of the canon as a result of this group.

I'm also fond of R.A.'s comments on culling and the need to sometimes pick up something more trashy. I think I need to find something that fits that bill right about now.

Hey Dan,

I wish I could suggest something; but, I'm going through my 'Classical' phase, right now—Thucydides, Homeridai, and a return to Plato. Such SLOW reading, think I'll need a 'trash' piece, soon.

. . . very soon . . .

Ugh.

Well read compared to what/whom? I agree about the sentiment that there is no longer any common ground. Two people can be very well read but have almost no overlap and thus nothing to talk about. There are so many corners to hide in, so many tiny areas to specialize. At first I tried to read widely, but lately I feel like it's more important to just give in to those obsessions and read deeper and deeper into what I'm already interested in. There will be time to widen up again later.

Also, I feel like the more I read the more I can see how one writer has influenced another. Or how one writer takes as a starting point what another writer has started. I used to think 'literary references' were kind of show offy, but sometimes when I catch those references it actually deepens the reading experience because it brings another work into the realm of what I'm reading currently. So it's not about name dropping, but about incorporating a larger body of work, to consider these ideas inside the community of what's already been written--which ends up adding to the ideas and making them more complex... Perhaps that's when you start to become well read, or at least FEEL well read. Like you can read one book and see all the tangents along the way in an entire history of literature.

Also, it gives a sort of comfort to know that the author you're reading has also read and engaged with many of the books that you've read. It feels like a form of 'community', but one that is between you and each writer rather than you and a bunch of readers. The latter is also possible, for example here in Goodreads, but I rarely find people who've read the same books I've read in real life anymore.

Jimmy wrote: "Also, it gives a sort of comfort to know that the author you're reading has also read and engaged with many of the books that you've read. It feels like a form of 'community', but one that is between you and each writer ..."

I totally agree!

i like this statement from patty a lot: "maybe being well read just means having read enough to know that you'll never be able to 'finish'"

a character in b. travens' story, "the night visitor" says he has written eighteen books. His friend asks why he has not published and he opines:

"Nonsense! For people to read them? There are thousands of books--great books--which they have never read. Why should I give them more if they don't read the ones they already have?"

i agree a lot of what people consider canon is now subjective, and the net is widely cast. harold bloom has made some efforts to define for us what is western canon, and i hotly disagree with some of his choices. and that is just him trying to prescribe to americans.
here in canada we might be required to read margaret atwood, and mordecai richler and robertson davies in our high school curriculum. if streaming is done in a particular school, a gifted class might read theatre of the absurd playwrights like albee and ionesco, instead of romeo and juliet, and macbeth. and if you move past high school into university, in the same way that ebert's prof inculcated his own tastes into his students, a thousand others throughout the world are doing that very same thing. i agree with kate that no matter what their individual tastes decree required readings for the syllabus they create, as English instructors it behooves them to "remind people of power of words and well-structured sentences, which ultimately contributes to our (English major or not) ability to communicate effectively in daily life".

oro and i have been having a conversation on facebook that reminded me of intertextuality and it reminded me of jimmy's comments here, and previous conversations we've had about this in the ff. he pointed out a b. traven novel has the same plot kernel as an episode in chaucer. i rejoined that shakespeare looted holinshed and ovid for plot and pulled whole sections to boot. what a revelation to me it was when i realized i had read words in shakespeare before, only then they were spoken by medea! at first i was crushed, but then when i studying apollonius of rhodes' jason and the argonauts it was made clear to us that all the textual references and quotes he used were meant to be recognized in the way that the simpsons loads in tons of references to films, and books, and other media, today, and it was only my modern mentality that expected a copyrighted work to be without context. how could you claim to own the right to those words otherwise? i once thought.

i'm going to go ahead and say, i feel well-read. this is not a boast but take as such if you like. i don't much care if anybody else thinks i am or not. i know i will never get to the end, but i appreciate the piles of books that i still have to get to, and appreciate the opportunity to unearth a favourite writer among those unknown to me. it doesn't much matter if that favourite is on harold bloom's list or not. :P and wonderful resources like project gutenberg mean we can all have a say in what remains behind to be read, and savoured. :)

I just know, when I read it, I imagine being well-read is some short of embarassing nightmare, where you stand naked in a bookshop while constumer go examining you inch by inch. I prefer to be obscure.

Below is a review of the latest book about how reading good novels is good for you. Back in my day, it was Wayne Booth and The Company We Keep. I suspect I would have the same reaction to Deserwicz' book, which is that there are many lovely insights about books I have read or should read, but the overall thesis does not stand up for me (nor does it for Laura Miller in this review). Reading does change you, but it is not about being good or "good for you". Let's leave that to spinach and vegan cookies.

http://www.salon.com/books/jane_auste...

The idea that good literature can instill good moral values is a age-old faulty one. What values does Beckett teach us? Or Flannery O Connor? Or Joyce?

I think it was Michael Silverblatt who said that great literature makes life more difficult.

It certainly can. It asks such hard questions, and it provides almost no answers (at least without implying more difficult questions).

I like the quote from Silverblatt.

robert, i'm not getting the connection with the idea of whether or not someone can be well read. please spell it out for me?

(lisa miller's insipid "review" upset me too much to be able to comment coherently, and i don't want to derail the subject of well-readness. but if you want to start a new thread, i'll certainly join you there.)

Patty,

For me, if there is a goal to being well-read besides being well-read, it is to become a better person. This is how I understand it, which probably comes from having read Clifton Fadiman's lifetime reading plan when I was young and now finding his advice and judgements, well, stupid. Perhaps though what Deseriwicz is after is reading welll. Maybe there is more to be untangled here.

I do like the idea(l) of being well read if its goal is to explore.

I would say that being well-read amounts to being able to have meaningful conversations with other people about books that they are also likely to have read.

I also believe that if you are able to have meaningful conversations with people (about books or anything else) you are (obviously) a better person than if you were not able to have meaningful conversations.

If reading doesn't improve people, I must not understand what is meant by "improve." And if it doesn't make me a better person, the whole concept of "better" must be beyond my grasp.

The fact that spinach is rich in vitamins does not preclude the possibility that it is delicious (but confusion on this point has caused many a 10 year old to forgo discovering the pleasure of spanikopita).

Patty,

I really appreciate having this discussion because it helps me think through stuff, some of which is what does it mean that I am not going to finish my PhD. I'll say more about what I think is the point of being well-read, but I do want to consider the the Salon review by Miller. It's not a review of the book, which in my book is bad form--one should forgo, rather than review a book for what it is not--but instead about knocking on the idea that reading improves one's moral character, or perhaps more narrowly, the idea that reading Jane Austen can improve the moral character of a 25 year-old graduate student, back in the heyday of high theory. This is a very old narrative: Irving Kristol, founder of neoconservatism, famously said he preferred Jane Austen to Joyce. I haven't read the Deserwicz, but perhaps he is trying to a make considered (and personal) argument that for him this is true. But I can't help hear in the argument that literature is morally improving implicitly an argument against imagination. To translate further what I hear: Books are machines to temper our unruly, unrealistic (and ultimately youthful) imagination. The best enact a dialectic that entertains and then disciplines our selves. Austen at moments believes this, when characters in her work advise reading Johnson rather the romances and poetry being produced in her time, but this does not exhaust her work. Yet it does seem to be what people reach for when they talk about Austen. I can see why a fan of Austen would tire of this angle, since off the top of my head, I can think a number of flat out mean characterizations in her work. Good and bad are not unambiguous in Austen, but we do know who the fools are. And that quality, that flaw is something to celebrate (to me) as is other more obvious virtures, because we can take pleasure in it.

I don't think that this form of moral improvement is what you mean by the ideal of being well-read. What I mean is that it broadens our selves and our sympathies, especially in opening us up to experiences by any measure we cannot have. I simply cannot be Jane Rule or her characters, but I can go out of myself when reading her work, discussing it, and writing about it. And going out of oneself is what is why being well read is a value that I believe in. (It's also what Shelley said in the Defence and elsewhere.)

I also think it's about exploration, and that is what gets me about discussions of being well read. A lot seem to have a goal in mind, an end. The point is the journey and frankly if there is an end that isn't simply learning to think and feel more complexly, then it isn't much different than a theology. This is why I think there is some justice in feeling that someone who engages with reading by simply reading a different version of the same genre book is not getting all they could out of reading. Difference matters. But we do come to books for stories we have heard before as well. It is not easy to tease out, but I do think that being well-read ultimately reading things that we might blanch at first (as Deserwicz must have with Austen).

I like spinach, too, though other greens can be more interesting and probably as nutritious. But watch the cream and pork fat.

Robert

so i think you are saying that there are two different ideas of Improvement.

one idea being "well-read" with a silent "in the accepted cannon" at the end of it, and that the implied cannon is a vehicle for conserving the set of morals/beliefs held by the cannonizers.

the other being self-improvement in the sense of the individual personally broadening his/her own view of the world via reading works outside of the cannon, which would also challenge the same morals being preserved by the well-read set.

am i getting what you are saying?

Patty,

This sounds right to me.

Robert

preserving the morals of the community does not need to be seen as in conflict with the personal growth of the autonomous individual. they belong together and thrive on each other, (or at least they should in the kind of communities we choose to be part of).

a lot of it just depends on what your morals are, and whether or not you wish to remain within the community whose morals you are preserving.

Since my dear Jane Austen has been brought up in this discussion, I just have to add my two cents and say I have never read or reread Austen for her morality or felt myself morally improved for having read her.

I read and reread Jane Austen for her biting humor and snark!

Kerry,

Jane does has a reputation for being morally improving. I think Alasdair MacIntyre has held her up in that light, but I would have to look for the reference. She is on the threshold of the time where literature nearly always was positioned to meet Horace's maxim, that it should please and instruct. The Romantics bent this maxim to the max--i think PB Shelley would have rewritten it as "to startle and to change"--but it was still in place. Of course, pleasure is a part, and the 18th c. was much more snarky than the 19th c. Pope, Swift and Sterne vs. maybe Byron is how the sides line up for me.

Patty,

For "well-read" I have come up with a maxim that interests me. Here it is:
"Read deep, don't repeat, discuss much. Repeat."
How does that sound?

Robert wrote: "Read deep, don't repeat, discuss much. Repeat."

Love it!