Reading irritations for a Saturday morning

The good news about being an academic in the humanities--okay, literature--is that you get to read a lot.

The bad news about being an academic in the humanities is that you get to read a lot, and you don't always get to choose what you read but you have to find an interest if you're going to write about it.

Right now, this never-ending story of a piece that I am working on has me reading some things that are worthy, even brilliant, but are a little . . . trying. Here are some additional irritations to add to last year's post.

• Religious doctrine, religious reflection--very important, I know, but reading this stuff is a slog for me.  "Be a good person, the end" is my medieval-peasant style level of understanding, if that's not an insult to medieval peasants.
• Travel writing. I love the blog entries that you all post from travels in other countries, but straight travel writing, 19th-century style, reads sort of like this: "As we meandered down the [word in another language], we were greeted by the [ditto], with their charming [ditto] beside them as they [ditto] in happy expectation of our [ditto]," followed by a paragraph describing the local flora and fauna in exhaustive and exhausting detail. It's Mad Libs, international style.  I don't lose my will to live, but I do lose my will to read. 
• Modernist texts that like to play hide the person's name, or the pronoun reference, or the central defining event of the book by mentioning it once in 400 pages. I understand why that's important and representationally sophisticated and the rest, but for trying to slog through, please give us a name. Please. 
• Cruelty to animals and children. If they show up in a contemporary text, you need to look out, because often they won't last long and will be dispatched in highly unpleasant and lengthily described detail to prove that the author isn't "sentimental." I gave up on John Updike's Roger's Version because of this, and you have heard me rant before about Lolita. "But look at the wordplay and the language," I was told. "Lolita herself is just a girl, just incidental." Not to me, she's not. 

And now back to reading my religious-doctrine-centric book with lots of travel and name-hiding and, I fear, some animal cruelty coming up.

Edited to add: Nope--child cruelty and death. Modern fiction, you never disappoint in your predictability.

What kind of reading do you find tough to get through?

*Updated to add: The Man Booker Prize this year goes to George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, which is by all accounts wonderful, and which I want to read--but it features #4 (Lincoln mourning his dead child) and #3 (a surreal, experimental style that one account said will leave you not understanding what's happening for chapters at a time). Just . . . leaving that out there.

Mad Men: Don Draper, Jack Kerouac, and the Divided Mid-century Self

I know that this is the second Mad Men post in a week, but there's only one episode left, so I won't be writing about it much longer. ("Doesn't this woman have any work to do?" you may be asking.  "Oh, wait--that's why she's procrastinating.")

Does he remind you of anyone?

I'm thinking of a parallel between Don and  Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road the spirit-Bert quoted to Don in a recent episode: "Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

For Kerouac, all that endless travel always led back to his mother, as Joyce Johnson writes about so beautifully both in her memoir Minor Characters and in her biography of Kerouac, The Voice is All.   

According to Johnson, Kerouac's drive to write and to create, to find a voice that could fuse the parts of himself--thinking in the joual French of his French-Canadian parents and writing in the English of the Beats that he would pioneer--was part of this restlessness.  Haunted by the death of his older brother, Gerard, when he was a child, Kerouac was on a continuing quest for some authentic voice that would admit perfection and ecstatic vision to be expressed through language. This and his insecurities led him through some self-destructive behavior, to say the least, including involvement with numerous women and heavy drinking. Oh, and he is drawn primarily to dark-haired women, leading him to tell the blonde Joyce Johnson (then Glassman) that he doesn't usually go for women of her coloring.

Sound like anyone you know? Does this mean that Don will be trying to get back to some state of origin, despite knowing that, as Thomas Wolfe, a great influence on Kerouac, put it,  "You can't go home again?" Don can never get back to his mother, although that doesn't stop him from trying to recapitulate the homecoming experience.  What Kerouac knows/knew is that even if you can go back physically, emotionally you never really can.

I'm not trying to trivialize Kerouac's achievement by comparing it to advertising, by any means, or trying to draw an exact parallel.  But if Weiner and company are trying to capture some essence of the mid-century man and the divided self, they couldn't have chosen a better model. 

***
Just as an aside: wouldn't you like to see the ending be what the writer over at Vox thinks might happen, the Mother of All Don Draper Pitches?

Through a glass eye, darkly: listening to the Alternavoice

Flavia has good a post up about a book that she read and that, quoting Dorothy Parker, she says she wants to hurl with great force out of her house.  It's a book about a guy having a mushy, lukewarm crisis of faith. She also says that she doesn't necessarily finish books any more once she's given them a fair (100 pages, more than fair) chance.

Finishing books? Not necessarily, any more.  I recently tried a modern classic, but after reading the preface about how it would be challenging, frustrating, and confusing, even a little boring with all the digressions, but that the 1000+ pages would be totally worth the effort, I let the Kindle app quietly return it to the library without forging ahead.  Maybe I'll try again in twenty or thirty years. If I'm going to work that hard, I'd rather work, if you see what I mean.

No, the thing that worries me a little is that in rereading some classics, including my recent stretch of visiting the mid-century males, my first reaction is often no longer "This is a Timeless Classic with Enduring Themes and Universal Truths," the gospel I was taught, but "Oh, great--more twentysomething guy problems."  As Mark Twain once said of James Fenimore Cooper in a very different but totally hilarious context, I'm seeing through a glass eye, darkly.

I can't tell whether this is a gender issue or an age one, since I've read so many more novels since first encountering those classics. I can still appreciate all the formal stuff and even a little stylistic fancy footwork, but in the big Crisis of Faith moments, a still, small voice in the back of my head is saying something like "Dude. You are worrying about this, really? Get a grip."

The Alternavoice hasn't always been there when I read. I think reading all the junk on the web has cultivated it, from listicles to the faux questions at Slate and HuffPo and now all the news sites.  It's not there with everything I read, which is a good thing.

And the Alternavoice isn't all bad.  It slips out in class sometimes, in some almost-snark pointing out problems in a text. I don't want to go all trollish on a piece of writing, of course, but it's good for the students to see that what we're reading isn't holy writ and that there's another way to look at the hero's dilemma.

Maybe I need to write up an assignment where they can let their Alternavoices loose, but once it's out of the cage, as evidenced in my brain in the last year or so, it's out for good.

Do you have this voice when you read literature? Is there some situation or plotline that especially brings it out?

Writing inspiration: John Updike

Walking really does help you to be more creative, even if the source of the information is HuffPo.

For inspiration and productivity, you could do worse than to emulate John Updike. I know that David Foster Wallace faulted his steady productivity and self-absorption, but like his friend Joyce Carol Oates, Updike just kept on. Snippets from various parts of Adam Begley's Updike:

From breakfast until late lunch, he wrote.  In that summer of 1957, when he was working on The Poorhouse Fair, he made up his mind to produce a minimum of three pages every morning (and many mornings, he did better). 

His schedule remained essentially the same for the next fifty years.  He never seems to have had any difficulty in getting himself to start work, or to sit still and concentrate for the number of hours necessary to meet his three-page quota.  It sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Having guests in the house did not mean that Updike altered his work schedule; he shut himself away as usual for his daily three hours. 

Updike's work is controversial for a lot of reasons, portrayals of women being among them*, but for sheer literary industry, doesn't this inspire you?

[More in an Updike interview at The Paris Review] http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4219/the-art-of-fiction-no-43-john-updike

*My take, in part: the Rabbit tetralogy works, although Rabbit, Redux, which seemed good back when I read it, seems in retrospect a Very Special Episode on the turmoil of the sixties. Maybe it wouldn't seem that way if I read it again. The Maples stories and most of his other stories, Couples, The Centaur, The Poorhouse Fair, and his essays were all well worth reading. Marry Me was a more intensely focused version of Couples.

The Witches of Eastwick--no. Just no. I stopped reading Roger's Version when the child abuse parts came up and didn't read S. or any of the Bech books or the later fantasies--come to think of it, I stopped midway through Roger's Version and never went back to Updike.

[Edited because I confused S.  and Roger's Version in the original post, and I had forgotten that I had read Marry Me.]

Brain change: can we still read long-form writing?

From WaPo, some research confirming what a lot of us have observed in our students and maybe ourselves.  Skimming and websurfing is changing the neural pathways of the way we read:

To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. 

 “I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” 

“They cannot read ‘Middlemarch.’ They cannot read William James or Henry James,” Wolf said. “I can’t tell you how many people have written to me about this phenomenon. The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James.”

Henry James is kind of a special case--there are sentences where you want to say, "Please, Henry, throw me a verb. Any verb will do"--but there's truth to this. I've noticed it in classes. Students can identify skimmable main points, but they don't have a sense of what individual parts mean. I've tried to counter this by slowing down the reading process, not by giving them less work (since, as rational beings, they would likely skim that, too), but by spending more time looking at passages and words.

I wonder, too, whether the popularity of graphic novels and comics has something to do with shifting reading patterns.  Those can be complex visually, but the way the information is presented doesn't train the brain to slow down and do long-form reading.

A lot of people complain that students don't read anymore, but this suggests it's not due to laziness but to brain issues.

And like the people in the article, I've noticed that my natural reading patterns have changed, so much so that I've shut off some social media for now and read books in the morning rather than news, to try to retrain them.

Have you seen this, too? 

The influential writers meme

The estimable Professor Zero has tagged me for the influential writers meme, and, although I fear that my list can be neither as rich as hers or as critically astute as Lumpenprofessoriat's, here it is. As I understand it, this is supposed to name authors who've inspired you or made you think. I took this to mean writers who had influenced me at an earlier stage of my life (hence the "greatest hits" nature of the list). Also, they don't have to be great writers, but I've left some off that at one point were important to me (how else to explain reading the entire "Strangers and Brothers" series of C.P. Snow one summer?), though I now can't remember why.

Bear in mind that this is done quickly and in no particular order; also, some obscure authors' names have been omitted to protect the guilty (me), and I'm not including critics.

1. Raymond Chandler
2. Jane Austen
3. Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. George Eliot
5. Henry James
6. Emily Dickinson
7. Thomas Hardy
8. Andrew Marvell
9. T. S. Eliot
10. F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. William Shakespeare (it's true!)
12. Ernest Hemingway
13. John Milton
14. Charles W. Chesnutt
15. Kate Chopin
16. William Wordsworth (and Dorothy Wordsworth)
17. Edith Wharton
18. Emile Zola
19. Willa Cather
20. W. Somerset Maugham
21. Emily Bronte
22. John Webster
23. Jean Toomer
24. Charles Dickens
25. James Joyce

And now for the tags, also in no particular order (and since I can only tag 25, please consider yourself tagged even if your name is not listed. I tried not to tag anyone who doesn't seem to do memes.)

1. Bardiac
2. Mel
3. Profgrrrl
4. Lesboprof
5. Sisyphus
6. Dr. Crazy
7. Horace
8. Fretful Porpentine
9. Heu Mihi
10. K8grrl
11. Bittersweet Girl
12. Dr. Virago
13. What Now?
14. jo(e)
15. Dance
16. Philosophy Factory
17. Dr. Brazen Hussy
18. The Salt Box
19. Moria
20. 10eleven
21. Historiann
22. New Kid
23. PhDme
24. MuseyMe
25. Cheese and Responsibility