Tag Archive for 'reading'

On imagination and, you know, whatever

Published
by
Colm
on 13 April, 2010
in Books (and the like), Films & TV and Writing
. 16 Comments

David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, 1993:

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

Discuss.

Compulsion

Published
by
Colm
on 27 January, 2010
in Books (and the like)
. 11 Comments

There’s something like my weight in books sitting at the end of my bed these days. I’m not counting shelves, you understand – only the bags of just-bought unreads. Some people seem to feel like this would be a daunting prospect, as if reading is something you have to push yourself into. Which, I don’t know. I spend minutes at a time just smelling books. I build them into a fort around me, laughing like a maniac the whole time. If I could swim through the things Scrooge McDuck-style, you’d better believe I wouldn’t be here talking to you people.


Because it’s funnier in Dutch, that’s why.

The catalyst for all this was the €100 of book tokens I got for Christmas. I was going to save them til my in-tray had diminished a bit, but on my first day back in work I went for lunch and – oh hello, I appear to have wandered near Hodges Figgis. You know they’re gonna have some sweet deals, might as well check those out.

I ended up buying seven books by accident. Which is to say, I didn’t specifically intend to buy seven books. I just kind of fugued. Also, the cashier was pretty.1

So ok, that’s gonna keep me going for a while. However, and for reasons outside my control, I happened to end up in Waterstones a few days later. Now, the thing about Waterstones is they have those 3-for-2 deals which, obviously, you’d be a fool not to take advantage. Not only that but there’s a best-of-the-decade table. I don’t want to spell things out for you, but let’s just say I woke up hours later with a brutal hangover and Random House’s number tattooed on my chest.

That should have been the end of it. But no: one morning the following week I forgot to put a book in my pocket on my way out the door. The whole way in on the bus I was just staring into space. Have you ever noticed what other people sound like? What they smell like? It was a nightmare. What the hell was I going to do on the way home? Gnaw my own arm off? Clearly, an emergency fix was needed. So into Hodges Figgis at lunchtime – Garrison Keillor, you say? And only €4? Job’s a good un. But on the other hand, if I find another book for €6 that means I’ll get a stamp on the ould loyalty card, and that’s just sensible.

It goes on in this vein. I’m going to trail off now, because I’m giving myself the vapours and my bank account can’t withstand another blackout. And because there’s a book of EU tax legislation here that I haven’t put to bed yet, and man do I want to see how that turns out.

  1. A fun game in bookshops is to try get the cashiers to check you out. I think I caught her attention with the Pynchon, but on reflection Rape: A Love Story wasn’t my smoothest move. [↩]

Charles Bukowski. What’s the deal?

Published
by
Colm
on 28 May, 2008
in Books (and the like)
. 8 Comments

His prose fiction contains zero emotional content, by design, and doesn’t attempt to be journalistic in the George Orwell mode. And yet, the last page of Factotum leaves you feeling like you’ve just sailed off the edge of a cliff, looked down and seen something terrible.

I’d previously read Post Office and loved it. The writing is superbly minimal. That’s probably why it’s such a gut punch; Henry Chinaski actively resists and repels any feelings of pity by just getting on with things, by being a shiftless, incurable drifter, and and by enjoying various dodgy pursuits a little too much. So when the tiniest, merest hint of an implication of vulnerability sneaks in, it becomes a very big deal. And then it ends.

I am very much looking forward to reading Women.

The week in books

Published
by
Colm
on 17 April, 2008
in Books (and the like)
. 2 Comments

Over the past while I’ve soldiered through the majority of Andrew Meier’s Black Earth: Russia After the Fall, a book I bought on a whim while wandering through the History section of Hughes & Hughes. It’s interesting and all, but relentlessly bleak is only entertaining for so long. I rather stupidly decided to take a break from it to read At Swim-Two-Birds and naturally I haven’t yet managed to get back to it, despite being less than a hundred pages from the end. In my defence the writing is pretty small and he does that thing where a new chapter starts right after the old one ends. (Authors: we need that bit of white space at the end of a chapter. It gives us a sense of accomplishment.)

Speaking of Flann O’Brien: as soon as I finished At Swim I went straight out and bought The Third Policeman, and it was a struggle not to just swipe an armful of him off the shelf. He is magnificent. I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Irish writing, but this I can get behind.

Most recently I’ve finished The Dice Man. It’s a very good read with some nice stylistic choices and inventive use of language. It also has that snazzy something I love in countercultural lit from the 70s – after the idealism burned off, but before it started blowing itself.

Finally, on similar lines, a biography of Tim Leary is currently residing in my coat pocket. Unfortunately the writing is determinedly uninteresting, which is practically heretical given the subject matter. Take Hunter S. Thompson’s quote on the jacket: “Tim was a Chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof-prints on all our lives.” That’s more like it. Why couldn’t someone like him have written it?