read•see•do
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Entries in reading (2)

Friday
May072010

Sometimes, a book is just a book.

Salon's Ann Nichols pens an elegant defense of reading for the sheer pleasure of it in her blog post at Salon.com.  In college, she confesses:

As soon as I took "real" literature classes in school, I became facile at the parlor tricks that would carry me through high school and a degree in English; these included decoding what I read based on symbolism, historical facts, and the life of the author. 

While she doesn't call down jihad on literary critics, her essay does begin to tease apart the knotty relationship between the creator and the created, between the maker and the consumer of any art, literature, photography or otherwise.

I've always read and looked at art as a combination of reading a page out of an interesting person's diary and sociocultural puzzle.  That is to say that the person making the art was an actual human citizen who lived in a time and place different from mine.  When I consume his art or read her books, I'm reading what the person wanted to say based on the fact that they existed in a real time and place.  Of course that artist is going to be shaped and influenced by the sociocultural soup he's floating in.

It is valid, I think, to ask oneself if what an artist has to say is relevant.  But as a reader, I grant the work that relevance by feeding their product through my filters.  If I'm black, I may resent the fact that Iago the bad guy is cast as a black person.  But I think I do Othello a grave disservice if I write the entire play off as racist claptrap simply because the world Shakespeare wrote of doesn't ideologically align with the world I live in today. 

As she concludes, Nichols writes:

What is gained by the picking, the dissecting, the categorizing and the smug analyzing of what was intended, in the first place, to be an expression of something personal and unique, floated in the literary ether to be absorbed by readers only imagined by the writer?

It's worth remembering.  Because while it's fun, and sort of like a treasure hunt, picking through a work for hints of latent "isms," overly analytical interpretations can drain a work of its essence as effectively as a bucket of leaches at an Open Wound Festival.

Friday
Jan012010

The Similarly Obligatory New Year's Eve/Day Post

Hear that low-pitched hum accompanied by the high whining shriek of locked-up mental gears?  It's the sound of the (self-imposed) pressure on People of the Blog everywhere to make their last/first post of the old/new year pithy/somber/witty/reflective.  The older I get, the less interest I have in parading my failures for the whole world to see, especially if I can'y squeeze any comedic value out of them.

So instead of resolutions, I'm going public with some guidelines for 2010 ... some personal milestones that, for one reason or another, I've decided are important to me.  Take 'em or leave 'em.  I pay the registration and hosting fees on this bitch and I can do as I choose.

1) Get started on my Music City 1/2 Marathon training and keep it going post-race.  When I finished last year, the multi-month endorphin rush made me talk crazy talk ... wanted to run it next year, wanted to run 5Ks for kicks.  If you were one of the people I said this to, my apologies.  I was out of my head.  My goal is to finish, maybe with an even better time.

2) Keep an accurate list of the books I read.  I don't know why this is such a big deal for me.  But I want to do a better job of tracking how much of the written word I take in.

3) Learn how to use a flash, and start taking pictures of people.  Don't get me wrong.  I love shooting 300 frames of a pile of rusty metal as much as the next OCD fauxtographer out there.  But a recent visit to the Memphis Books Museum of Art and viewing a collection of WPA photos (disappointingly fewer than I would have liked to have seen) suggested that what my oeuvre has in obsessive detail it lacks in soul.  @griffintech photographer @bradleyspitzer publically set out last year (or the year before that) to "learn how" to shoot people.  I think he's more than succeeded.  It's time for me to nut up and ask people if I can take their picture.

4) Be a better friend.  Facebook friends are fine, but few of them would actually pick you up at the airport late at night on a rainy Sunday.  I want to give more time to the people who really matter.  And spend way less mental and emotional energy on those who don't.

5) Write a story, submit it somewhere for publication and get my first real rejection letter out of the way.  To celebrate my 20th college reunion, why not actually write some fiction and send it off somewhere to have it looked at and summarily rejected.  "I haven't written in way too long.  I need to get back into that."  Or "Well, the New Yorker rejected a story about middle-class white suburban angst I sent them.  Said something like "did not fit their needs at this time."  Which sounds better?  

6) Let my kids grow up.  They're going to whether I want them to or not.