AUSTIN KLEON : BLOG : Posts tagged \'Reading\'

The right book at the right time

October 2, 2018

I’ve been re-reading Moby-Dick again. In some ways, I like thinking about the writing of Moby-Dick as much as I like reading it.

Right now I’m most interested in Melville as a reader. Moby-Dick began its life as a more straightforward whaling adventure, but at some point, driven by his epic reading habit, Melville got really ambitious, and expanded it into the monster it is now. Although it would prove financially disastrous, Melville felt pulled beyond writing what he knew would be popular with his contemporaries. (“What I most feel moved to write, that is banned, —it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”) A lot of this feeling was exacerbated by the quality of the books he was reading. (Let that be a lesson to you: read the Big Dogs, and you might be doomed by your lit’ry ambitions!)

Here’s how David Herd puts it in his introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition:

Coming to literature relatively late in life, Melville did so not with the reluctance of an unwilling recipient of some institutionally imposed reading-list, but with the wide-eyed eagerness of the autodidact, hungry for the resources of the world’s great books… Melville never made any mystery of his sources, passing them on (not showing them off) in the ‘Extracts’ with which Moby-Dick begins: the Bible, Montaigne, Shakespeare…. [T]he more he read, the more Melville wanted to emulate what he read… he wanted to find a way of writing that would enable him to meld together all that he found valuable in other works. And this, more or less, as his diaries and letters describe it, was the state of mind, the state of readiness, in which he sat down to write Moby-Dick: full to the brim with the world’s literature, in a state of something like intellectual frenzy.

In Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick narrows it down just a bit, and points to two giant reading events that changed the course of Melville’s writing. First, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and read his stories. Second, he read Shakespeare for the first time:

Hawthorne had a lot to do with the making of Moby-Dick, but the novel truly began in February 1849 when Melville purchased a large-type edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The eyes that would become so inflamed during the composition of Moby-Dick were already beginning to bother him. “[C]hancing to fall in with this glorious edition,” he wrote to a friend of the large-type volumes, “I now exult over it, page after page.”

Melville’s example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference. For Melville, the timing could not have been better, and in the flyleaf of the last volume of his seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays are notes written during the composition of Moby-Dick about Ahab, Pip, and other characters.

(You can see some of these notes on the wonderful website Melville’s Marginalia.)

William Giraldi sums it up in “The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia”:

Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.

sam anderson marginalia — Sam Anderson’s marginalia in Annie Dillard’s *Living Like Weasels*

While reading about Melville’s reading habits, I thought of Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, and perhaps our greatest contemporary celebrator of marginalia. Just yesterday, Sam wrote a beautiful little tweet thread about coming across the right book at the right time:

I was at my favorite place (@Powells) and found this beautifully tattered 1st edition of [Annie Dillard’s] *Teaching a Stone to Talk*. Realized I’ve read pieces of it but never the whole thing. So I spent $14.50, cracked it open on the plane home, & got IMMEDIATELY EXTREMELY ECSTATIC.

He goes on to sample some of his favorite excerpts, and then gets to the magic of books catalysts for writing:

maybe the best thing: reading this made me want to write. Some of my best writing—including the 1st stuff I ever published—started as marginalia in my favorite books: Didion, McPhee, Baldwin, Zora NH, DFW & on & on. Them doing their voice flows into you doing your voice.

In conclusion, books are the best technology. This cost less than $15, put me in a totally new & better headspace w/in 15 seconds, & I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Also, it started me writing an essay of my own. And that was just the first 5 pages.

Melville’s notes in the back of Shakespeare vs. Anderson’s notes in the back of Dillard

This, again, is the magic of reading with a pencil: it occupies a space somewhere between reading and writing, a crucial step towards turning reading into writing. And reading the right book at the right time with pencil in hand can lead to your best work.

Reading with a pencil

August 30, 2018

Oliver Sacks’ writing in a Noam Chomsky book

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
—George Steiner

Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated books on Twitter:

Sacks “loved to write notes on the pages of books he was reading — thoughts, ideas, arguments with the author, diagrams.” What a delight it must be to go through such a library (of 500+ books) and see Sacks’ raw thoughts in margins and endpapers:

This is, of course, an ancient practice called marginalia. (A nice, short read on the subject is Mark O’Connell’s piece, “The Marginal Obsession With Marginalia.”)

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you’re existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:

Patricia Lockwood put it this way:

There’s a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration… You have a pen in your hand, you’re going along in a way that’s, like, half creating it as you go. And you’re also strip-mining it for anything you can use… you’re sifting for what could be gold.

Panning for gold, or “shopping for images,” as Allen Ginsberg puts it in “A Supermarket in California.”

Sometimes marginalia is the next best thing to punching an author in the face. I’m a huge fan of Sam Anderson’s “A Year in Marginalia” in which he posts snapshots of his marginal comments:

The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain.

Whether you’re panning for gold or slinging shit at a dead man, marginalia turns reading into writing. (See Billy Collins’ poem.) My friend John T. Unger once said to me, “Every piece of art I’ve ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s notes on Puzo’s *The Godfather*

In Sam Anderson’s “What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text,” he points out that marginalia used to be more of a social practice:

[P]eople would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers…. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” — a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.

I own books that were marked up by my father-in-law and my wife when they were in high school. Reading through them is like a kind of time travel — get to visit with them in the past. Sometimes I imagine my kids reading one of my books and coming across a note from me…

My notes in Maggie Nelson’s *The Argonauts*

I love this idea of marginalia as a way to turn a book into a medium for conversation — a kind of literary note-passing. G.K. Chesterton’s once went through a friend’s newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as Platitudes Undone.) Sam Anderson and David Rees wrote notes to each other in a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst actually used handwritten marginalia as a device in their novel, Ship of Theseus. (I was delighted to see readers swapping their marginalia for my book, Show Your Work!)

Finally, marginalia is a way of really owning your books and your reading experience. Here’s Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in their classic, How To Read A Book:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Read with a pencil! (I recommend Blackwing Palaminos.)

Self-help as oxymoron

August 19, 2018

After I wrote a long post about self-help, I listened to an interview with Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I had completely forgotten the beginning of that book:

LOOK, UNLESS YOU’RE WRITING ONE, A SELF-HELP book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books too. […] None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.

In the interview, Hamid talks more about what he learned from writing in the self-help format:

…what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself. You know, I sit by myself in a room for several years, which isn’t a normal thing to do, and out of it comes a novel. So there is some degree of self-help just in writing a novel. But also when I read a novel, I feel like there is a kind of self-help going on there too, that I’m going beyond myself, transcending myself, I’m encountering another consciousness, I’m leaving the place where I am.

To repeat Josh Shenk, writing is self-help, because “we’re writing to help ourselves.”

Favorite reads of 2018 (so far)

August 6, 2018

I usually wait until the end of the year to make this kind of list, but it’s been a pretty good one so far, so here are 10 books I really enjoyed in the first half of 2018, listed in the order I read them:

Tape For The Turn of the Year
A.R. Ammons

In 1963, Ammons got a roll of adding machine tape from the hardware store and decided to write poems on it every day until the tape was used up. I started the book on December 6 of last year, and followed along with each entry until January 10th.

Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Denis Johnson

Beautiful stories.

A perfect swan song.

Reinventing Bach
Paul Elie

Takes a look at Bach’s work through the recordings of his works throughout the years. I especially liked reading about Glenn Gould and Pablo Casals.

A Natural History of the Senses
Diane Ackerman

I originally thought my new book would have more about the senses in it, so I picked this up for research. Very dense, lush book.

Prince and The Purple Rain Sessions
Duane Tudahl

A day-by-day play-by-play of Prince in the recording studio at the height of his powers. I did a lot of skimming and skipping around, but really enjoyed it.

You & A Bike & A Road
Eleanor Davis

A comic diary of Davis’s bike across the south. I love her work so much. This might end up my book of the year.

Meet Me In The Bathroom
Lizzie Goodman

An oral history of NYC music from 2001-2011. How much you enjoy it will probably depend on your familiarity with the music — I was eighteen and a freshman in college when I saw The Strokes in Newport, KY, in 2001, so it made me pretty danged nostalgic.

Calypso
David Sedaris

I mean, what’s there to say? The dude makes me laugh out loud… and he keeps getting better and better.

Confabulations
John Berger

Considering how much Ways of Seeing influenced me, I’m ashamed I haven’t read more Berger. This was the last book he published before he died.

Monograph
Chris Ware

A gorgeous, gigantic tome dedicated to the work of one of our great Midwestern artists.

This list originally appeared in my weekly newsletter.

A warning to my readers

June 18, 2018

Wendell Berry, “A Warning To My Readers,” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

* * *

Yesterday my 5-year-old son told me that he really wants to go to Germany so he can be friends with the guys in Kraftwerk. First, I had to explain that Florian, Karl, and Wolfgang don’t even tour with the band anymore, and second, Kraftwerk are notoriously secretive, so he probably has a better chance of meeting Paul McCartney. (Not that he knows or cares who that is.)

I then tried to explain to him what a tricky thing it is meeting the people who make our favorite things. Sometimes people whose music we really like are not necessarily people we would want to hang out with. And besides, we already get the best parts of them in their work. When you put on a Kraftwerk record or a DVD, I told him, you’re already sort of hanging out with Kraftwerk.

I realized, midway through my monologue, that these are hard concepts even for adult fans to grasp, let alone a 5-year-old fan.

“What really knocks me out,” says Holden Caulfield, in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye, “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

That is, in a sense, one of the things I love in books — that feeling of a human being on the other side of the page who really gets it. You fall in love with the voice, and part of you wants to talk back to it, and have it talk back to you. But it’s always so much better for me when they’ve been dead for a hundred years, and I don’t even have the temptation to want to meet them.

I love meeting my readers, but I am so aware that the person who writes the books that they read is the best version of me — the most hopeful, the most helpful version of me. In my day-to-day life, I am as confused, and stupid, and pessimistic as anybody. As Wendell Berry puts it, “I am a man as crude as any…”

Summer reading assignment

June 8, 2018

I indulge in silly little writer fantasies, like rehearsing my answers for the “By The Book” column in the NYTimes. (“If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?” Lydia Millet had a good answer: “This president? Yes. One book.”)

On Twitter, Erika Hall asked, “If you could assign every American to read one book over the summer, what would it be?” She got good answers, many of which might be on my list: Amusing Ourselves To Death, A People’s History of the United States, The Fire Next Time, etc.

If I gave a summer reading assignment to every American, here’s what it would be:

Visit your local library and apply for a library card. (Or pay your fines and renew.)
Ask a librarian for a tour of the library building, the online catalog, and the digital holdings. Ask the librarian to show you how to put materials on hold, how to request materials for purchase, and how to use interlibrary loan.
Check out at least one item. (So you have to return.)

That’s it.

The need for readers

May 31, 2018

A few days ago, my friend Alan Jacobs, author of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, quoted philosopher Jürgen Habermas:

The public sphere is crucial to the intellectual, though its fragile structure is undergoing an accelerated process of decay. The nostalgic question, ‘Where have all the intellectuals gone?’ misses the point. You can’t have committed intellectuals if you don’t have the readers to address the ideas to.

Alan writes:

Those who once might have been readers are all shouting at one another on Twitter…. So maybe one of the most important questions we who are concerned about our common culture can ask ourselves is this: How do we bring reading back?

Ironically, it was over on Twitter that I saw my friend Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research, thinking out loud about how every big tech company in America should house a small independent bookstore that’s also open to the public. (She got to thinking about bookstores, browsing, and what I call “the serendipity of the stacks” when she came across a book about Nazi resistance while browsing a bookstore in Gatwick airport.)

I’ve cut and pasted a few of her tweets, below.

We’ve been talking a lot about the need to infuse more humanities and greater diversity of perspectives and inclusion of underrepresented groups in techbusiness before we build SuperBiased Skynet. In addition to changing hiring practices, we need more bookshops.

If tech companies have space for quinoa bars and rosé taps, they have space for airport-sized bookshops.

I’ve been inside a lot of these very nice buildings and campuses, and it is striking how similar the culture is from one to another for being supposed hubs of innovation.

Any tech company that cares about their employees’ bodies enough to have a chef and a gym, should also offer something for the mind. Imagine how it changes the recruiting conversation to say “we have an onsite independent bookstore” as one of the amenities.

There are different ways to do this: 1) Hire a librarian and have an elementary-school library themed lounge. (with scooter parking) 2) Get someone like Books Inc to set up and send money back out to a local business. More points for putting it on the ground floor for the public.

[A bookshop] is a way to support the local community both monetarily and culturally, and promote intermingling with non-coworkers.

And hey, you want social activities that don’t center alcohol and are maybe even, gasp, family friendly? Have them in the bookstore.

Such an interesting idea. (Erika started a hashtag — #books2tech — if you want to add your thoughts.)

In response, my friend and former co-worker Adam Norwood pointed out the “Institute for Humanistic Studies for Executives” program that Bell System ran in the 1950s:

[A] number of Bell’s top executives, led by W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company’s hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.

The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell explained the Bell leaders’ concerns in an article published in Harper’s magazine in 1955: “A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.

They basically came up with a liberal arts program: visits to museums, orchestra concerts, architecture tours, guest lecturers (W.H. Auden! Lewis Mumford!), reading programs, and eight three-hour seminars devoted to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

At the end of the 10-month course, an anonymous questionnaire was circulated among the Bell students; their answers revealed that they were reading more widely than they had before — if they had read at all — and they were more curious about the world around them. At a time when the country was divided by McCarthyism, they tended to see more than one side to any given argument.

What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.”

Of course, Bell withdrew their support for such a humanistic education when the executives started to turn, well, more human.

“[W]hile executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities.”

So it goes.

Shelf life

April 23, 2018

“Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.”
—Margaret Atwood

Storing up images

April 16, 2018

I love reading more than one book at a time and letting the books talk to each other. I love promiscuous reading. Here’s Octavia Butler on her practice:

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

I’m currently dipping in and out of two books: 1) Harold Gatty’s Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass — a 1958 wayfinding manual and Christmas gift from my wife — and 2) Tom Hart’s How To Say Everything, material Tom’s been working on for the past decade, but just recently published in book form.

They compliment each other beautifully on the subject of storing up images. Here’s Gatty:

There is something which all the greatest artists and writers, naturalists and scientists, voyagers and explorers, poets and pioneers, share. It is an interest in the external world and the ability to contribute something creative to human life in this world by means of taking parts of the world to pieces and putting them all together again. The ability to observe, and the ability to see the little things that seem trivial at first, may become amazingly important and meaningful. Out of little observations huge ideas may grow; and if a mind, made receptive by training in the use of the senses, can store away a mass of observations, the time will come when the whole collection can be unrolled, connected together as a great novel is planned, in a compelling pattern that tells us something new.

And here’s Hart, quoting Stanislavski, in his chapter, “Creating A Store”:

You must be constantly adding to your store. For this purpose you draw… principally upon your own impressions, feelings and experiences. You also acquire material from life around you, real and imaginary, from reminiscences, books, art, science, knowledge of all kinds, from journeys, museums and above all from communication with other human beings.

In both of these contexts the word “store” refers to stocking up or keeping a supply for future use, like a squirrel, but it also conjures retail associations in my brain. I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg, in “A Supermarket in California,” who, dreaming of Walt Whitman, wandering around, looking at the moon, stops into the neon supermarket, “shopping for images.”

That seems to be so much of what I’m always doing — shopping for images — adding to the store, stocking up for the future…

Top image: Drawing of a brain by Jules (3)

Clippings

April 8, 2018

Years ago I borrowed this copy of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler from my father-in-law, and when I opened it up I found Calvino’s 1985 NYTimes obit and stories from a 1983 Harper’s.

I was so surprised and delighted by these unexpected artifacts that I decided to start saving clippings in my own books. Here’s my brand new copy of John Ashbery’s The Knew What They Wanted, in which I stuffed a NYTimes review and a photo of his collage desk.