Reading in a post-fact age

Along with the other disturbing attributes associated with Donald Trump--ignorance, corruption, boorish behavior,and general incompetence--there is his lack of interiority, a point made by Christine Smallwood in an article on the future of serious reading, in a time when the U.S. President does not read, reflect,listen well or care about truth.  He is lazy.

The essay is in the current HARPER's magazine, and asks the key question, "Does reading matter in a post-fact age, when smartphones and social media also distract us from interiority?"

Smallwood quotes near the end a statement of major importance by novelist Don DeLillo:  "If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean what we're talking about when we use the word "identity' has reached an end.  Privacy,  personhood, reading, and thinking are all wrapped up together."

I am applying this insight to my much-delayed reading of a classic English novel from 1953, THE GO-BETWEEN by L. P. Hartley, a beautifully evocative memory piece about an adolescent boy's innocence shattered during a summer in 1980.  In such fiction, we can come closer to another consciousness, and to our own, than in most other ways.

The novel was made into a film in 1973--hard to find but which I located from Korea via Amazon. It stars Alan Bates and Julie Christie, with an imperfect but intelligent screenplay by Harold Pinter, who doesn't make the central (older) narrator clear.  But seeing it lead me quickly back to reading the much more satisfying novel, which I highly recommend--and not merely as an escape from difficult times.   It sums up the essence of DeLillo's excellent point.

When the well runs dry

What does a writer do when he or she can't write? Some desire to create is there but nothing comes; distractions replace inspiration.

It happens to us all, perhaps serving as a break from too much mental activity, a needed dry spell. It is not a cause for alarm.

It has happened to me in my fiction writing in recent months: fatigue and other commitments have gotten in the way of developing several ideas I have for stories.

This week I decided to take action, and the remedy I found most useful: reading something of quality, with style.  The novel I chose was the recent work of Andre Aciman, Enigma Variations.

It's too early to tell what I think of the novel, except that it is carefully crafted, full of detailed description, in this case of Italy at some time in the past; and for me, being absorbed in the author's language and dialogue is very helpful in moving out of my lethargy, not that it gives me ideas to borrow but something broader and harder to define: a sense of being connected to the world of words, a sense of borrowed confidence coming from an accomplished author.

I find myself intrigued by Aciman's exotic upbringing in Egypt, the son of Italian and Turkish Jewish parents who spoke mainly French at home, along with Arabic, Italian and Greek. What a cultivated milieu in which the young author was nourished, outlined in his memoir Out of Egypt.  I envy such a cosmopolitan background, which is more important to me than his doctorate from Harvard or his teaching in New York, where he now lives, since it has produced a writer of high skill.

Reading anything of quality (I find that many things in the New Yorker give me a jump start when my energy flags) is an often overlooked necessity in the life of any writer.  Two hours of reading might produce an hour or more of writing and the sense of relief that the well has not run dry.

Reading is Creative

We all know that writing is a creative act, but many of us overlook the fact that reading, which is such an inseparable part of writing, also involves the reader's imagination in ways that literary theorists and neurobiologists have been studying for some time.

I was reminded of the work of Norman Holland of the University of Florida and others when I encountered a blog by Nicholas Carr a few months back. He writes about how narrative literature "takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways."

It seems that, as we read a story, our own experiences and knowledge join with the narrative to create something like a dream of the work we read, and we inhabit that dream as if it were an actual place, Carr says.

You might be thinking, "Of course, I know that reading, like immersion in a film, is emotionally engaging and absorbing, that we lose ourselves."  But did you know that experiencing strong feelings from a fictional work can cause alterations in brain functions?  I don't know how the reactions a reader has can ever be measured in a laboratory, but the mounting evidence from various researchers about the social and psychological implications of reading is impressive.

Quoting Keith Oatley as well as Holland, Carr says that "a book is rewritten in the mind of every reader, and the book rewrites the reader's mind in a unique way, too."  An astounding statement.

Does reading literature make us more attentive to the real-life feelings of others around us? Do we become more empathetic?  Such are some of the imponderables as we consider what happens when the reader withdraws from his or her own world into a fictive world, which can be a way to connect more deeply into the inner lives of ourselves and "others"--even if these others are imagined characters.

If reading fiction can alter the reader's personality in various ways, imagine what happens cognitively to the writer, who both creates alternate worlds and, in revising his work, becomes the first reader of this work--and is changed in ways yet to be determined.

Good News, Bad News

Some good news on the literacy front: the biggest innovation since Gutenberg--the e-book--is creating more books and a bigger audience for them. So reading is up, whether in pixels or print.

This insight, from Timothy Egan of the New York Times, came as a great surprise to me as I read with sadness of bookstores closing and publishing in the old sense apparently dying, as my wife, Lynn, struggling to get her stories or poems published, keeps finding out.

Apparently, according to Egan, the popularity of Kindle and other such devices has resulted in an increase in sales of printed books as well. Without all the e-books being consumed, publishing in America would be flat or comatose.

One fifth of Americans say they have read an e-book in the past year, and digital readers buy more print books. Why this is the case is not clear to me. But it is good news to a fan of the old technology who believes that nothing can replace the pleasure of holding a book and turning the pages.

Less heartening is the news that Twitter users are being upset by Autocorrect, which unnecessarily and misleadingly changes words in an effort to correct spelling. Are writers no longer responsible for their own typos?

Apparently, a kid in a Georgia school typed "gunna be at west hall today." This was changed to "gunman be at west hall today," as if we don't have enough terrors. The school was locked down for two hours. Most of the "corrections" have been much more minor, just annoying to those involved. Annoying to me is the use of "gunna" and such shorthand terms in any communication. The use of standard English would have prevented this miscommunication.

Errors can cause serious problems, but when they are non-human errors, the effect is alarming. I am glad to say I am not and never will be a Twitterer.

Read to Write

I don't often read brand-new novels, but when I saw several glowing reviews of Peter Cameron's "Coral Glynn," and when I found it by accident in the public library where I am teaching my annual writing workshop, I decided to give it a try.

Somehow, I was hooked; maybe the length of the novel (about 200 pp.) suggested that I could read it in an hour or two; maybe the clarity and intelligence of the style appealed to me, along with the fact that the story was set in England in 1950.

The remarkable thing about this is that the author is an American and is one of those insightful and brave male writers who is able to create a credible female heroine in the tradition of Jane Austen and Barbara Pym. Or the Brontes, since the title character, a nurse, is rather like Jane Eyre--alone in the world, nervously reacting to the complexities of a society she knows little of.

So we have a novel of manners, a social novel whose tone is made possible--and this is the main point I want to make--by his years of reading novels of this type and listening to English people talk in print, in movies, and in real life, too. The result is a singular achievement for an American: an authentic-sounding English novel that captures the nuances of class, the awkward nervousness of an employee in an upper-class family sixty years ago.

It is not, of course, a novel in which much happens in the sense of action; yet a great deal happens in the inner lives of the characters, which is why I read fiction to begin with. How did Cameron learn to create such a fictional world? How did he develop such a fine ear for style?

It is said that all writers borrow, consciously or (more often) unconsciously. We absorb the language and idioms of a place and people and an awareness of our debt to all the writers that have preceded us. This point has been made by T. S. Eliot years ago and later by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence. In saying that Cameron has a pitch-perfect ear for language, for example, I am borrowing a term, perhaps trite already from overuse by reviewers, that I have read somewhere.

We all are products of what we hear and experience, and this is especially true of writers. So it should surprise no one when I tell my students that, along with daily writing, there must be wide reading, especially in the genre they aim to write, whether it's non-fiction or fiction.

I am not suggesting they become derivative and avoid originality; rather, that they develop an ear for language that comes after a long immersion in well-crafted prose in which they pay attention to the word choice and sentence style of skillful authors. Then they can move from being writers to being authors themselves.

Robert Louis Stevenson spent three years reading the masters before trying to get published; it was time well spent.

What Writers Need

When I sent a recently-completed story, one of my rare pieces of fiction, to two friends to read, I received two totally different kinds of responses.

One friend apparently read it hurriedly, and out of a sense of obligation, because his comments were a bit off the mark, as if he had read a different story from the one I sent him. His suggestions were not helpful. I felt I had wasted his time.

My other friend read it carefully, several times, and met with me to go over specific things he liked and those he thought needed improvement. He made some good suggestions about the way some of my dialogue needed to be updated, to suit a 40-year-old man today. Nearly everything he said and wrote in the margins ended up being helpful in my revision. He was concerned about not offending me by his comments, and I was grateful for everything he said.

I learned, again, that asking people to read anything I have written is, for a writer, like a land-mine. Unless carefully handled, it might explode.

Of course, every reader wants and deserves to hear something positive, some appreciation of (at least) one aspect of the story or essay. And it's important for me as the writer to ask, upfront, for a general comment: what did you like and what did not work for you? In that way, I am more likely to get a balanced reaction. I know how easy it is for those who critique to be negative; after all, they have received a lot of negative criticism from teachers and others.

A writer wants, craves, needs, yearns for acceptance and can easily be hurt when he or she feels rejected or ignored.

If my characters are not believeable, if the setting is vaguely described, I should be told this in a context of support and general appreciation, with the encouragement that, with some revision, the piece will be stronger. This is what I tried to do with my university students, few of whom aimed for publication, and what I do now, as I work with older adults aiming for publication.

So it's up to me, the writer, to set forth the guidelines of what I expect in a critique; otherwise, there might be unpleasant surprises, such as a generalization ("good job") or, as in the case of my first friend, rambling comments irrelevant to me as a writer since they focus more on him than on my work.

So I have to choose readers who know something about the creative process, preferably what it means to write something for a reader. My second critic met this criterion; the first did not.

My wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, a poet and writer of fiction for young readers, has often been disappointed, even hurt, by the lack of response she gets from people she expects will appreciate her work: are these readers too busy to pay attention? Are they so far removed from what a writer does that they can't take in what a writer needs to hear about her own work? Probably.

But in the case of editors and fellow writers at literary conferences who fail to notice a comic tone or an original idea in Lynn's work because it does not fit their pre-conceived idea of what a good story should have (action, for example), the issue is deeper than being busy or being self-absorbed. They may be "professionals," but they are not good listeners, I suspect, in conversations because they lack patience, empathy, and open-mindedness. They may work for publishers, but they are not good readers.

I believe many people who agree to critique a work lack the patience of my ideal (second) reader, who was willing to devote considerable time to appreciate what I had done, and to appreciate me. He paid me the great compliment of attention.

Writers need readers, but often finding good ones isn't as easy as it might seem. It's a challenge to write well; it is also a challenge to be a good reader.

Reader's Block?

When I check out Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog, I am invariably introduced to articles I would not otherwise discover. Most recently, comments by the British writer Geoff Dyer, who, while shaped by his wide reading, has, for whatever reason, begun to suffer, not from the usual writer's block, but from an aversion to reading.

Perhaps, as he confesses, he is overdisciminating, maybe even lazy. He feels guilty, apparently, in not being motivated to read as he did twenty years earlier. He is right in saying that much fiction being published is a waste of time. Perhaps he is impatient and thus affected by the immediate gratification we all quickly learn from the media.

There are so many options out there for anyone intellectually curious, as Dyer obviously is. It is hard to concentrate on reading because, I think, we have learned from the computerized world of messaging that speed counts; the result is a scattering of our attention. Some would say that too much reliance on the web makes our thinking shallower.

Adam Gopnik, quoting Nicholas Carr in the current New Yorker, makes this
point. I suspect that Dyer has much in common with Sven Birkerts (author of "The Gutenberg Elegies"), who laments the loss of inner life that has long been made possible by the leisurely reading of fiction.

The way the social media and even the web make being unavailable a sin has clear implications for any serious reader, who needs uninterrupted time and attention, which are all too rare given the extensive competition.

Dyer no doubt would nod in agreement at the words of Rumi (the 13th cent. Sufi mystic): "I have lived too long where I can be reached."