A Reader, Not a Writer

I have been reading compulsively since my older sister taught me how one summer when I was between the ages of three and four and she--a compulsive reader and high school senior thinking about going to college to become a teacher--practiced upon my malleable self. Like most avid readers I wrote a bit as a youngster and imagined becoming a writer, but long ago realized I lacked both the staying power and the kind of imagination necessary to do the kind of creative writing I would want to do. Why clutter up the landscape with my indifferent efforts, I reasoned, when there were so many really good books out there for me to read?  Unlike Gertrude Stein, who tells us in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (another non-writing reader--Alice that is, not Gertrude) that Gertrude Stein, an avid reader, feared as a young woman that she would soon read up all the books there were and so would have to take up writing herself to ensure a future supply, I have been willing to trust that there will always be plenty of books worth reading and that simply reading them, a task for which I have infinite staying power and real talent, would be a full-time job.

To make that full-time job pay I became a trained reader of texts, with a Ph.D. in American literature and an academic gig which is rounding up its second decade. I have even committed the occasional--too occasional--act of scholarship. Which involves writing, of course, but is not Writing of the sort that Writers do. Literary scholarship is a highly esoteric form, a set of gestures, postures, and movements that bear the same relationship to Writing as Tai Chi does to actual hand-to-hand combat: once, long ago they may have been the same, but while the former has great value as a kind of discipline and as performed by the Sifu is capable of great beauty, it does not risk all in order to conquer--a city, the self, a readership. A Writer, by contrast, risks everything with every word. The culture of literary scholarship, too, limits the ways a reader can write about the thing read. There are fashions and shibboleths. And, perhaps because of these, very few readers. So while I continue to produce, slowly, effortfully, literary scholarship which from time to time (I hope) evinces small beauties, there is so much more that I need to get down about all that reading.

This blog is conceived as a place where this Reader can sift through a lifetime of notes on reading, making sense of five decades of doing the thing I am really good at: burying my nose in a book.