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Issue XIII Books, Reading, and Being Read
INTRODUCED BY MADELEINE ADAMS, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
You are about to begin reading Book XI’s newest issue. Close, or at least minimize your email inbox. Go somewhere quiet, if you can, a room where 30-second video clips aren’t blaring from phones, where chit-chat is minimal. If the video-watchers and blabberers are unavoidable, stuff your ears with those earplugs you finally decided to buy for people with “sensory sensitivities.” If you didn’t fall for that aggressive ad campaign, normal earplugs, headphones, or even old receipts or tissues balled up very tightly will do the trick. Shout to the others, through your muffled ears and over the loud videos, “I am reading Book XI’s issue on Books, Reading, and Being Read!” Reading, you think, to yourself, the one activity that elevates us above base and brutish animality. Here you eye the video-watchers and gossip-mongers and scoff silently.
Plato famously condemns the written word in Phaedrus. Like a painting, writing does not respond to questioning, or adjust its depiction to suit its audience. Speakers shape their words for the specific topoi and kairoi and defend them against attackers. Writers cannot. Written words, detached from their author, tumble about in unanticipated times and places among readers who may not understand them, for whom they may not be destined. And even if those words are meant for those readers, those who read can only access a “semblance of truth.”
As Plato says: “They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing, they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Terrible cocktail party guests!
But Plato also says that writing that is dialectical, that is sensitive to its interpretation, that is not simply to be believed but to be taken instructively or critically may bring us as close to the truth as we mere mortals can get. This is the kind of writing that Book XI editors love, and the stories in this current issue on Books, Reading, and Being Read are a testament to that love.
“Renovation” the essay by Ken Malatesta muses about how books evoke certain selves, at certain times, in certain places. In If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino provides a hectic list of what sorts of books we encounter at a bookstore. My favorite is “Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered.” For Malatesta, copies of heavily thumbed Rimbauds, DeLillos, and Bolaños are imbued with the many lives that he, their owner, lived alongside them.
When the protagonist of Kyle R. Garton’s “Advance Copy” receives a short story collection from the dystopian future, he scours the edges of his world for a seam that he can rip open to view the future through. By the act of reading the short story collection, not for clues or code but as a work of art that filters disturbing events through the artful veil of metaphor, he is able to enter into a Borgesian, subjunctive future world, where the events of Garton’s story unfold.
Wittgenstein invites us to mind the gap between word and world, just as Joseph Geskey’s poems, “C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures,” and “Picking Blackberries” do. Our language-cities will always be incomplete, even as nifty new suburbs of chemistry and calculus threaten to overtake and overwhelm the linguistic hinterlands. There is simply too much world. Too many blackberries to put in your mouth, too many particularities of your childhood neighborhood to capture. Not even a perfect chemical notation can quite do the trick.
In his essay “Tending Gardens in Brains, Inc,” Joel Winkelman considers what authentic reading might look like for teachers and students implicated in increasingly corporate structures that train them in commodity exchange, neoliberal self-regulation, and “professionalization.” Thinking with the matryoshka structures that often organize the nested consciousnesses of David Foster-Wallace’s narrators, particularly the executive in the short story “Mr. Squishy,” Winkelman considers Hannah Arendt’s warning about the bureaucratic banality of evil. A homegrown horticultural heuristic emerges to counter the large-scale agricultural methods of education which indiscriminately prune back everything that does not make the student a better office worker. Reading, then, becomes the loving cultivation of books and words.
The materiality of language is the primary concern of Harrison Fisher’s poems “Reading Deaccession” and “Marvell’s Garden.” A reader is not only a reader, but she is, whether she likes it or not, a historiographer and philologist. The history of a story or poem inheres not only in the pages of the library book or in the mind as remembered beauty, it comes through ancient mouths and hands, housed in enormous, shared repositories of knowledge, gaining millions of significances, some private, some universal, as it travels about along the many-laned human highway. A book changes a mind, a poem evokes an absent loved one – the dead are not forgotten.
Derrida’s (R.I.P.) endless preoccupation is with the dead, as is the protagonist in “Phantom Power.” He returns to the home of his recently dead mother, and finds mysterious notes on her old laptop about “quantum suicide” and the possibility of an electronic afterlife. While the author, Anthony Schneck, is alive, we do wonder if his words, too, will haunt us with the trace of his writerly self, disseminated into our consciousnesses and embedded there by the whirring of our laptops and smartphones. While we think it’s a knock-out piece, we certainly do not wish death upon you, dear reader, while you savor the story.
But it’s true, someday you will die! So make life count. Keep those earplugs in and read the stories and poems of some thoughtful writers, so that you too can partake in the immortality of the written word. Please enjoy Issue XIII: Books, Reading, and Being Read!