Metareading

Phantoms on the Bookshelves is a charming memoir of bibliomania, by French editor and writer Jacques Bonnet. Treading in the footsteps of classics like Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library," Bonnet offers a series of reflections on his personal library and, more generally, on the quality of a life lived with books. Its 123 pages can be enjoyed in an afternoon; its charm lies in Bonnet's quiet self-awareness and wry humor. Throughout Bonnet mentions not only the books he has read (and re-read) but also the numerous authors who have, throughout human history, written about their reading and their libraries. For those interested in books about books, this tiny volume is a great map.

Bonnet is interested in something I've been pondering a lot lately: from where does a passion for books (or passion for the arts, in general) come? In the beginning of the book, he mentions how "reading...penetrated, like a shaft of sunlight, through the gloomy atmosphere of a provincial childhood of the 1960s" and about how both escape from and knowledge of the world excitingly tarried with each other for him during the tumult of France in the late-1960s. These answers are circumstantial, pointing to the power of books to re-contextualize us, to subvert the conditions in which we find ourselves. But he also wonders about the force of sheer curiosity: "The fanatical reader is not only anxious, he or she is curious. And surely human curiosity--condemned as it was by certain Fathers of the church as being of no purpose since the coming of Christ, and even prohibited, since we now have the Gospels--is one of the determining factors of all our actions? A capital element in the search for knowledge, in scientific discoveries or technological progress, the essential force behind human endeavour..." (29)

Otherwise, I was taken with his repeated assertion about libraries as alive. For readers, this is a common reality; for non-readers, it might seem hyperbolic. It is not easy to explain. Bonnet says, "A strange relationship becomes established between the bibliomaniac and his (or her) thousands of books...We may have chosen its themes, and the general pathways along which it will develop, but we can only stand and watch as it invades all the walls of the room, climbs to the ceiling, annexes the other rooms one by one, expelling anything that gets in the way." (31) Bonnet is genuinely surprised as he writes to us about his library, seeing things he had not seen before. "How did these books get into my library?" he asks at the start of chapter 5. The question is not entirely rhetorical.

One of the funniest moments was his discussion of how "human reality sometimes intrudes strangely into the principles of classification" of any library, noting how book collectors think long and hard about which books should be allowed together or forced apart. Apparently, the author of a rulebook for personal libraries in the Victorian era suggested that works of male and female authors had to be separated "unless the parties are married to one another," (41); Bonnet quotes the hero of a bibliomaniacal novel, The House of Paper, who worries about putting Borges next to Garcia Lorca, Shakespeare next to Marlowe, or other potentially unpleasant social situations.

In the end, Bonnet assert that "hundreds of thousands of people live in my library." First, he notes that each book contains a host of "imaginary" characters, with whom we have a deep experiential and psychological communion, who are always there, living their stories for eternity. Second, while asserting that authors are only fragmentary apparitions about which readers know very little, he argues that readers nevertheless are are invested in their reality and are always in search of books' creators. "We are so anxious to maintain the illusion that the author is a real person that we cannot be satisfied simply with an orphan work of literature." (83) Of course, these are the two foundations of fandom--sustained passion for a work and the quest to establish a lasting and strong relationship with others, famous or humble. Escape and knowledge.

Reading in Public

If you've come across this blog before, you probably know that I enjoy talking about reading as much as--well, reading. That's why I enjoyed this post by Scott Aiken and Robert Talisse, about "Reading Weird Books in Public," over at 3 Quarks Daily. Apparently, people have strong reactions to what others read. Think of it as a kind of social marginalia.

As an academic whose professional life revolves around reading, I bring books everywhere. There is always reading to be done, and, as a parent who must drop-off and pick-up children on a daily basis, I am often waiting, with time to kill. Why not catch up on the latest journal? Take notes on a book for research? Prep for the next class reading? It doesn't really matter whether it's at the mall or gymnastics class or on the soccer field--if there's light, I can read.

Apparently this is not always cool. Usually, I don't ever get more than a second glance, or someone wise-cracking "a little light reading, eh?," when I am spotted outside of the classroom with an academic monograph. Of course, there was that one time when a woman on a plane was curious about my copy of David Mitchell's The Cloud Atlas and asked if I were "studying to be a meteorologist." And I do still get grief from my family about the time I sat amidst roaring fans in the stands at a high school football game, engrossed in Brian Ward's Just My Soul Responding. (In my defense, I had class the next morning).

Inappropriate reading has a long history, reaching at least into the 18th century, including workers sharing pamphlets, housewives engaging in novels instead doing housework, etc. (see http://pastispresent.org/2010/curatorscorner/the-novel-reader/). I never really thought about the extent to which we still maintain all kinds of prescriptions and rules about what, when, and where to read. It may not be threatening anymore, but it can still provoke.

For more on the contemporary phenomenon of reading in public, be sure to check out:
Underground New York Public Library
Or
http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/is-it-creepy-to-see-someone-reading-fifty-shades-of-grey-on-the-subway/

Reading and Not Reading

I love John Sayles' A Moment in the
Sun for many reasons.

Nice piece by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle Review last week about the "growing body of investigations into the history of reading." For reception scholars, such growth may seem old news, but the piece, prompted by Leah Price's How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain, separates historical research on reading from more established research on the history of the book and reception theory, linking it to current debates on reading and technology and transnationalism. Howard offers a too-brief history of the field (though it name-drops my own favorites--Janice Radway, Robert Darnton, and Jonathan Rose), but her discussion of research methods and problems is quite good, ranging from the rare joys of marginalia to new efforts to aggregate historical evidence, such as the Reading Experience Database (RED).

Price offers the best line, actually: "'The history of reading,' Price says, 'really has to encompass the history of not reading.'" Absolutely true, that. (I am reminded of my own students' love for "art books," as well as this amusing review of Ronald Reagan's memoir). But we still haven't figured out how to talk about "reading" in its broadest sense without some awkwardness. In my own work on music, I have used the term "audiencing," which encompasses moments of encounter, as well as everything else that goes into one's attention to music: various kinds of meaning-making around performances and works, social practices of fans, and the diverse uses of music in daily life. Michael Broyles and other recent reviewers of Listening and Longing have rightly called me out on the clunkiness of the term, but I'm not sure how else to capture all that we do with music. Until our shared understanding of "reading" (or "listening" or "viewing") moves away from the narrow act of sensorily encountering a text, we are stuck with this sort of awkward explanation.

With a little pedantry, I'm sure that we can shift the tide! Try this line at your next party: "I just read the best book! Which, of course, included my enjoying the story, posting about it on Facebook, inadvertently repeating its phrasing in conversation, doodling an illustration of one of the characters while talking on phone, trying to re-flatten the cover after I dropped it, using it to hide a gift certificate I bought for my sister's birthday, and proudly displaying it on the shelf where I keep Absalom, Absalom! and Finnegan's Wake."

Graphic Texts, Then and Now

Over the past two years, I've been working as the editor for Music:Interview, a new series from Wesleyan University Press featuring books that creatively anthologize "the most provocative and resonant interviews by a significant figure in music." A project in the series I'm particularly excited about is Stephen Farina's Reel History: The Lost Archive of Juma Sultan and the Aboriginal Music Society. While the book introduces musician Juma Sultan and his performances with the Aboriginal Music Society from the 1960s and ‘70s, it is also an exciting experiment in form. It dynamically combines oral history, the graphic novel, audio recording, and film to narrate the story of Farina's own encounters with Juma Sultan and to make sense of Sultan's decaying but extraordinary archive of historical reel-to-reel tapes, 16 mm films, and posters from the heyday of black nationalist politics and avant garde jazz. Reel History is Wesleyan's first "digital-born" book--that is, it is available an e-book only--reading it was a new experience for me, since it invites a range of readerly engagement. One moment you are following Farina's story-telling in words, the next you encounter a visual montage (sequential panels evoking Sultan's body movements as he reminisces and laughs). Along the way, you can click on links that play clips of the music being discussed, or you can watch a silent movie of the AMS rehearsing. It is truly a book illustrated for readers in a digital age, used to moving between text, video, and audio with ease.

Coincidentally, I've been reading another older work, for a class I'm about to teach on social justice and the New Deal, that also experimented with illustration and narrative, albeit in a very different way: Lynd Ward's Vertigo. Ward was a printmaker who combined wood engraving and a strong commitment to social justice to create a series of "novels without words" in the 1930s. I had never heard of Lynd Ward until he was recommended to me by a friend, but his work is extraordinary, representing a kind of moving picture, with the "movement" created not by visual illusion or mechanical device--or even a layout of frames, typical of comics and graphic novels--but rather by a reader's own engagement with narrative flow. Each page holds one illustration, exquisitely-rendered: establishing scenes of city streets, characters in various settings, conversations, dreams, close-ups of faces and expressions. When taken together in sequence, they tell a complex story. In an earlier work, Wild Pilgrimage, Ward interestingly used different colors--red to indicate interior thought and black to indicate exterior action; in Vertigo, he dispensed with such cues, putting everything into the composition and sequence of the images. Sometimes, you don't know what's going on for several pages, but then with one expression or twist, it all becomes clear.

Finally, thanks to Andrew Sullivan's blog at the Daily Beast, I was made aware that the Folio Society is re-publishing William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) in the way that Faulkner originally intended, with different colored text indicating different time periods. The Sound and the Fury is a complex, layered book, with the same story told from multiple points of view and with abrupt shifts in narrative style and time period. Faulkner had originally hoped to use colored ink to help readers negotiate these shifts, but the publisher refused, so he had to rely on roman and italic type instead. Now, we can experience the book graphically in ways we could not in the original Random House editions.

I've been reading a lot about reading lately, but I have not come across scholarship that addresses the processes of reading a graphic text in the way that, say, Wolfgang Iser or Stanley Fish have addressed the more conventional word text, or art historians have made sense of looking at a painting. I'm fairly certain that this is due only to my ignorance, so I'd appreciate any recommendations for such criticism and theory in the comments. In the meantime, happy "reading," whatever that entails.

Summer is the Time for Reading

I'm never going to make it onto the Hot Guys Reading Books blog (fascinating concept in the history of reading, no?), but I am a guy who is presently engaged in reading books. Lots of them. During the academic year, while I deal with the non-stop demands of teaching, committee-work, and administration, I rarely have time to read. Still, every year, there are about a dozen or so new books on fans and audiences that I really must read, a situation that puts the pressure on me during my breaks from teaching to take them all out of the library. I rarely get through the whole pile, but with due diligence I do begin to acquaint myself with some of the latest interesting work in the field. Maybe there needs to be a Harried Professors Reading Books blog.

This summer, I've been trying to catch up with recently-published books on popular music by Will Hermes, Patti Smith, Kevin Fellezs, Claudio Benzecry, William Roy, John Street, Steven Feld, Kiri Miller, and Harry Belafonte. I've already reviewed Hermes' Love Goes to Buildings on Fire and will talk about some of the others, soon, on this blog.

Of course, while I've been focusing on music, I've been noticing a host of books on audience that have been cropping up in other fields. Just quickly, for example, here are a few books about ardent reading that I ardently wish to read:

Michael Millner, Fever Reading (University of New Hampshire Press, 2012)

"Drawing on a rich archive of scandal chronicles, pornography, medical journals, religious novels, and popular newspapers, as well as more canonical sources, Michael Millner examines the panics and paranoia associated with “bad reading” in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the Civil War. Weaving into his analysis a model of emotion recently developed in cognitive psychology, he provides the back-history to our present-day debates about “bad” reading and shows how these debates—both in the past and in the present—are in part about the shape of the public sphere itself."

Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Queequeg's Coffin (Duke University Press, 2012)

"The encounter between European and native peoples in the Americas is often portrayed as a conflict between literate civilization and illiterate savagery. That perception ignores the many indigenous forms of writing that were not alphabet-based, such as Mayan pictoglyphs, Iroquois wampum, Ojibwe birch-bark scrolls, and Incan quipus. Queequeg's Coffin offers a new definition of writing that comprehends the dazzling diversity of literature in the Americas before and after European arrivals. This groundbreaking study recovers previously overlooked moments of textual reciprocity in the colonial sphere, from a 1645 French-Haudenosaunee Peace Council to Herman Melville's youthful encounters with Polynesian hieroglyphics.

By recovering the literatures and textual practices that were indigenous to the Americas, Birgit Brander Rasmussen reimagines the colonial conflict as one organized by alternative but equally rich forms of literacy. From central Mexico to the northeastern shores of North America, in the Andes and across the American continents, indigenous peoples and European newcomers engaged each other in dialogues about ways of writing and recording knowledge. In Queequeg's Coffin, such exchanges become the foundation for a new kind of early American literary studies."

Barbara Hochman, Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011; recently won the 2012 DeLong Book History Prize from SHARP: The Society for Authorship, Reading, and Publishing)

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution explores a transformation in the cultural meaning of Stowe’s influential book by addressing changes in reading practices and a shift in widely shared cultural assumptions. These changes reshaped interpretive conventions and generated new meanings for Stowe’s text in the wake of the Civil War.

During the 1850s, men, women, and children avidly devoured Stowe’s novel. White adults wept and could not put the book down, neglecting work and other obligations to complete it. African Americans both celebrated and denounced the book. By the 1890s, readers understood Uncle Tom’s Cabin in new ways. Prefaces and retrospectives celebrated Stowe’s novel as a historical event that led directly to emancipation and national unity. Commentaries played down the evangelical and polemical messages of the book.

Illustrations and children’s editions projected images of entertaining and devoted servants into an open-ended future. In the course of the 1890s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became both a more viciously racialized book than it had been and a less compelling one. White readers no longer consumed the book at one sitting; Uncle Tom’s Cabin was now more widely known than read. However, in the growing silence surrounding slavery at the turn of the century, Stowe’s book became an increasingly important source of ideas, facts, and images that the children of ex-slaves and other free-black readers could use to make sense of their position in U.S. culture."

Reading about Reading

Several books have been lurking in the background of my far-too-busy days lately, including Martyn Lyons's Books: A Living History and Nathaniel Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick. Lyons offers students of the history of the book a lavishly illustrated tour of the books and reading across cultures and history, from the differences between writing surfaces like papyrus, parchment, and bamboo, to book collecting and the birth of libraries, to the modern digitization of reading. While the book does not offer anything particularly new for students of book history, there are lots of great tidbits (I especially enjoyed his interpretations of the transition of scrolls to codexes and the evolution of copyright). And it is, overall, an engaging argument for the extraordinary and enduring influence of books as a technology of knowledge. While reading it, I kept remembering the times when, as a boy, visiting my grandparents, I would sit for hours while the adults talked, reading their 1970 set of the World Book Encyclopedia. Like the magazine-like glossy pages and color layout of the World Book (different than, say, the rather austere black and white text of Collier's Encyclopedia), Books: A Living History has an excitingly wide historical scope, invites you to linger over exquisite visual photography, and offers writing that is brief but fascinatingly suggestive in its potential linkages. You get the sense that Lyons could tell you much more, if he and you were to, say, meet over a pint. Most of all, it makes you yearn for an uninterrupted afternoon in the library.

Nathaniel Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick is a slim but delightful celebration of Melville's classic. Having read Moby-Dick too many times to count (it seemed to be on every American Studies syllabus when I was in college), I wasn't sure what Philbrick could possibly tell me, but I was pleasantly surprised. This is not so much a book about Philbrick's love for Moby-Dick, as for his love of reading the book, something he views not as a one-time affair but a regular ritual. Moby-Dick is not an easy book to move through, on the whole, something Philbrick himself admits, and educators have (much as they have done with Shakespeare) gone on a little too long about how Melville is good for you. Especially galling to Philbrick is the tendency to find symbolism in the book: "The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I...He is a thing of blubber, blood, muscle, and bone--a creation of the natural world that transcends any fiction....So don't fall into the Ahab trap of seeing Moby Dick as a stand-in for some paltry human complaint. In the end he is just a huge, battle-scarred albino sperm whale, and that is more than enough." (This reminded me, in particular, of a professor I had at Cornell, Walter Slatoff, who, in the heyday of postmodernism, daringly argued that he would treat characters, in the novels we read, as people). At any rate, Philbrick argues that, if you spend time with the book, and you open yourself up to its meandering philosophizing, poetry, humor, and "genial stoicism in the fact of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life," it may just reach deeply into you and fundamentally change how you see the world: “Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.” This is precisely what fans say in their becoming-a-fan stories: they don't understand or relate to an artist, and, at the behest of friends, half-heartedly try to engage but fail. Then, one day, they read or listen or look one more time, and what they encounter strikes them unexpectedly in a new and profound way. From then on, the artist and his/her work become not a piece of entertainment but a source of affirmation, meaning, and efficacy. Philbrick likewise urges us to visit Moby-Dick again and again, even when it seems daunting: "Moby-Dick is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase, will do. The important thing is to spend some time with the novel, to listen as you read, to feel the prose adapt to the various voices that flowed through Melville during the book's composition, like intermittent ghosts with something urgent and essential to say." Even if you aren't ready for such a relationship with Melville, you have to envy Philbrick's genuine and abiding enthusiasm.

Finally, as a quick and related addendum, I just want to mention Maria Popova's recent discussion, on Brainpickings, of a very cool 1933 Booklover's Map of Literary Geography. I don't have more to add, except that I want a map like this in my office.

The Swerve: A History of Passionate Reading

I just finished reading Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, something that I accomplished in a day. I rarely find myself so enthralled with a nonfiction book that I can't stop reading it, but this instance was even more remarkable since the The Swerve is itself about avid reading. On one level, it narrates the story of a former papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, whose passion for ancient texts led him to a German monastery in 1417 and to the discovery of a long-lost poem, On the Nature of Things, by the Roman philosopher Lucretius. The carefully-copied lines asserted Epicurean ideas with such eloquence and daring that--despite its challenge to fundamental precepts of Christianity--Bracciolini sought to make it known again to the world.

At another level, it is about Greenblatt's own fascination with Lucretius. Greenblatt's preface to The Swerve is an eloquent testament to the power of a text to strike, thrill, and infiltrate one's daily life. As he explained: "It was not Lucretius' exquisite language to which I was responding. Later I worked through De rerum natura in its original Latin hexameters, and I came to understand something of its rich verbal texture, its subtle rhythms, and the cunning precision and poignancy of its imagery, but my first encounter was in Martin Ferguson Smith's workmanlike English prose...No, it was something else that reached me, something that lived and moved within the sentences for more than 200 densely packed pages"(2).

Some have cited Greenblatt's engaging analysis of Epicureanism and its influence on Enlightenment thinking, but, for me, what is most significant are Greenblatt's insights into the history of ardent audiences. Most importantly, Greenblatt argues that for Bracciolini to be so passionate about books in the early 1400s was strange: "To all but a handful of people in Germany, this quest, had Poggio tried to articulate it, would have seemed weird"(18). Books were valued mostly in monasteries in the 15th century; all monks had to know how to read and were expected to engage in both "prayerful reading" and manual labor as part of their vocation. This institutionalization of reading was good for the survival of ancient texts; in order to read, the monks had to have books, and they learned to carefully reproduce texts through copying. However, it was not necessarily a joyful or exciting affair--reading and copying were, for most, compulsory chores.

Even more significant than Bracciolini's strange avidity for books was the fact that he was not alone. Greenblatt cites a small but earnest community of humanists in Italy that were devoted to uncovering and collecting lost classics. "Italians had been obsessed with book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself around 1330 by piecing together Livy's monumental History of Rome and finding forgotten masterpieces by Cicero, Propertius, and others." (23) Petrarch, Greenblatt suggests, set the model for Bracciolini, by investing "this search with a new, almost erotic urgency and pleasure, superior to all other treasure seeking" (119). Greenblatt quotes Petrarch's own assessment: "Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy."

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that this love of books among humanists in 15th century Italy was actually an emulation of the intellectual culture of the ancient world, in which, "it became increasingly fashionable for wealthy Romans to amass large private libraries in their town houses and country villas...whether on the banks of the Rhone in Gaul or near the grove and Temple of Daphne in the province of Syria, on the island of Cos, near Rhodes, or in Dyrrhkhion in what is now Albania, the houses of cultivated men and women had rooms set aside for quiet reading." Even more remarkable, Greenblatt states that in the first century CE, the first reader-fans emerge: "At the games in the Colosseum one day, the historian Tacitus had a conversation on literature with a perfect stranger who turned out to have read his works. Culture was no longer located in close-knit circles of friends and acquaintances; Tacitus was encountering his 'public' in the form of someone who had bought his book at a stall in the Forum or read it in a library" (60-63). Based on Robert Darnton's work on Jean-Jaques Rousseau's public readership (See "Readers Respond to Rousseau" in The Great Cat Massacre), I had always associated this sort of public reader-author relationship with changing social and urban contexts of the 18th century, but this is a tantalizing revision.

There are other great tidbits in The Swerve about book hunting and collecting, about the circulation of ideas in Renaissance society, and about those whose lives were deeply shaped by the recovery and maintenance of a lost, seemingly better, past. In the end, The Swerve is really about a fan-like love of learning, from Lucretious in the first century BCE, to Bracciolini in in the early 15th century, to Greenblatt today. Their enthusiastic encounters with texts, together with one's own potentially enthusiastic reading, have the power to accumulate--or resonate together--to form an extended community of reception.

Romantic Fandom

Before the holiday, I heard from Professor Eric Eisner of George Mason University, who shared that he had edited a volume of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, on "Romantic Fandom," in April 2011. I am not very well-acquainted with literary studies these days (and especially not British Lit.), so I was delighted to check it out. Clearly there are exciting things happening in the study of Romanticism--between this and Judith Pascoe's book on Sarah Siddons, I now see the Romantic Era as a key moment in the history of audiences. Much as the "market revolution" in the United States during the 1830s and 1840s changed the very nature of cultural consumption and participation, Eisner writes that, in England, the Romantic period of the late 18th century

...saw the popularization of recognizable "fan practices," spurred by the growth of consumer culture and the development of a mass audience for culture generally. Admirers collected autographs, souvenirs, portraits and relics of celebrity writers, artists, performers, military heroes, and athletes; snapped up mementos associated with beloved plays or books or music; visited the homes and haunts of celebrities; pored over gossip-filled periodicals and newspaper notices; imitated celebrities’ fashion statements; fantasized about becoming friends or lovers with celebrities; wrote fan mail and formed communities of like-minded aficionados.

And while I’ve emphasized the connections between modern and historical fans in this blog, these essays advocate caution. As Eisner explains in his introduction, “If these essays contest literary criticism’s abjection of the fan as ‘naïve, obsessive, desirous, and dangerously predatory’ (Watson), they also resist simply celebrating the fan or identifying Romantic-era readerly desire with our own…Fandom is always historically situated, always tied to specific and shifting cultural as well as individual situations.”

The essays are consistently excellent, examining everything from the literary tourism of Lady Frances Shelley to the surprising mania in the 1820s for Pierce Egan’s Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, with other contributions by Nicola J. Watson, Clara Tuite, Mark Schoenfield, and David A. Brewer. I have taken note!

Literary Pilgrimage

I see that University of Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill has discovered fandom in his new book, Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, and Bronte's Grave, which was the subject of a recent profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education's PageView blog. His discomfort with readers who make pilgrimages to author-related sites is interesting; if anything, it shows why critics and fans, reading the same books, often exist in completely different universes.

I shouldn't show him, I guess, the photo of me, during a trip to New Orleans in 1989, casually reading a newspaper outside the French Quarter residence of William Faulkner (where he began his career as a writer):

Perhaps, however, my family will sympathize with Goldhill's skepticism. When I suggested a vacation trip to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, this summer, so we could visit the home of Herman Melville, they laughed, and then, with some alarm, asked if I was serious. I was.

Literary tourism is a big business, big enough to get a featured in O Magazine articles like "5 Legendary Writers' Homes." It has also been a hot topic in literary studies, where it is generally equated with superficiality and commercialism, the equivalent of taking a pre-packaged bus tour of a city rather than living in a neighborhood and learning the language. Literary pilgrimage has been the subject of satiric novels (like Brocke Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England), as well as condemnatory papers about the public's naive obsession with authenticity or the emotional reality of texts (discussed previously in a Chronicle review, "You've Read the Book, Now Take a Look!," from 2009). Tourism, more generally, has been a hot topic in cultural studies for much of the last decade, the subject of journals like Tourist Studies, or research collectives like UC Berkeley's Tourism Studies Working Group, and also the subject of books in anthropology, literature, history, and music, from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (U. California Press, 1998) to Stephen A. King's I'm Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).

From the standpoint of fans, visiting sites associated with various performers, works, or characters is a key element of how they decode works, aesthetize their lives, and shape cultural experience. As far as I can tell, however, work in fan studies has not had any explicit impact on the study of tourism. It might be time to connect that gap by holding some kind of meeting that will enable a sharing of perspectives from anthropology, history, literature, media studies, and religion on fandom and the power of place. Sounds like a good panel, at least, no?

E-reading

Last year, in a seminar, one of my students was using her iPhone while we were discussing Jim Deetz's In Small Things Now Forgotten. I asked her to put the phone away, since class had begun and we were engaged in discussion. But she protested, indicating that she was engaged--the text had been downloaded to her phone, and she was merely following along with the passage I had asked everyone to turn to!

We certainly live in a new world of "reading." I have no moral or philosophical objection to e-books, the digital humanities, etc. In fact, I see the incredible potential of such technologies for creating and maintaining knowledge and fostering new kinds of educational, research, and business. But I have to say that, personally, I still prefer the "hard" form of a book. Flipping pages is an economical and pleasurable means of encountering text that involves not only a particular kind of spatial understanding but also involves familiar sounds (the swish of a turning page), gestures (holding a book in different stances), and materials (glue, cardboard, pulp). I particularly like each book's design identity, implying an intellectual world. Books as singular objects--with form, color, and weight; that I can carry around, have nearby, and consult--supports my understanding of them as a unique and singular utterances of fellow human beings. I fully understand the convenience of having one's entire library in a tablet device, but at the same time, I resist the idea of making "my library" a basic unit of value, like my stock portfolio. I want my library to be chaotic, more about all the amazing ideas and debates in the world to which I often return, puzzled, curious, and seeking connection. I'd rather not have my library conveniently display my investments but rather function as an imperfectly-wrought sanctuary that I can enter for the purpose of discovery, surprise, and encounter.

At any rate, there have been many writers, readers, and critics out there who have compared old and e-books over the past several years. JBMonco had a nice comparison of experiencing Moby Dick in book and e-book back in 2009, for instance. Or author Margaret Atwood:

This is a nice chart from The Daily Beast that compares the economics of the two forms. And now researchers are starting to get in on the debate, studying reading on different devices (including this study from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany). The findings are not surprising. It appears that reading is not simply a cognitive action of information retrieval or even communication, but also involves wider and more complex frameworks of preference, habit, and ritual. That's why thinking about reading has become so significant. Reading is undergoing changes, but those changes are cultural as much as behaviorial.

In the end, it seems to me that to properly assess "what's the best way to read--book or ebook?", we need to move beyond just the mechanics of the behavior to the institutions and ideologies that define reading for us and make it personally and socially meaningful. How are those changing? Are schools, government agencies, or companies requiring the use of ebooks and why or why not? What does it mean to advocate for older forms of print media through newer forms of communication like blogs or YouTube? If the competition between forms continues, will simply making the choice to read a book rather than an ebook become a form of antiquarianism, curmudgeonliness, or rebellion?

Some Fan Studies Before "Fan Studies"

In the past, I've written about some of the classics of fan studies. In this post, I want to briefly highlight a few books that do not explicitly address fandom but nevertheless deserve mention as works of scholarship that have addressed the subject of devoted or enthusiastic audiences. For me, these works all had to do with reading; in the late 1980s, I was a newly-graduated English major, growing tired of great authors and works (I think I had read Moby Dick five times at that point), and becoming more and more interested in marginal aspects of literary studies: the physical nature of books, the business of publishing, and, especially, the history of readers. To my astonishment, I found a number of fairly recent works on those subject. I wasn't studying fandom when I first encountered these books, but once I did start to think about fans a bit later, in the context of popular music, the book's arguments and stories came back to me, providing a rush of intriguing parallels, echoes, and connections. Rousseau readers and Springsteen fans, for example, separated by centuries, seemed to be thinking in similar ways--how could that be? It's something I'm still thinking about twenty years later.

Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity" (1984). This essay appeared in Darnton's collection on French cultural history, The Great Cat Massacre. Drawing on a collection of letters between Jean Ranson, a French merchant book collector, and a Swiss publisher, Darnton unearthed Ranson's fascination with the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Ranson called "L'ami Jean-Jacques" (my friend, Jean-Jacques) even though, as Darnton noted, he "had never met" Rousseau and could only know him through the printed word. This relationship was the set-up for an amazing analysis of what Darnton calls "Rousseauistic reading," a new way of understanding the world of a novel as an intimate representation of an author's emotional being. In some of the funniest passages, Darnton talked about Rousseau's alarm about the new type of readers he created; apparently Rousseau had to install a trap door in his home to escape the many admirers who sought him out for heart-to-heart chats and expressions of gratitude after reading books like La Nouvelle Heloise. In the described shift toward a Romantic "sharing of selfhood," I started to see patterns that pre-modelled modern fans' relationships to media celebrities.

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984). Susan Stewart's On Longing was an extraordinary work of cultural theory, rooted in literary studies but also ranging outward to include giant myths, doll houses, and book collectors. For me, it was one of the first theoretical works I had encountered about the sometimes intense relationships that people develop with objects and performances. No one I knew was writing about that particular kind of desire in 1984, and her arguments about the ways in which we make sense of the world around us by sorting our experiences and manipulating time and space through narrative gave me a stronger sense of the existential gravity behind reading: it was about much more than mere entertainment or cultural refinement. Stewart's final essay on collecting directly addressed what I later recognized as a primary fan practice. She showed how collectors variously layer objects with complex narratives of authenticity, nostalgia, and the self. The book's post-structuralist language and Lacanian references were, at first, a bit impenetrable for me, but Stewart, a poet, still had a knack for thought-provoking declarations: "The printed text is cinematic before the invention of cinema." "Although reading may give form to time, it does not count in time; it leaves no trace; its product is invisible." "The souvenir must be removed from its context in order to serve as a trace of it, but it must also be restored through narrative and/or reverie." I still go back to it.

Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984). In one of my first jobs (1985-86 or so), I worked at Barnes & Noble, where I was in charge of, among other things, shelving the new series arrivals in the romance section and shipping older, unsold editions back to the publishers. I distinctly remember the customers who came into the store regularly to buy romance books and who seemed to have a deep knowledge of the nuances between Harlequin lines and other competing series. I wanted to talk to these customers more about their obvious passion for books and reading, but it was too awkward for me. Radway did. Published in 1984, Radway's pioneering research featured interviews with a group of women romance readers. Like Stewart's work, Radway was, at one level, rescuing a denigrated form of popular culture by showing the ways in which it facilitated meaning-making in everyday life; as a feminist, her goal was to find out how such books helped women to negotiate patriarchal society. There were problems with the research, at least in terms of ethnographic practice (Radway was ultimately unwilling to take the women's articulation of their own lives at face value, asserting their patriarchal oppression and then wrestling with how to interpret romance reading in light of that), but her work nevertheless showed me how fieldwork--typical for anthropology abroad rather than at home--might serve as a legitimate method in the investigation of popular culture fandom. I taught this book for many years in a seminar on audience studies, and it remains influential.

Cathy N. Davidson, "The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple" (1989). This essay, which appeared in a collection edited by Davidson called Reading in America. I could talk about Davidson's equally compelling Revolution and the Word (1984), which more broadly addressed the power of novel-reading in the new republic, but this essay was one of the first that I had encountered that analyzed, head-on, the ways in which a single novel might change the lives of ordinary readers. The novel was Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, a cautionary tale of a young woman's fall from virtue, and one of early America's bestsellers. Davidson pointed out that readers developed such intensely emotional reactions to the story and the character of Charlotte that they believed that the sensational story was true. Someone even placed a tombstone for Charlotte in the churchyard of New York City's Trinity Church, signifying readers' blurring of the lines between fiction and reality, and by the 1850s, weeping readers (men and women, working and middle-class) regularly made pilgrimages to the churchyard to pay their respects. Besides suggesting the ways in which readers worked to sustain the world of a narrative outside of their encounters with that narrative (much as music or theater fans stay in "audience" mode long after performances are over), the notion of pilgrimage really resonated with me. I knew fans for Springsteen who did the same thing as Charlotte Temple readers, imbuing real places with new layers of meaning known only to them.

Pleasures of Reading

I just finished Alan Jacobs's new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. It has been getting some press attention lately, with a review in the Wall Street Journal, as well as an adaptation in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

I have to admit that I was a little worried about the title, at first glance. While Jacobs is decidely not a member of the "turn off your computer" camp (or their predecessors, the "turn off your TV" crowd), who assume a negative causal relationship between media engagement and the quality of one's reading, he does point to the ways in which the the obligations of educated refinement (promoted especially in academia), as well as the information triaging necessitated by the hyper-culture of social media, create a great deal of anxiety about sustained, deep, and enthusiastic reading. We feel we should get lost in a book, but we can't. When we do, it feels a little strange. 

First, kudos to Jacobs for trying to capture the pleasures of reading (even though he admits that it is truly impossible to convey what a "page-turner" feels like). I certainly love books in they ways that Jacobs describes and can attest to the ways in which chance encounters with individual works have changed my life. I also appreciate the ways in which he attempts to situate that joy in the context of contemporary culture, assuaging lack of confidence about "reading properly" or about "reading deeply" by encouraging "reading at whim," that is, to fully embrace the experiences of reading that feel right, no matter the dictates of taste or the competing demands on one's attention. As he writes, "The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions" (16).

This is, as he suggests, not so much the function of a "good book" itself, but rather of one's general approach to the ecstatic potential of any encounter with a book. That is, we read deeply when we accept, or, at least, leave ourselves open to the premise that "books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self" (116). While Jacobs tends to talk about fandom as a kind of extremism, I'd suggest that this approach to books more accurately describes fandom as it is experienced: a recognition of a performer or performance (including "texts" of all kinds--books, movies, music, art, etc.) as having the ongoing potential to move, transform, connect, and otherwise wrest one from torpor. As Tia Denora put it, we engage in culture to "aesthetize ourselves." Fan engagement can sometimes appear aberrant (when fans embrace a work that is not canonical) and it can sometimes appear obsessive (when fans allegedly spend too much time engaging one work or author), but its mode of hopeful enthusiastic engagement is unabashedly catholic and deeply pleasurable, often facilitating a kind of lasting and meaningful learning that cannot be attained through other means.

Jacobs focuses a bit too much for my taste on quietude, on shutting down cultural "distraction," though I do recognize the need for many to carve out time for sustained reading. Rather than turning things off, I always encourage my students to simply treat books differently. I tell them, first, to understand reading as not simply a mechanical movement of eyes over a page, but rather as the development of a relationship, much like one you might develop with a person. "Reading," in fact, is always a complex and unique story of encounter, flirtation, acquaintance, and knowing. It's a little weird, but I ask students to carry their books around with them, place them nearby when they are not reading (on their drawing desks, at the dinner table, etc.), and, in Whitman-esque fashion, get to know them, even unopened, as daily companions and even as old friends. I hope, this, in turn, leads to a reformation in their minds of what a book is. When some complain that a book is "dry" or "boring," or even when they assert that a book is "exciting," I tell them that, in fact, it is their relationship to the book that is "dry" or "boring" or "exciting." Books are just books; their meaning and transformative power depend on how readers bring them to life. 

These are just some of my own techniques for keeping the pleasures of reading alive; on the whole, I think Jacobs and I are far more in sync than apart. Perhaps more so than Jacobs, I sense that all this might be futile: maybe the pleasures of sustained reading are indeed being erased and are likely to be lost to us in the future. But, really, I don't know. Like Jacobs--and, I think, teachers in general--I hopefully and defiantly try to keep it alive anyway. (The cliché of teacher-motivation is true: "If I can just reach one person....").

I wish you all absorbing and transformative reading.

Harmless Insanity: Bibliophilism v. Bibliomania

The excerpt below, from Henry Howard Harper's Booklovers, Bibliomaniacs, and Book Clubs (1904), is an early attempt at explaining what Joli Jensen, in 1990, called “fandom as pathology." I’m not sure the author succeeds in moving beyond the disease metaphors! Good point, at the end, though, about how some people, more than others, are apt to be labelled maniacal.

"It should be remembered that one possessing a fondness of books is not necessarily a bibliomaniac. There is as much difference between the inclinations and taste of a bibliophile and a bibliomaniac as between a slight cold and the advanced stages of consumption. Some one has said that 'to call a bibliophile a bibliomaniac is to conduct a lover, languishing for his maiden’s smile, to an asylum for the demented, and to shut him up in the ward for the incurables.' Bilbio relates to books, and mania is synonymous with madness, insanity, violent derangement, mental aberration, etc. A bibliomaniac, therefore, might properly be called an insane or crazy bibliophile. It is, however, a harmless insanity, and even in its worst stages it injures no one. Rational treatment may cure a bibliomaniac and bring him (or her) back into the congenial folds of bibliophilism, unless, perchance, the victim has passed beyond the curative stages into the vast and dreamy realms of extra-illustrating, or 'grangerizing.' People usually have a horror of insane persons, and one might well beware of indulging a taste for books, if there were any reasonable probability that this would lead to mental derangement. There could be furniture-maniacs, rug-maniacs, and china-maniacs, but people do not generally hesitate to purchase furniture, rugs, and china for fear of going crazy on the subject, and no more reason is there why rational persons should hesitate to make a collection of good books for a library, for fear of being called bibliomaniacs. In Sesame and Lilies Ruskin says: 'If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad—a bibliomaniac. But you never call one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books.'"

Banking Reading

Two online sites to note about historical research on reading are the Reading Experience Database and the “A Place of Reading” Exhibit.

The Reading Experience Database (RED), begun in 1996, is extraordinary—an accumulated collection of descriptions of reading over centuries, from a variety of English language sources (mostly from autobiographies and literature). It is one of the go-to places for learning more about the changing practices of reading.

“A Place of Reading” is a wide-ranging overview of reading in early America, including an image bank of people reading in various private and public spaces. The bank is less expansive than the RED but nevertheless interesting; while iconographic research has somewhat of a hold in music studies, it has not had wide application in literary studies (Garrett Stewart’s The Look of Reading being a notable exception).

It would be great to see more collections of evidence on listening, dancing, viewing, and other audience behaviors about which we know very little historically.