A significant reason behind your fondness for reading
relates to your perception of the relationship between the reader and the
writer. On it’s face, the relationship
is pretty simple: Writer works at
concocting a story, pursues it through a number of drafts, then sends it off
for publication. Reader sees the story, reads enough to determine that he’s
willing to see it through to the end, then does so.
You could tweak this formula somewhat with nonfiction,
whether a news story, an instruction manual, an op-ed piece, even—here’s the
tricky part—a textbook. This last is
tricky because it opens the door for committees associated with adaption for
courses, in other words, men and women who have power over what we are taught,
which is to say what we think we are learning.
Further, at certain levels, what power does the student
have. The student can scarcely refuse to
read the book. Best-case scenario is
when the student objects to what is published in the textbook, finds
contradicting or supplementary sources, then forms her opinions
accordingly. How often does education,
particularly at the lower levels, work that way.
Thus this short cut to your theory those Marxist principals
can apply to reading if there is an overdone cultural pressure applied to the
reader.
You’ve reached the point where your reasons for reading
something are pretty much based on your taste and curiosity as opposed to
need. You are in fact in a situation of
power to the extent that you can and do assign reading for classes, holding the
students responsible for a response to the contents of the reading.
In one notable case during the last quarter, one of your
favorite novels was on the reading list.
One of your students resented it, found it scattered, distracting, and
ineffective. You did not agree with her
vision of the novel but you were pleased by the strength of her distaste, and
for the way she was able to articulate the things she found lacking. One major thing was the fact that all the
chapters seemed like individual short stories.
You not only felt this to be true, you are also quite fond of short
stories. Your student did well for
disagreeing with you in such articulate and vivid fashion, and was graded
accordingly but you do not think she learned from the experience yet, thus the
assignment of the book, the causing her to read it, was somewhat of a tyranny
to her; she was being exploited in a sense as Marx equated the exploitation of
workers.
You like reading because of the choice. In the same way, you like writing because
your choice of what to write is mediated, even dictated by your
enthusiasm. You have various committees
to go through before your work reaches publication, but the most important of
all of these committees are the ones resident within you, composed of aspects
of you that pull a project together, assess it, edit it, allow it to go forth
to the point where it can be seen by others.
Even when the work is in the hands of others, it will have
reached there because what you did satisfied them enough to consider its
potentials. If and when it is published,
it will experience its additional fate on the basis of what complete strangers
think about it. You are still the winner
because you brought it to the closest point of your dream for it; you in effect
had the opportunity to argue it into congruence with the image you first had of
it.
Your own reading is yet another matter. You follow the whim lines of curiosity. When a reading project becomes unpleasant for
you, there is nothing more in store for the relationship between you and it.
Pleasure in reading for you often means being caught up in a
situation or locale you’d never have thought to enter. Some of this is recognition that you enjoy
being seduced into reading something you might not have read. It also means that if you chose something
because of your fondness for, say, the author, or the genre, there is no
guarantee you will stay to the end; you may well begin to suspect this is
something you will put down without having to return to it.
Nice to think of these two areas, reading and writing in the
same critical way. Makes you think of
the times you speak of writing the way you talk and talking the way you write,
bringing those two means of expression into congruence. This is a good discipline to hold in mind
because of your tendency to get formal in tone and somewhat longer in sentence
than most readers find comfortable.
If you can write for the same reasons you read, then turn
the process to read looking for the things you seek when you write, both
activities will have the potential to crackle with excitement and
intensity. Not bad qualities for your
reading or your writing to embrace.
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