Friday, February 18, 2005

On being a bookslut in need of a hot sweaty affair

I have trouble reading.

Which isn't to say I can't read. I'm literate. When I publish this post, I'll be able to pick out the sense from the typos and grammatical inconsistencies, some of which I might go back and fix. Functionally speaking, there's nothing wrong with the systems of my body that are required for reading. I'm not blind. My hands can turn pages. I have a lap to place hardcover books on and I have the upper body strength to hold a paperback up to the good light. I am quite capable.

The problem is, I don't read. I suspect it's a combination of a lack of time (once out of work, I go home to write most days, which can chew up several hours itself) and a lack of that true excitement that got me into reading in the first place (with what few hours are left after all of the above's done, how bad do I really want to do more things that require thinking?) And while I've had reprieves along the way--the list of books to the right was mostly consumed during the first couple weeks of this year--they've mostly come at the expense of writing time. The two shouldn't be so incompatible--after all, one of the most common pieces of advice I've seen published writers give to beginning writers is to read everything. But spending hours on the mental life is like trying to buy one toy for two children: someone's going to wind up with a bloody nose and tears.

So I think part of why I started this blog was to try to remedy the situation by giving something to the net while forcing myself to give something to me: a literary web-forum, a place where I could maybe talk about books that I might convince myself to read once I was creating a conversation around them. See, I suffer from a sort of information overload (1), and so much of the information I try to consume in any given day from the net points towards the net as a great place for something I've been sort of thinking of as "geek chic nouveau" culture and not much else. (2) My life's felt like it's been sort of drowned in so much techy wizz-bang alternate-copyright programming-mashup uber-tomorrow culture conversation, that it's sort of started to feel like, you know, maybe, it was everybody else who forgot to read books. Not just me.

Luckily for me, though, the net isn't a box you can fill, and there really are other conversations going on out there. But more luckily for me, there's already people out there doing the work I was thinking about doing, which is kind of sad in that it means I still have to figure out what the hell to do with this blog now that I don't have to dedicate it to saving the world from choking to death on links about expensive toys I can't afford, but really great for me in that, hey, thank god someone else is doing it, because I don't have the time for it. (3)

How to find that sub-net-culture in which paper is still something worth touching and words aren't necessarily used in non-arguable but-argued-anyways declarative sentences? You can do like I did and Google for "literature weblog" or I can save you the trouble and point you at some pretty cool portals:

Maud Newton: Blog
The Elegant Variation

The "links" page alone on Maud Newton's blog could, were it printed out, probably fill enough paper to help start a campfire in a rainstorm, and it looks just as promising for keeping the sore mind warm through the cold winter of nerd-chic nouveau. But the truest compliment I can offer these pages is that reading them, even if only occasionally, has gotten me almost excited enough about reading again to maybe put down the video games and naps for a while and maybe try thinking a little bit more each day. If the brain's a muscle then I guess these blogs are my new fitness coaches. I just hope I start listening to their shouts of Drop down and gimme 50 pages!

2 comments:

Brandon said...

i've been trying for the last two months to get through maud's links. i think once i got to the Onion though i gave up...

Darby M. Dixon III said...

I haven't even seriously started yet. I just kind of look at the list a lot, the way I kind of sometimes look at the snow outside, and nod to myself, and recognize it, and then kind of stop thinking for a while.