Metareading; Or, Against the Potholes
Followers of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” reviews column in The Believer (also collected in his Polysyllabic Spree volumes) know he can combine the promiscuous literary taste of a grad student turned loose in a used bookstore with a platinum Visa card, with an expansive pop-culture enthusiasm. His reviews can make even the most hard-core realist consider checking out a metafictional novella framed around the music of the Smiths, say, or just re-reading Dickens:
Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where…Go on, young writer – treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! (May 2004)
Hornby suits the McSweeney/Believer moment perfectly, though readers of High Fidelity or his more recent A Long Way Down will suspect that he was McSweeney’s way before McSweeney’s was cool, or could pay him for a regular gig, for that matter.
Anyway, the other excellent (and as far as I know, unique) thing about the column is that each installment begins with lists of books Hornby has bought and books he’s read since the last issue. Some of the “bought” books also make it onto the “read” list, but usually the former outnumber the latter.
Listmaking is a stylistic tic in the McSweeney’s universe (and the most primitive form of literacy, according to certain scholars). But in Hornby’s column it introduces a nice bit of critical honesty that makes it a little easier for an overwhelmed reader like me to admit that her own current backlog reaches back to approximately 1998.
I do read quite a few books, of course; they’re still the basic tools of the academic trade. I just don’t get through enough of them as soon as I’d like, an unhappy occupational hazard. So if I want to keep up with the big cultural conversation out there I have to depend on reviews. Not those spiritless verdicts in the back pages of the daily paper, sniffy snapshots in Slate, or two-minute packages by earnest-sounding literature profs on NPR. I mean big proper review essays that sweep across the life, the oeuvre, and the significance before settling in for a leisurely recap and assessment of the latest work. For those of us confronting Hummer-sized potholes along our various intellectual highways, reading a good review is like finding a brand-new stretch of Interstate.
So as the blog develops I’d like to take Hornby’s gambit one move further and explore the outer reaches of metareading* — by which I mean reading about reading, or reading writing about writing – as a strategy for filling those potholes. My favorite sources include the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the occasional Believer, the arts columns in New Republic and essays in Harper’s. Yes, all print. I’d like to find good online sources; some reviews in Salon come close, but the visual noise tends to drive me off. So far, long-form criticism doesn’t seem to have moved very comfortably to the screen.
Hm. Screens.
I recall reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 circa 1972, in an “experimental” undergraduate literature class at UT Austin. We met in a soundproofed multimedia classroom pod-in-the-round appended to the undergraduate library that resembled the set of a Kubrick film. The instructor, a disembodied voice emanating from behind a massive, walnut-veneered control panel, would dim the lights to project images and film clips onto multiple screens simultaneously, making it nearly impossible to follow along in the text or take notes. Pedagogy-by-vibe, maybe.
On the plus side, what I took away from this experience was that the main character of Crying was named Oedipa Maas. Also that the book was short. Still, on balance I’ve learned more about Oedipa and her creator in the last month from reviews of Against the Day in NYRB and TLS than from a whole semester in the pod.
More as it happens.
*NB: My usage of the word “metareading” should not be confused with the vastly more sophisticated concept discussed by Patrick Bazin in The Future of the Book, an outstanding collection edited by Geof Nunberg in 1996. With apologies to Prof. Bazin…
Add comment January 28th, 2007