Via A Piece of Monologue: Thomas Bernhard, from his autobiography, Gathering Evidence:
For long periods I live in isolation, isolated both in mind and in body … Subject to every vagary of my own nature and of the universe — whatever it is — I can get through life only with the help of a precise daily routine. I am able to exist only by dint of standing up to myself — in fact, of consistently opposing myself. When I am writing I read nothing, and when I am reading I write nothing. For long periods I read and write nothing, finding both equally repugnant.
And:
There are long periods when I detest both reading and writing, and then I fall prey to inactivity, which means brooding obsessively on my extremely personal plight, both as an object of curiosity and as a confirmation of everything I am today, of what I have become over the years in circumstances which are as routine as they are unnatural, artificial, and indeed perverse.
Speaking of a thousand things: As of last week, it grieves me to say, our book collection has finally broken a thousand. The tally as of this writing is one thousand and three. Some are hers, some are mine, some are ours. Regarding the mine-and-ours: Don’t ask me how many of them I’ve read or will read or will even ever crack open and flip through in search of something, I beg you. Don’t ask me how well I remember or understand the ones I have read. Just don’t go there. The answers will reflect poorly on all involved. The shame of the high books-bought-to-books-read ratio is of course comfortingly widespread among us of the book-nerd persuasion. Let’s just round down and say I haven’t read any of them. I don’t want to read them. I just want them around. I require them in my home. And I must have more.
Forgot to mention this: Back in November, I’m sitting in the customer area at a local auto garage, reading, waiting while my car gets an oil change. A customer guy who has been chatting with one of the teenage mechanics sits down on the waiting-area couch with me and starts looking through the magazines on the table in front of us.
“What’s with all the chick magazines?” he calls over to the mechanic. The magazines on the table do in fact seem to be nothing but glossy women’s titles.
The mechanic looks up and explains: “Most guys don’t read.” He adds: “And if we put out any good magazines, they take them.”
Vox populi. We’ll just file that one under the Department of Surprises No One. Though I do feel a little self-conscious that I’m sitting right there reading Lapham’s Quarterly. The two fellows are nice enough not to notice. (At least it was Medicine.)
From the Department of The Story Of My Life: Via Boing Boing, the opening bit of Julian Gough’s literary-bailout satire piece in the NYT (also here):
As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading. This simply put too many families into books they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with five million Americans now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place.
The part of my brain that enables me to finish reading books is broken. As of recently. Not sure I can bring myself to say that I have become a chronic book-abandoner, but more like I keep buying and beginning new books while still partway through several others, which others I then grow reluctant to pick back up, unable to decide on any one that I’m in the mood to chip away at. (Might the part of the brain in question be, you know, my attention span?) I am told this promiscuous non-finisher habit is a totally normal condition for most bookish types (i.e. the Voracious Readers who simply Cannot! Stop! Reading! O calamity!) but for me this plate-spinning act is sort of new and it gives me a clammy feeling, the suspicion that I have become, or have long been, an egregious readerly flake-o-tron. On some gooey wide-eyed English-majory level I do want to read them all and finish them all but I take one look at these hillocks of god damn books multiplying like mushrooms, monopolizing coffeetable and nightstand, desk and floor, flocks of bookmarks accusingly sticking out of their middles — I take one look and something knocks me down and hauls me back to the stupid computer where I plug in again and keep skimming the bottomless well of blogs and feeds and videos and news and all that other wonderful unreading material. O calamity. Mike Patton, monologuing in Faith No More’s “RV”: Would anyone tell me if I was gettin’ stupider?
Forget forgetting a book. What if you’ve read a book and remember it fine but just don’t understand it? Is that the same as never having read it? I remember a lot of books I read in college that I wouldn’t say I really read. Out of college too.
Today: I open Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books to this:
19. I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
which makes me think of 1) this bit from Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross that I recall and mull over (and attempt to recite) last Thursday evening, on a full stomach, while washing dishes with my brother after Thanksgiving dinner at our parents’ place:
A great meal fades in reflection. Everything else gains. You know why? ‘Cause it’s only food. This shit we eat, it keeps us going. But it’s only food.
and 2) this thing Tom Stoppard says in the recent NY Times Magazine’s profile of him:
One of the questions that haunts me — it’s a question for philosophers and brain science — is, if you’ve forgotten a book, is that the same as never having read it?
