Do the reading
On hitting the stacks; also, hits du jour
On needing to get in (reading) shape
Is it serendipitous to discover a fruitful conversation among the books and essays one might be reading? I half-suspect it’s inevitable.
Let me make the inevitability argument: I probably read things I’m interested in. Most of the things I read, therefore, fall into categories under the general heading Topics That Interest Me. If I get really into in dog fashion, for example, and if I then pick up/click on anything I can find about dog fashion, an oblivious version of me might go, “Weird how everybody’s writing about dog fashion.”1
A further argument for inevitability: Topics come up. People write about them and respond to other people’s writing about them. An honest-to-goodness conversation is actually occurring. Unlike English lit papers for which you “place two pieces of writing in conversation with one another,” the authors of which may have lived three centuries apart and never read each other’s work, the authors of these pieces are in fact having a slow-motion, longform-text-based chat. The rest of us are eavesdropping on it.
Of course, I must also allow for the Boss Baby factor—the idea that I tend to view everything I read through the frame of whatever idea or question I’ve been noodling on most persistently. To Dog Fashion Nat, therefore, even the weather forecast is an opportunity to think about the societal implications of dog raincoats.
Anyway. What I’ve felt myself eavesdropping on in the last couple of weeks—whether it’s a genuine conversation or whether I’ve just Boss-Baby’d these voices into forced dialogue—are several really intriguing points about reading deeply and well. Here follows some of that, plus—if you’ll bear with me—what it’s got me thinking about.
Author and critic Brandon Taylor wrote a wonderful Substack post about being a self-taught literary critic. Highly recommended if you’re the kind of guy for whom happiness is a folder stuffed with lit. crit. articles (or, perhaps, if it’s never occurred to you that such a thing might yours by rights to access). I loved his account of struggling to parse the various takes on short story writer Raymond Carver, then deciding simply to read everything Carver ever wrote, plus all the criticism Taylor could get his hands on, and only then to articulate his own opinion. (Verdict: “[H]e’s GOATed with the sauce.”)
Naomi Kanakia also recently published a Substack post I really enjoyed, this one on the history of short fiction in American magazines. As part of her investigation, she read reams of O. Henry’s short stories, particularly his New York stories. Her reading places her in a strong position to comment on not only O. Henry, but, because of the niche he occupied in early 20th-century letters, broader short fiction trends in American popular literature in the early 1900s. She’s also just demonstrated in her most recent Thursday creative writing post that she’s learned how to adopt O. Henry’s structural tricks in her own writing.
I’ll also mention B. D. McClay’s most recent posts on women writers of 20th-century science fiction, a topic she’s set to explore in a forthcoming book (a group biography of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree, Jr.).2 Though I have no behind-the-scenes access to BDM Industries Headquarters, my understanding of (one facet of) her approach to research is that she tracks as many authors as possible in sci-fi magazines of the 1950s-1990s, then figures out who was reading whom, and then reads them herself. As in, reads everything they published (or as close to it as possible). I highly recommend tagging along on her research deep-dive so you can benefit from her recommendations and capsule reviews (and longer-form criticism). McClay is a writer who reads A Lot. We all benefit, and it’s great.
A further, non-Substack-based point: Earlier this week, I was reading a 1943 New York Times review of a then-new English translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The review was penned by Austrian-American journalist William S. Schlamm. As the New York Times puts it in a 2020 introduction to the review, “the Book Review was taking on the Nazis with the only weapon we’ve ever had in our arsenal: the interrogation of language.”
Schlamm in fact excoriates the language of the book, not because it’s a shoddy translation, but because it’s a remarkably faithful translation of a terrible piece of German writing: “Here,” he says, “for the first time, you get Hitler’s prose almost as unreadable in English as it is in German.”
He goes on:
Without a personal stake in the profession of translating I feel free to show explicitly what I mean. On Sept. 6, 1934, Adolf Hitler read a speech to an audience of a few thousand professors, writers and artists at a Kulturtagung in Nuremberg. The following, on my word of honor, is a literal translation […] based on the official text in the Voelkischer Beobachter—an uninhibited translation, to be sure:
“The picture of the human culture can build itself upon the entirely unconscious, because purely intuitive, realization of an internally, bloodily conditioned longing and its command. But moreover, it also can be influenced and formed by an external infection in a national body, coming there to an indisputable importance without being internally related as to its absence.”
… In German, so help me, it sounds exactly as it does in this faithful translation. In German, too, there is not the faintest similarity to a thought and barely a trace of language. …
When you have read Manheim’s translation of “Mein Kampf,” the next worst thing to the original, you’ll comprehend less than ever what has happened to the Germans, but you’ll understand better what was bound to happen to the rest of Europe. This is not just bad style, not even its absence. This is the Moronic Evil, so shapeless and pre-spiritual that it defies articulation. If infusoria spoke they probably could use Hitler’s language, but they would have to bark.
It’s a review worth reading for its own sake, but I include it here mainly because it reminded me of some family lore: When my dad was at university, studying history and economics (and he’ll correct me if I’ve misremembered this account), he grew preoccupied with the question of how fascism had become so popular in the 1930s. Had fascist agitators and writers of that time, he wondered, presented uniquely compelling arguments? Would the average person have come across a fascist pamphlet and been irresistibly persuaded by it? Would he have been persuaded by it?
In his attempt to get an answer to this question, he tracked down a whole bunch of 1930s fascist texts in their original printings. (My mum has since had to hide Dad’s highly sus 1930s book collection in their spare bedroom.) He did his best to read and understand them all. His verdict: Essentially, exactly the same as Schlamm’s—bafflement. It was all gobbledygook.
You can trace your own way through the themes above, but for me what’s stood out is how they all integrate the fruit of genuinely, rigorously Doing The Reading. If you place this kind of reading alongside what’s required to snap up a quick summary, or scan a couple of other people’s takes, you realize there’s no comparison. Getting below the surface, getting past the best-ofs and the primers, is a matter of—I’m so serious here, though probably also a bit off my gourd—becoming, as Homo sapiens, more fully alive.
And it isn’t just that you benefit from the exercise: what you’re able to share with and supply to others, and what you’re able to draw out of conversations (spoken or written), is enriched immeasurably for having done the work.
I think most of us are out of shape for this kind of work, though. I’ve found myself recently contending with feeling out of shape. I was poking at an idea for a post about a completely unrelated topic for this Substack, but I realized that if I wanted to write about that topic, I should probably go back and read through Aristotle’s Categories, one of the philosophical texts that’s most impacted the way I think about the world.
In considering the work that would take, I started thinking it might make more sense to write about how Substack posting, as a genre, resists the kinds of topics that require a writer to go back and reread Aristotle before their weekly post. Fair enough, I guess. But I had not thought about this for five minutes before I got to asking myself, “Okay, but is that actually true of the genre, or am I, as an individual writer, just out of shape, reading-wise?”
Frankly, I think it’s that I’m out of shape. It’s not the genre; it’s the writer. I think plenty of writers could pull it off. I think plenty do. And if I spent the next year working on giving sustained attention to difficult texts and consistently fitting them into my day, I bet I could do it too. Given my interests, I think I probably should.
As a necessary aside: I realize learning disabilities are a thing, and if you’re feeling accused by any of this, I don’t mean for you to be. But I also think a lot of us—including me—let ourselves get out of shape, and then confuse being out of shape with being inherently incapable of doing deeper or more sustained learning.
Though he’s making the point about learning more broadly, Brandon Taylor addressed some form of this idea in his Substack post:
When I was in graduate school for science, I went in thinking that there were things I could do and things I could not do and that these things were fixed. My whole life, I had gotten through school without any need to study. For me, observation had been enough. See it once, and then I could do it. If anything was harder to pick up than that, I simply didn’t try. What was the point. I could get by with what I had. But when I told my thesis advisor that I didn’t know how to do immunostaining, she blinked at me and said something like, “No one is born knowing how to do it. Go read a paper on it and do these experiments.” It struck me then, perhaps for the first time in my life, that intelligence is really not about what you know. Intelligence is about whether or not you have the capacity to learn or be taught. It is perhaps also about curiosity. Anyway, I learned how to do immunostaining, and every time I did experiments, it seemed miraculous to me that I had learned how to do something I didn’t think I could learn how to do. As an intelligent, but unchallenged child, I had developed the bad habit of a fixed view of my abilities. That I was exactly as smart as I was and would get no smarter. This is not true. Or, if it’s true, I think its effect is misstated.
And again:
I wish more people took the time to read about the things they are writing about. I wish people were a little more careful and patient with their ideas. Part of why I started this newsletter was to prompt myself to slow down and to write about my ideas in a way that was broader and deeper than I could do on Twitter. I think Substack has that capacity for deep engagement. But sometimes, I read articles and posts on here that make a hash of potentially interesting ideas because the writer didn’t feel like reading five PDFs, which would have easily mooted the post they wrote.
To try to integrate Taylor’s point with my own, perhaps I risk not just having a fixed sense of my understanding of a topic (when it would in fact benefit from a commitment to careful study), but a fixed sense of my ability to cultivate a habit of reading and learning more generally. Let’s allow, for instance, that I couldn’t do a proper deep reading of Aristotle’s Categories this week, no matter how hard I tried. But if I committed to regular study of that work and other works like it, I bet that before too long I’d be in shape to pull off a fruitful and in-depth one-week study fairly easily.
Before I turn to other things, I should note that I don’t mean to conflate learning with reading. They’re different—if overlapping—activities. You can certainly do a lot of learning without reading anything, and frankly (alas!), you can do a lot of reading without learning anything. I’ve been reminded by wise people in my life that sometimes one faces a temptation to learn about an issue through intensive reading when one actually just needs to face the thing and learn by doing. There’s discernment involved here, as with all things, I think.
Anyway—a lot, as they say, to unpack, and I think I’m still in the suitcase-open-on-the-bed stage. If you’ve got footnotes to add, I’ll gladly meet you in the Comments section.
Hits du jour
Some things I’ve been enjoying lately:
I recently listened to the audiobook version of Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship by Dana A. Williams. (Thanks to my mum for sending it to me!) It’s about Toni Morrison’s time as an in-house editor at Random House from the 1970s to 1990s. You want to talk about an easy sell in terms of getting a reader to pick up a book?—this was it, for me. I’m probably predisposed to be interested in writing about Toni Morrison, so if you take that and throw in some behind-the-scenes publishing stuff, you have Yours Truly as “Shut up and take my money” meme. Anyway, a fantastic read. Williams organizes the book mostly by author/project, which works very well. Morrison was dedicated to advancing Black authors in the U.S., and her list reflects this. From my own vantage point as a tiny and insignificant author/editor, I found it fascinating to encounter Morrison, the Nobel-prize-winning author, as a savvy editor arguing with a recalcitrant poet about the need to think about book marketing and publicity as something other than a compromise of one’s artistic integrity—how else does the poet expect readers to discover the book? And if she doesn’t care about a broad readership discovering it, why did she opt to publish with Random House? Authors, take note. Besides her work with poets and novelists, Morrison worked on books by Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and more or less a Who’s Who of late-20th-century Black writers. Fascinating stuff (especially for the publishing-curious), and highly recommended.
I recently discovered Eccles cakes at a local grocery store that has a little British food section, and shoot, they are nice. They’re probably 80% butter/sugar and so definitely fall into the “A Sometimes Food” category. On the other hand, if you’re training for an Iron Man and need to diversify your energy bar consumption, allow me to recommend the Eccles cake.
My fiancé John introduced me to a wonderful collection of wedding sermons by Fr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957), titled Bridegroom and Bride. Since each is a sermon from a Catholic wedding (and meant to be brief), you can dip in and out of this book very easily. A recommended read for anybody curious about Catholic/Christian thought around married life, and no doubt makes a great gift.
That’s all for now, amigos.
Dog Fashion Nat being identical with Oblivious Nat now strikes me as rude. Mea culpa. I’m sure she has many good qualities, and in fact Real Life Natalie is often the oblivious one.
BDM’s Substack newsletter, “Notebook,” is so far the only one I feel confident automating as a “recommended” one for people who subscribe to mine. I know sometimes people absently click through that step in the subscription process and end up with unexpected newsletters in their inbox, which risks being annoying. I’ve got a good dozen or so friends with brilliant Substacks, but many of them are quite different from mine (e.g. highly philosophical in an academic vein, or preoccupied with theological questions… or extremely fun and gossip-y), and I’m not sure everyone who comes to this newsletter would be up for that. BDM’s newsletter, on the other hand, is probably like this one, only better, so I figure you’d like it if you like this one. (Admittedly, she has a lot more posts about Taylor Swift and Neon Genesis Evangelion than you’ll find here.)