a guest post by Kaitlin Heller and Suzanne Akbari
We’ve been thinking about how we read.
About four months ago, the two of us planned to write a
blogpost describing our own reading practices. Our goal was not just to share
our own experiences, but to elicit responses – via comments on the blogpost,
sharing the post on Facebook, tweeting it – that would allow us to learn more about
the reading practices of others. We began by writing a few Facebook posts back
in June to do some preliminary exploration along these lines: we learned about
what kinds of books people are interested in, and we were surprised and
delighted to learn about the commonplace books – some elaborately and
beautifully decorated – that several of our friends and acquaintances keep. And
then terrible things kept happening, all through the summer and into the fall,
and it never seemed to be the right time to ask the ITM bloggers about the
possibility of doing a guest post.
But now the time suddenly feels right, because our
collective conversations have turned toward self-care, and the care of others.
We both believe that the crucial context for this undertaking is the way that
reading is not only individual and private, but also communal and shared. This
sharing can be actual, in real time (reading a book out loud to others, online
blogging a book), or it can be virtual or imaginative, a community of readers
linked by love of a particular book, or by a set of reading practices. This
seems to us to be a potentially vital place for self-care and care of others,
two impulses that seem to be contradictory but are in fact intimately connected.
Reading practices can be part of a shared pedagogy, directed
toward the ways we can begin to combat the injustice and harassment in our
field and our world; we’ve been reading about the damage done by that
injustice; we’ve been reading about the work of repair. As medievalists, we
have been deeply moved to witness how that work of shared pedagogy is
simultaneously a work of repair, as the community is forged and nurtured by the
process of compilation and sharing, seen so vividly in the crowd-sourced
bibliography led by Julie Orlemanski and Jonathan Hsy. This may be a moment
to explore more widely the ways that our reading practices inform who we are – as
individual readers, as members of a shared reading community, or members of
several overlapping communities.
How we read informs how we work and live. We see this as a
space in which repair can happen. Below are our particular two histories of
reading: one, a meditation on mental illness; the other, a consideration of time.
Both are stories of loss and recuperation. We hope that by making these
histories visible, by thinking about reading as self-care and as care for
others, we can make a space for others to share their personal histories and
practices: to be visible and validated in the ways we are all changing how we
read.
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Kaitlin Heller:
I’ve been a fan of the series A Song of Ice and Fire since I was a young teenager, when it
first came out. I have a first edition of A Game of Thrones, signed by George R. R. Martin (and yes, I got
that signature in person, trembling hands and all). When book number five
came out, it was the summer of 2011, I had just passed both my Latin exams, and
I was about to begin my comprehensives. I’ve been waiting for that book for at
least six years, since the previous book came out in 2005; but really, it was
more like eleven years, because, as all fans of the series know, books four and
five were actually two halves of one whole. So I’d been waiting catch up on
many of my favorite characters since before I went to college, and now I was in
grad school. To put it mildly: I was excited for the book to come out.
And yet, the day I finally got my hands on that beautiful
book and took it to Christie Pits Park in Toronto, I wasn’t able to read it.
That was probably the point at which I should’ve known
something was wrong. But I’d been through feelings like this before: I had just
finished four years in the publishing industry, working at a rewarding but
demanding editorial job that required an immense amount of reading. Then, I’d
often found it difficult to read for pleasure when I got home, and so I’d spent
much of my leisure time talking to friends, watching movies, or singing
karaoke.
But this proved to be far more severe. I spent an entire
summer trying to read that book, the book I’d looking forward to for more a
third of my life, and I couldn’t do it. So it probably won’t surprise you that
I also found I couldn’t do my comprehensives reading.
For months, I tried to read my way through that list of two
hundred books by brute force. I would hole myself up in a library or coffee
shop, or if that didn’t work, I’d try reading while I was talking to someone in
the Center for Medieval Studies common space or in the grad room at the History
Department. But I was simply too slow. I’d find myself rereading a single
paragraph over and over, or puzzling out every single footnote, or listlessly
staring into space.
Eventually, the only solution I found was to write while I
read. I made myself a schedule of the books and time I had left, worked out how
many books I needed to get through per day, and sat myself down in the
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Library with a notebook and a pen. I
would take notes while I read, do a summary at the end, and then ruthlessly
move onto the next book. I went through something like four notebooks that way,
and eventually, I did pass my comps.
Since that time, I’ve heard other people—especially other
grad students, especially other women—talk about similar things happening to
them. How we read is not simple. It’s as complex and anxiety-ridden and
idiosyncratic as anything else we do as academics, and no one talks about it.
But since the publication of the beautiful How We Write collection a couple
years ago, I’ve been thinking about how we can talk about it. I want to know how we read, if nothing else
for the sake of that other future grad student somewhere who finds herself totally
unable to do her reading, personal or professional, and needs a way forward.
Some excellent Facebook threads this spring got me thinking
about how a volume on this subject might look, including one started by
Brantley Bryant and one by Suzanne Conklin Akbari. Here is an incomplete list
of the kinds of reading we do that I want to hear more about:
Goth(ic) reading, anxious reading, queer reading,
intersectional feminist reading, speed reading, slow reading, reading in
translation, reading for translation, not reading, transitional reading,
required reading, preparatory reading, reparatory reading, reading for
pleasure, punk reading, rebellious / resistant reading, professional reading,
(eco)critical reading, monstrous reading, audio as reading, accessible reading,
inaccessible reading, reading in transit, affective reading, fannish reading,
amateur reading, nationalist reading, international reading, reading without
borders, reading against borders, identities of reading, reading as justice,
reading for work, reading as work, hierarchies of reading, prestigious reading,
“trashy” reading, camp reading, performative reading, religious reading,
reading together, reading alone, reading things that aren’t meant to be read,
reading between the lines, digital reading, analog reading, impoverished
reading, reading spaces, reading practices, reading histories.
Suzanne Akbari:
Responding to Kaitlin – initially, in a real-time
conversation about ‘How we read’ earlier this year, and now, in written form –
I want to mirror what she’s written above. I’d like to begin by seconding the
call for your accounts of multiple kinds of reading, and then move on to say
something about my own perspective and private experiences of reading, in the
hope that this account might stimulate others.
For me as a child, there was a very special pleasure in
reading fast. My fourth grade classroom had a strange kind of projector device
that was meant to improve our reading speed: it projected a single line of text
on the wall, moving more or less rapidly (you could set the speed), until the
passage was finished. Then you would complete questions designed to measure
reading comprehension. I gamed that machine until I could read (or at least
skim) about 1200 words a minute. It was a kind of trick, but it also produced a
certain kind of flavor of reading pleasure: a highly superficial, super-fast,
super-shallow engagement with language.
In some ways, this facility turned out to be valuable. As
the years ticked by, the ability to read a lot of text very quickly, retaining
only what was essential, was a crucial strength. I encouraged others – first,
peers; later, students – to develop this same skill, believing that it would
help them as much as it had me, making it possible to manage very large amounts
of text in a short period of time.
But as you will have guessed, and as is always the case,
there was a necessary trade off: could it be possible to have that facility for
quick reading, and also muster up the ability to slow it down, to read in a
deliberate, careful way? Up to a certain point, it was absolutely possible to
maintain those two modes. But like Kaitlin, who describes in moving terms what
it was like to lose (terrifyingly) the ability to read for pleasure, I also
came to a point where I could no longer hold these two modes in tension. It
became extremely difficult to read deliberately, slowly, closely.
And the painful poignancy of this lay in the fact that those
moments of deliberate, slow reading were among the most precious moments of my
intellectual and, I would say, spiritual formation. To read highly compressed,
distilled language – whether poetic verse (Whitman; Stevens) or sacred
scripture (Leviticus; the Qur’an) – is to exit linear time, if only for a
moment, to be in a separate in-between place where chronology stops mattering
and you fully inhabit the single moment. Losing – or, at least, almost
completely losing – that ability was terribly painful, and I am still working,
right now, to try to get it back.
One thing that has helped me to do so is remembering what it
was to read slowly. These remembered experiences include the time of learning,
both in college and in grad school, how to practice close reading (both times
with a focus on seventeenth-century English poetry and prose), as well as
older, more primal experiences of reading. In particular, I have been
remembering what it was like to read as a very young child, including both my
own memory of learning to read, and my memories of teaching children in my family
to read. These are stories I would like to tell at greater length: healing
memories in themselves, they might also be stories that are good for sharing,
and good for thinking with as we reckon with our own histories of reading, and
our reading practices.
In our recent conversations, both in person and online,
Kaitlin and I have already learned quite a bit about how our own histories of
reading – both our deep histories and our proximate, urgent histories – inform
our teaching and research practices, as well as how they have shaped us on a
deeply personal level. Do teaching and research inhabit a different environment
within our sensibility, totally divided from our pleasure reading, or are these
domains contiguous or even overlapping? Is reading a fundamentally passive act
– made visible in that strip of words flowing through the projector’s light –
or is it active? Is reading an act of consumption or an act of creation? Is it
even, sometimes, an embodied form, as manifested in our vividly illuminated and
lovingly scribed commonplace books? Please share your own histories of reading,
and let’s discover together the shared pleasure that lies in this most solitary
of acts – which is also, paradoxically, the act of most complete plenitude.
