Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "questions"
Brutalizing myself with a bad Book; or, the Agony and the Agony
Did you ever pick up a book, not just with high hopes, but with a near-sexual sense of anticipation? Then, as you began to read, you started to get that sinking feeling in the stomach, the tightening in the chest, and it occurred to you (whether after one page or fifty) that this author’s intent and your expectations couldn’t have been more different?
Sometimes, maybe the author’s style grates. I spent enough time in academia, for instance, reading graduate papers during the day (and reading the philosophy of the ages at night) to figure out who is deliberately obscurantist and whose thought is actually just so complex that it requires sometimes nigh-on impenetrable thickets of words. I’ll wade through muck, but there better be something on the other side, damnit, some goal, some point. But if you talk about the “discursivity liming the dialectical and juridical framework regarding interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinary semiotics in the biopolitics,” just to tell me which zombie movies you like and which ones you don’t like, well …I’m going to hate you for writing this book, and I’m going to hate myself for reading it.
And that’s the other thing. Much like the boxer Mike Tyson, I am a glutton for punishment. I love reading, and I love learning, but regardless of the quality of a book I pick up, I feel some obligation to read the thing to the end. In for a penny, in for a pound.
There are a couple of times I’ve just tapped out in absolute agony (I won’t mention the titles that broke me here), but for the most part, when faced with something that is painfully turgid or feels unreadable, I just gird my loins and brace for the misery each time I pick up the damn book. And I always finish with a sense of relief, and maybe even accomplishment, similar to what one feels after perhaps an especially grueling double-shift at a job they don’t care for, when they maybe have the flu and the shift supervisor is in an especially foul humor.
I’m committed once I start a book, though I feel stubborn and nigh-on stupid for plodding ahead despite the agony I’m inducing in myself by continuing to read. What am I trying to prove? And to whom? Is it just another facet of my obsessive-compulsive behavior, manifesting itself in my reading habits? Is it some form of sublimated masochism? I refuse to pay a shrink to talk about it, though I will read a book by a shrink on the subject (even though there’s always a chance that the book in question may be a boring piece of shit as well, which would only compound the problem and make my torment sort of amusing in a meta-sense).
Anyway, I’d like to issue a general apology to anyone who has ever started reading one of my books, and rather than just throwing it down and declaiming its vile or putrid nature (I still get hate mail now and again), has felt compelled to see the task through to its completion. Here it is: I’m sincerely sorry for putting you through that hell.
But believe me, I know how you feel.
And at least I keep it under 90,000 words or so, and my fiction offerings are usually a lot cheaper than most academic texts.
Sometimes, maybe the author’s style grates. I spent enough time in academia, for instance, reading graduate papers during the day (and reading the philosophy of the ages at night) to figure out who is deliberately obscurantist and whose thought is actually just so complex that it requires sometimes nigh-on impenetrable thickets of words. I’ll wade through muck, but there better be something on the other side, damnit, some goal, some point. But if you talk about the “discursivity liming the dialectical and juridical framework regarding interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinary semiotics in the biopolitics,” just to tell me which zombie movies you like and which ones you don’t like, well …I’m going to hate you for writing this book, and I’m going to hate myself for reading it.
And that’s the other thing. Much like the boxer Mike Tyson, I am a glutton for punishment. I love reading, and I love learning, but regardless of the quality of a book I pick up, I feel some obligation to read the thing to the end. In for a penny, in for a pound.
There are a couple of times I’ve just tapped out in absolute agony (I won’t mention the titles that broke me here), but for the most part, when faced with something that is painfully turgid or feels unreadable, I just gird my loins and brace for the misery each time I pick up the damn book. And I always finish with a sense of relief, and maybe even accomplishment, similar to what one feels after perhaps an especially grueling double-shift at a job they don’t care for, when they maybe have the flu and the shift supervisor is in an especially foul humor.
I’m committed once I start a book, though I feel stubborn and nigh-on stupid for plodding ahead despite the agony I’m inducing in myself by continuing to read. What am I trying to prove? And to whom? Is it just another facet of my obsessive-compulsive behavior, manifesting itself in my reading habits? Is it some form of sublimated masochism? I refuse to pay a shrink to talk about it, though I will read a book by a shrink on the subject (even though there’s always a chance that the book in question may be a boring piece of shit as well, which would only compound the problem and make my torment sort of amusing in a meta-sense).
Anyway, I’d like to issue a general apology to anyone who has ever started reading one of my books, and rather than just throwing it down and declaiming its vile or putrid nature (I still get hate mail now and again), has felt compelled to see the task through to its completion. Here it is: I’m sincerely sorry for putting you through that hell.
But believe me, I know how you feel.
And at least I keep it under 90,000 words or so, and my fiction offerings are usually a lot cheaper than most academic texts.
