Shome Dasgupta's Blog, page 8

Robert Kloss, On Reading

"I've never really thought about why I read or what it means to me. I've never had the need to justify the action, even when my father or my teachers made me feel like it was a less than healthy activity — I just sneaked around to do it. Honestly, I think I just fell into the habit when I was very young and I always kept at it. But, then again, I was always good at it and it was one of the few things I was good at so for whatever reason it was a natural activity. It was also one of the few things I liked to do so I did it whenever I could. At the moment I started to read I also started to write and I think the two have always been bound up in each other. Writing was the other thing I liked to do that I was also good at. Had I been able to draw or had I been able to sing or had I been more athletic things may have worked out differently. Slowly I think the writing cannibalized the reading, so now most or all of my reading happens so that I can write — it's research or its inspiration, searching for power. I read how Melville wrote Moby-Dick while reading Shakespeare and Greek tragedy and Sterne and Rabelais and how those geniuses somehow unlocked his own genius. I have to admit I have always tried to do the same thing, with not quite as startling results. So I suppose if I have any requirement of the books I read, now, its that they should startle me. I don't read for a good yarn or to gain some insight into why people do what they do or some other abstract insight: I suppose I read to be startled and amazed by something brilliant and awesome, like an old time prophet caught in the glow and hum of the burning bush."


{ Robert Kloss is the author of How the Days of Love & Diphtheria (Mud Luscious Press/Nephew) and The Alligators of Abraham (Mud Luscious Press, 2012). He is found online at rkbirdsofprey.blogspot.com .}

Ryan Call, On Reading

"My mother has a rule regarding books: don't throw them. As children, my sister and I were not allowed to throw books in our parents' house. We could throw other objects, certainly, and we did throw other objects, often at each other, but we did not throw books. Now, whenever I throw a book, I think about my mother and how much I love her."


{Ryan Call is the author of The Weather Stations (Caketrain). His stories appear in Mid-American Review, New York Tyrant, Conjunctions, Annalemma, and elsewhere. He teaches English and coaches cross country at a high school in Houston. Visit him here for more information.}

Alissa Nutting, On Reading

"I grew up in a very safe, boring home. It's no accident that 'boring,' as a verb, means 'to drill a hole.' Life as we currently experience it gives us a lot of holes, from boredom and many other places; voids that we fill with a variety of things, by necessity, in order to feel full enough to keep going. I've tried quite a few methods of easing the pain of lack (an inescapable pain that even the best live-rs will feel now and then, given our temporary lives, faulty bodies, and general dearth of control). Of every salve I've tried, I would like to give my endorsement to books.

As a child, books were the spaces where I could go make all the unwise decisions I knew deep down I wanted to make but was not permitted (they still are, except now I'm the one not permitting myself). For every urge, there is a book (and if there isn't, you need to write it please). For every problem, there is a book (and if there isn't…). Putting yourself between covers—inside an open book—is just as intimate and vulnerable an act as putting yourself between the sheets of a bed. You and the author are communing together in a way that no one else can ever know or experience.

Plus reading is the most polite selfish act ever. Sitting in a corner and reading, I emit very little waste or sound. I am not distracting to others. This is a benefit not to be underappreciated in a crowded world.

I mainly live in books, and have ever since I could read. Vicarious is an ugly word to many, but not to me, not when it comes to reading. Unlike a movie or video-game simulation, the act of reading is as personalized as a fingerprint. No two people have the exact same thoughts or visualizations when reading the same book. It's an experience that is yours, and belongs to you, just as all that any of us ever have beyond the present—our memories—belong to us. Except for the current moment, we have nothing, really, but the slides stored in our imagination.

As a form of acquisition, reading makes me wildly greedy. I try to read up on anything I'm curious about, afraid of, obsessed upon, or unfamiliar with. Reading is another word for more—more experience, more knowledge. More understanding. When I want more, I read, and it feels like I get to throw a few more handfuls of dirt into the chasms, the omissions of life that sting."


{ Alissa Nutting , an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at John Carroll University, is the author of the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls . Her website is alissanutting.com .}

Tim Horvath, On Reading

"My daughter is learning how to read right now one room over at the very moment I'm writing this. And I am sitting on the couch, or was until I broke off to write this, learning how to read myself. We talk about knowing how to read as if it is like knowing how to tie shoelaces, or how to prepare a particular meal—an either/or, a process that we might master, proudly strutting in our newly-knotted sneakers and ladling lobster-speckled paella onto plates. But the more I do of it, the more I suspect that we never really know how to read. It might sound like I'm being archly postmodern, taking shots at fish-barrel range at the very possibility of knowledge, but that's not what I'm going for.

My daughter sounds out words…oftener she gets them right, the short ones almost always. She asks things like "is it a 'c' or a 'k' in 'crackle?" She gets stymied on 'musicians.' She writes 'j' for 'ch' and in her own story writes 'ixclamd,' which I can only think of as a word in a language spoken somewhere with a brutal climate. Her questions, when they arise, are readily answered. The fun, for her, has just begun.

It verges on cliché that every difficult book must teach the reader how to read it. These days I am dipping into Joshua Cohen's Witz, in which I might get hung up on 'the throb of shaigetzes.' But most of the words in Witz are familiar; it is not the vocabulary that makes it a challenging, if uncommonly pleasurable read. It is more that with its gushing, pagelong sentences and profusion of allusions, it is just plain tough going. To know when to count a clause/sentence/page done, or done enough to move on. Impossible? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, though, that I will never know how to read this book. And I often wonder whether reading even simpler, more straightforward books is just as mysterious.

In this spirit, then, I ask, do you know if you've read a book? If you have read all but the last twenty pages have you read it? When, as a teacher, I assign reading, I expect my students to read. Sometimes the ones who have can't provide specific details from what they've read, and sometimes those who haven't can rattle them off like they wrote the thing. But even if we put the most flagrant cases of those who didn't read on one side of the room (the spine uncracked, rods and cones that don't know from the ink in question), I wonder how much those who have read really have in common. Have you read a book if you have consciously looked at all the words? What does 'consciously' mean? (Send in the neurophilosophers). Have you read a book if you have read it quickly and enjoyed it but not really reflected, not really thought about it? What is reflection, and how does it differ from recollection? Every reading a rereading, Nabokov mused, okay. But how do you even know if you've reread the first time? What makes you so sure? If your mind wandered, how much attunement to the words on the page qualifies you for to get the sticker, like the ones we wear on Election Day, that announces 'I READ'? In my daughter's case, she might get actual stickers…

To read is just a damned odd verb, is what I want to say. Can we use place as an analogy? It strikes me that it's a lot easier to know that you've visited a place than that you've read something. I suppose we could each visit a place and have such utterly different experiences of it that it seems like an entirely different place, and the same might be said for a book. Could we have such utterly divergent encounters with a book that it becomes, for all intents and purposes, two books? Actually bifurcates? Book cloning? Is that ethical? What I'm getting at, more broadly, can be underscored by this juxtaposition of reading and visiting a place. (But maybe we should problematize traveling, too. One might visit a place deeply or superficially. I want to at least think of myself as a proponent of deep traveling, not only wide.)

What is depth? What is width? In terms of reading, most, I think, would agree that reading widely helps you to read deeply, situates you in a context that helps your understanding of any individual work, and possibly we could say the same about traveling, that having been to many places augments your ability to appreciate a new place. But is that so? Could wide reading, in some instances, dilute, as going a bunch of places in rapid succession can make the places themselves seem too much the same, introduce too many parallels to be useful, turning it into routine and numbing the eyes and ears, all the senses with a surfeit of too-familiar exoticism? Well, could reading too widely do the same? Perhaps one ought to read with a deliberate narrowness, dwell in a single book for a year or more as we do with those we author. When others are consuming by the hundreds, trading favorites, rookies-of-the-year, etc. will you tout your scuffed, dogeared pair fifty times apiece? Is narrowness necessary, or even desirable, for depth? I do not know how to answer these things.

What I do know is that I am always learning to read. Nowhere does the dictum 'Zen mind, beginner's mind' weigh so aptly. Sure there are times I'll feel the opposite, the literary equivalent of pulling into the umpteenth city on a puddle-hopping whirlwind tour, jet-lagged and burned out. Another sleep-deprived innkeeper whose mustache flops onto the coffee-stained check-in registry? Another overzealous shopkeeper? I'll read things where I'll feel like 'I've already read this/seen this/been through this a hundred times before.' But more often I'm daunted. To take in all the undercurrents of sound, of implication, the unsaid, to translate between the spatio-temporal on the page and that in the world, to infuse voice and vision with life, to balance upright on the tendrils of text for the full swerve of a paragraph, giving due heed to every glint of nuance, to appreciate what the hell is going on in the story, to read both with and against the text and orthogonal to what is written…I will never really master this, I think, never get my sticker. Still, you will hear me go with convention and say 'I've read x, I've read y, haven't read z yet, hope to get to it someday.' I will always be learning to read. But I do know that 'crackle' is spelled with a 'c,' unless it's the candy bar, in which case yes, you can have exactly one."


{ Tim Horvath is the author of Circulation (sunnyoutside press) and the forthcoming collection Understories, which will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in May 2012. His stories appear in Conjunctions, Fiction, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Chester College of New England and works as a part-time psychiatric counselor.}

Edward Mullany, On Reading

"I was in the park, reading a paperback novel, when the sky darkened, and one or two raindrops plopped onto my knee. 'Come on,' I said to my dog, who was sleeping beside me on the grass, 'if we don't hurry, we're going to get wet.' We started out of the park, me walking quickly at first, and my dog trotting, but slowed when I saw that the clouds had parted and that the raindrops I'd felt had not been indicative of further rain. We stood in the middle of a wide path, and I looked up through the branches of a leafy tree, while my dog sniffed the ground patiently, his leash slack. 'What are we doing?' I said to myself and to my dog, who looked at me for a moment before staring off at something he'd seen or thought he'd seen. The book I had been reading was a page-turner. I was enjoying it."

{ Edward Mullany is the author of If I Falter at the Gallows (Publishing Genius, 2011).}

Jillian Lauren, On Reading

"It's appropriate that it's late right now (too late for a woman who has to wake at dawn with a toddler), and I'm writing about reading. Because late is when I've always read, since I was a child. First with a flashlight and then when I got busted--as I often did because they were onto me--by the red light of my digital alarm clock.



Late at night is when I conduct my love affair with books.



Now I read late because I don't have any other time in the day to sit down and sink into a book. But that wasn't always the case. When I was young, I read late nights because it was a quiet time during which I could spiral out into the darkness and explore the endless possibilities that I found in books. Books were the only thing in my life that spoke to the kind of magic I suspected was shimmering in the shadows in the corners of my room. I certainly couldn't find it in the people surrounding me in my small, stiflingly conservative suburban town. Nor in the world of school and soccer and temple and birthday parties and sameness through which I shuffled in the daylight.



Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe I just couldn't sleep. Maybe I was desperately lonely. But wherever the longing came from, ultimately it made me fall deeply in love with reading.



I have rarely met a writer for whom books were not a salvation, an obsessive passion, the first true love of their life.



And there are times I forget how much I love to read. There are times that reading and I grow too familiar with each other. There are times that I pick up book after book and put them down after thirty pages, unable to stay engaged with them for one reason or another. But inevitably, a book finds its way to the top of my unruly pile and it grabs me by the throat. It blows the top of my head wide open. And I lie there late at night vibrating with the same passion as ever for the singular experience of connecting with a work of literature.



I read for the same reason I write--to experience a space of infinite possibility. And more importantly, to connect. To connect with with my own deepest humanity and with that of others. Which is to say, to fall in love."





{ Jillian Lauren is the author of the novel, Pretty and the New York Times bestselling memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem . Visit her website here , and she can be found on Twitter, here .}

How to be a good live reading audience member

This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn't Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb







Etiquette is important. Whether downing clam chowder or chowing down on a clam, understanding the context of any event and knowing how best to position yourself within it is an important skill. This knowledge-set extends also into the world of live literature readings. Long assumed by literary outsiders to be trivial, boring, mind-numbing, boring, despicable, boring events, the live reading fits these descriptions only to the untrained mind. So, let me train some minds.

1. Bring friends. You don't have to bring the friends that you want to keep, but if you know one or two annoying hangers-on, trick them into coming with you on the rouse of a few photo-ops with your permission that you can be tagged for the Facebook album. Who am I kidding? If you are going to a book reading, you don't have many friends, let alone ones you can risk losing. So bring that frumpy girlfriend and the awkward guy and get ready to have an appropriately adequate evening.



2. Pretend you are a fan. To the author, the live reading is the equivalent of a twink going down on a Van Nuys, CA movie director in hopes of a starring role in an upcoming porn adaptation of the early 90s sitcom "Life Goes On" (that was a sitcom, right?). Basically, don't be afraid to get on your knees and…worship the author. Go ahead and stroke his…ego. Besides, he may just make you famous.



3. Don't be a rogue decibel. As most fancy things are, book readings are quiet. Eating caviar, sipping fine scotch, ruling poor people, all of these are done quietly (in addition to fancy-ily). Literary readings, for the most part, are true to this rule of fanciness. It's not that the audience doesn't want to stir up a mosh pit and scream, but when that happens, the reader cannot be heard. Now, if the reader has a microphone and is fronting a punk collective trashcan ensemble, then screaming might be appropriate. When it doubt, copy other people. If everyone else is moshing, mosh you should.



4. Buy a book. Most readings don't charge admission. So, consider a book purchase the equivalent of dirty money in the hand of a dirty bouncer. Yes, it is true that you might already have all of the author's books. So, if you are such the fan that already having the books would imply, then…



5. Open you pages to a signature. It's okay. Just a little scribble. It doesn't mean anything. Don't worry about it. Nobody will find out. Just let him crease that spine and spill a few drops of ink on your pasty white pages. There you go. Doesn't that feel good? It feels good for him, too. Like a conquest. His greasy fingerprints will live forever on your bookshelf.



6. Ask the author to get a beer after the reading. Especially if this author's name is Caleb J. Ross.

Photo credit: Designated Disaster

Ben Rubin, On Reading

"I never liked reading growing up. I wanted to, but it always seemed little more than a difficulty, one which was not as enjoyable as those to be found in sport and being with one's friends, as those we discover when learning how to behave and misbehave, usually with smiles on our faces.



Being read to, on the other hand, was always looked forward to with that sense of anticipation; the kind we experience when looking toward a joy, and when felt deeply can almost verge upon anxiety, though this is the side of such anticipation we cannot see. Like a thing behind the sun whose blind fingers invent our bodies.



Yes, that was a thing about the stories that were read to us as children: not only did they have to be read aloud, not only did they have to be read to us, not only did their creatures have no be invoked by another's voice; not just another's voice, but by the voice of one we loved, for fairy tales are filled with magic and thus must be brought to life by incantation. They must be spoken as a spell, and that spell must be filled with love, which by any other name is the deepest magic we know. Not just that, but we had to wait for them. Yes, we had to wait; our anticipation of their arrival was necessary too. It was part of that essential readiness which allowed these new worlds to open within us, that opened us as well, into the world outside, the world into which, even if we entered as a freedom, we stepped intrepidly for it was still so new and strange a thing.



It is often that way. Patience is needed. A certain slowness which allows the event to make its way towards us, and to mean more than a complacency or commonplace when it does so; something special. We must only trust in it, that it will indeed find us, that it knows where live, just as the moon did when we were children, and does still today.



Being read to, yes, I loved being read to. I loved my father's words, even though they were not his own. They were those of someone else transformed by his speaking. And he too was transformed. He read these words, and suddenly he was not just my father. Suddenly he spoke with a mouth of buried moonlight. Then, to read was like an excavation, and it was his voice that would guide our going. To where?



To wherever. It didn't really matter, nor did it matter if that destination was delayed. It was the going that was important. It was the invitation to voyage that ripped us from our rootlets, and helped us begin the long, strange journey we continue today, to see that indeed no everyday is ordinary, to learn to call forth miracles from the tamed circle of the commonplace. What we know now is that it might take a long time to get there. All the better:



In art, no deep magic happens quickly, even if sometimes it seems that way, for you do not stop being an artist merely when you're not making art; something essential is happening even then for it is always happening so long as we are open to it. That is precisely why it is deep, because it takes time to develop, because it is allowed that time. That's one of art's great secrets, and thus too life as well, for everything that happens in art happens in life, happens in the world.



It is just in art that those forces are concentrated and condensed so that we may better feel them, so that we too may be touched deeply by them the way, as children, we were touched deeply by stories that were filled with our parents' breath. Wasn't it their voices that lifted those words from the page, the words then already inseparable from the breath of those we love, so that they could enter into us and become once again human? Wasn't it we who waited at night to be moved by them so that we could move the way the wind moves, so that we could know intimately what it was like when the wind of the world passes into and through a human soul, only remaining for a moment before returning itself again to the deep, illimitable space from whence it came?"





{ Ben Rubin is the author and illustrator of When Comes What Darkly Thieves , which is available here . For more information, visit his website here .}

Janet Skeslien Charles, On Reading

"Reading is like breathing. Necessary. Reading shows us different worlds, different times, different ways of thinking. I have read in stages.

Growing up in a plains town of 2000 souls, about as landlocked as possible, I was able to visit Russia through Anna Karenina and the South through The Sound and the Fury. Novels helped me escape my own world.

Reading made me want to create my own job for my own characters. This was the job I wanted -- to create new places with my own people. Reading -- analyzing the techniques of other authors, looking at the motivations of their characters -- helped me write my own stories.

As I get older, instead of escape, I seek understanding. Why do we do what we do? How do we survive terrible things? I learn the answers from novelists and historians in reading their words."


{ Janet Skeslien Charles is the author of Moonlight in Odessa . It has been translated into over a dozen languages and was named a top ten debut by Publishers Weekly in 2009. She works as the Programs Manager at the American Library in Paris and enjoys interviewing other authors on her blog .}

Laura Ellen Scott, On Reading

"Reading is travel. I read to go. This probably means that everything is travel writing."


{Laura Ellen Scott's debut novel, Death Wishing , will be released by Ig Publishing in October 2011. Her collection of 21 creepy little stories, Curio , is available for free download from Uncanny Valley Press .}