I'm not a scholar or a student, but I read a lot of "non-fiction." Some of it is professional, but mostly it's because of an urge to understand the world and people. This fascination has a limitless quality that makes it almost painful. I feel massively ignorant, and that's reinforced every time I find a new subject of which I am clueless. The mass of knowledge and thought is so enormous.
I recently learned about von Humboldt's late 1800s masterwork, the multi-volume "Kosmos," a guide to the known world of natural science, with a 1000-paged index. And now that knowledge is outdated, except that "Kosmos" dedicates itself to the history of science, and now that work itself is a part of that very history. And so it goes on and on.
One of my Kindle reads at the moment is "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Miche de Certeau. It might be disappointing to announce up front that I haven't read much of it yet, but that itself is part of my point. Sensing a relevant connection, I looked at the Table of Contents and found that Chapter XII is "Reading as Poaching." I turn to it and skim a few pages of stuff about French politics and find a servicable quote:
> In the eighteenth century, the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational popularization could transform manners and customs, that an elite's products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole nation. This myth of Education inscribed a theory of consumption in the structures of cultural politics.
That goes along nicely with the book's theme of refuting an implicit "productivist" bias and highlighting the way "users" and "consumers" are always themselves creative, tactical, and in some sense subversive with regard to the stuff presented to them as "finished products."
When reading the book, I sometimes feel aversion to the countercultural eagerness to demonize the systems of power, but I also don't disagree -- it's just a vague feeling of "yes, yes, sure, get on with it..." Still, I find the author's perspective very interesting and useful, and I'm enjoying "poaching" from the book.
A few pages later:
> To write is to produce the text; to read is to receive it from someone else without putting one's own mark on it, without remaking it. In that regard, the reading of the catechism or of the Scriptures that the clergy used to recommend to girls and mothers, by forbidding these vestals of an untouchable sacred text to write continues today in the "reading" of the television programs offered to "consumers" who cannot trace their own writing on the screen where the production of the Other -- of "culture" -- appears.
Yes, yes... I agree! The vague feeling is still present, and I start to understand that it's related to a rather uncharitable tiredness with "postmodernism" or "poststructuralism," references to "the death of the author," and so on. I can't identify anything specifically wrong with any of this. There is a looming sense that if I were forced to explain to someone in this restaurant what I am reading and writing about, I might come across as some kind of flakey weirdo. They don't even know the other book I'm working on is about Heidegger... But I digress.
I'm not interested in all this because of a moral preference for the downtrodden over the elite and powerful, though I do have some of that. What interests me more is just simply what it is to be reading; what to actually do with books; how they function and circulate and affect people; and why they are, despite often being too long and dreary and just boring, irresistible.
In "The Rebel Sell," another one of those books that I continue to think about and reference many years later, the authors make the provoking claim that, contrary to the self-images of most tourists, backpackers, and lovers of foreign culture, the only authentic way to travel is on business trips. With a tangible reason to go abroad, a plausible desire for mutual exchange, instead of the usual leering and viewing and aimless wandering, the business traveller is authentically engaged and directed by a real project.
I would propose some other equally authentic modes. Someone who loves to take photos is also guided on their travels by a skillful project, a context of self-actualization and learning, and so on. Likewise someone who is researching for a story, or just someone who likes to get laid. It strikes me that "The Rebel Sell" might be attacking a straw-man idea of a person who travels only to gaze, to enjoy consumptively, to "appreciate." In fact we all seem to make up projects even if only as surrogate activities. Taking a front-lit snapshot of every single attraction one finds listed in the Lonely Planet might not be very sophisticated, but mostly we just need something, anything, to do.
Of course I am metaphorically equating books with places to make a point about the activities involved in reading. A scholar researching the literature to find a good reference is on a kind of business trip. Chapters that fail to support her argument she walks past like trinkets on a market promenade when searching for a particular kind of hat. She doesn't demand that the text be superbly beautiful or worthy of an appreciative gaze. She's not enjoying the book like you enjoy the wine on a countryside vineyard vacation; she's critical, practical, and absorbed in an activity for the sake of a project.
That seems to be to be the reason why she can study large amounts of literature without becoming "bored" or "distracted" or being very concerned about "attention span." She's working; she doesn't get paid to merely enjoy; she might often enter states of flow even while hopping wildly from book to book, scribbling furiously, underlining, making mental connections. She may use various tactics, including skimming, only reading a preface, or going straight to the index. If she is studying a work of fiction to comment on its narrative structure, she might want to read it cover to cover to get the usual effect, but she might also want to obtain a gist of the plot and then engage in some other ways of reading, even ways as far removed from conventional reading as plotting word frequencies.
As for me, writing bloated comments on internet forums is, perhaps unfortunately, a driving force in my whole practice of reading. I submit these ramblings because I need a question and an audience in order to write anything; otherwise I just sit and stare at the empty screen, pondering my own useless vacuity, feeling not just bored but confused in a metaphysical sense: why ever do anything, really? What is "thinking"? Who am I? If I desire to discuss, though, that gives me real motivation, and reading too acquires a new role.
That all said, I remain curious about other peoples' "practice of everyday life" and their ways of engaging with books. Also about how we could make books more fun. A new kind of book club? Come up with something, please.