Jonathan Franzen wooooo
Okay I can't stop reading that Harper's Essay. I keep on going back to it. I'm going to quote it again.
He's talking about Shirley Brice Heath, a MacArthur Fello, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford.
"Her research effectively demolishes the myth of a general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First the habit of reading works of substance must have been "heavily modeled" when he or she was very young. In other words, one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. On the East Coast, Heath found a strong element of class in this. Parents in the priveleged classes encourage reading out of a sense of what Louis Auchincloss calls "entitlement": just as the civilized person ought to be able to appreciate caviar and good Burgundy, she ought to be able to enjoy Henry James. Class matters less in other parts of the country, especially in the Protestant Midwest, where literature is seen as a way to excercise the mind....
As Heath unpacked her findings for me, I was remembering the joy with which I'd discovered two friends in junior high with whom I could talk about J.R.R. Tolkien. I was also considering that for me, today, there is nothing sexier than a reader. But then it occurred to me that I didn't meet Heath's first precondition. I told her I didn't remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.
With Missing a beat Heath replied: 'Yes, but there's a second kind of reader. There's the social isolate- the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you- because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community.'
Pride compels me, here, to draw a distinction between young fiction readers and young nerds. The classic nerd, who finds a home in facts or technology or numbers, is marked not by a displaced sociability but by an antisociability. Reading does resemble more nerdy persuits in that it's a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading- to reconnect to that community.
According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she also calls them "resistant" readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What's perceived as the antisocial nature of "substantive" authors, whether it's James Joyce's exile or J.D. Salinger's reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that's necessary for inhabiting an imagined world. Looking me in the eye, Heath said: 'You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.'
I knew she was using the word 'you' in its impersonal sense. Nevertheless, I felt as if she were looking straight into my soul. And the exhilaration I felt at her accidental description of me, in unpoetic polysyllables, was my confirmation of that description's truth. Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, as reasons to write."
-edit-
i was too tired last night to explain why i put this here. Well I was talking to Dooley about his reading habits (null) compared to mine. Heath also mentioned how a modeled pattern was not sufficient to keep a habit-reader reading. That kind of reader is much more likely to continue reading if they find a peer that also reads.
I feel that I'm the latter kind of reader (social isolate- haha), and it felt strange the first time that I read the essay some weeks ago, because I felt just as Franzen felt. To know that there are readers like me is nice.
He's talking about Shirley Brice Heath, a MacArthur Fello, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford.
"Her research effectively demolishes the myth of a general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First the habit of reading works of substance must have been "heavily modeled" when he or she was very young. In other words, one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. On the East Coast, Heath found a strong element of class in this. Parents in the priveleged classes encourage reading out of a sense of what Louis Auchincloss calls "entitlement": just as the civilized person ought to be able to appreciate caviar and good Burgundy, she ought to be able to enjoy Henry James. Class matters less in other parts of the country, especially in the Protestant Midwest, where literature is seen as a way to excercise the mind....
As Heath unpacked her findings for me, I was remembering the joy with which I'd discovered two friends in junior high with whom I could talk about J.R.R. Tolkien. I was also considering that for me, today, there is nothing sexier than a reader. But then it occurred to me that I didn't meet Heath's first precondition. I told her I didn't remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.
With Missing a beat Heath replied: 'Yes, but there's a second kind of reader. There's the social isolate- the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you- because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community.'
Pride compels me, here, to draw a distinction between young fiction readers and young nerds. The classic nerd, who finds a home in facts or technology or numbers, is marked not by a displaced sociability but by an antisociability. Reading does resemble more nerdy persuits in that it's a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading- to reconnect to that community.
According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she also calls them "resistant" readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What's perceived as the antisocial nature of "substantive" authors, whether it's James Joyce's exile or J.D. Salinger's reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that's necessary for inhabiting an imagined world. Looking me in the eye, Heath said: 'You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.'
I knew she was using the word 'you' in its impersonal sense. Nevertheless, I felt as if she were looking straight into my soul. And the exhilaration I felt at her accidental description of me, in unpoetic polysyllables, was my confirmation of that description's truth. Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, as reasons to write."
-edit-
i was too tired last night to explain why i put this here. Well I was talking to Dooley about his reading habits (null) compared to mine. Heath also mentioned how a modeled pattern was not sufficient to keep a habit-reader reading. That kind of reader is much more likely to continue reading if they find a peer that also reads.
I feel that I'm the latter kind of reader (social isolate- haha), and it felt strange the first time that I read the essay some weeks ago, because I felt just as Franzen felt. To know that there are readers like me is nice.