The Elegant Variation: TODD HASAK-LOWY ON BLINDNESS AND WRITING: PART I

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September 16, 2008

TODD HASAK-LOWY ON BLINDNESS AND WRITING: PART I

If you’re lucky enough to get paid to read, then you’re probably unlucky enough to feel that reading is a job. You might well enjoy what you read most of the time, but even so, if it’s part of your work, you can’t help but read it in ways that make the reading anything but the stuff of simple pleasure: you read with a pen or pencil in hand, you ask yourself after every sentence, “Is this good?” “What does it mean?” “How would I teach this?” “Do I even understand this?” You read (or watch) yourself reading, constantly making sure that you’re drawing meaningful conclusions or making suggestive connections, because in one way or another you’re going to be accountable for what you read. Otherwise, why would anyone agree to pay you?

Now as far as making a living goes, one could do much, much worse. But still, if you wind up in a read-for-pay career, it’s likely that a) once upon a time a love of reading played a role in your decision to pursue this career, and/but b) this career of yours has at best complicated this love in ways that on occasion makes the word “regret” not entirely ungermaine to the topic at hand. Sure you avoided selling radio time to advertisers or strip mining in West Virginia, but remember when you just loved reading?

I mention all this in order to present what was for me an exceptional reading experience: Jose Saramago’s Blindness. I liked, a lot even, this novel from its very first (if memory serves me correctly) long sentence, and my fondness for it only grew as I continued. About 100 pages into it, I reached a happy place I had not visited for some time. I knew I was there when I looked at my watch, saw that it was nearly midnight on a weekday, and said to myself, “Okay, just one more chapter.” I realized that this was a book so good that it silenced all the typically bothersome professional yammering that comes steadily from all the other semi-related-to-reader parts of me (teacher, scholar, writer). I was just reading this book, by which I mean that I was unusually present in the reading experience, by which I mean that I was probably out at some boundary where what I already knew a book could show me meets what I was at that moment learning lies just beyond that.

(Continued tomorrow.)

Posted at 12:42 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink

Comments

Yes, you lose your readerly innocence once you become a writer, and again once you're being paid for writing and reading. It gets ever-rarer to find yourself at that far boundary, but it can happen. After years picking over every word of my own - or other people's - it takes a better book to get me there these days, but I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, in human terms. It probably distances us ever more from most readers' experience, too.

Posted by: Emma Darwin | September 16, 2008 at 03:22 AM

I, too, loved Blindness, the first of many Saramago novels I've read. I don't suppose the forthcoming movie will be worth the effort though.

I belong to a number of book discussion groups, and I've felt similar feelings about reading when I find myself racing through the last chapters of a novel in time for the meeting, wondering if I'm missing the terribly important point of the work that everyone else will see, wondering what insightful contributions I can make to the discussion. I've found myself "resenting" my reading obligations at times, and I look for the in-between weeks when I can indulge in books of my own choosing.

I had a similar experience back in the days when I was "committing journalism." As long as I was freelancing some article on a topic that interested me, I enjoyed the whole process. But when writing became (briefly) my sole source of income, I resented writing on assignment and on deadline. Now I've stopped that.

Posted by: Paul Lamb | September 16, 2008 at 04:05 AM

As someone who writes about books for a living (for a book industry magazine and as a blogger) I can understand exactly what you mean. Sometimes now I deliberately decide not to pick up my pen and just hold my comments in memory, but it is almost a stressful and impossible experience. I feel as though when I write the review I may forget something. So I end up with a heavily dog-eared book. I just can't escape the analytical brain when it comes to reading - but it actually doesn't impair my joy of the reading experience. I am so excited to come across a passage and put a big star or exclamation mark next to it on the page, or write 'Pg. 124 - SO APT' on my notepad.
But this is why I will never, ever learn to play an instrument. So many people have wanted to teach me guitar, and I refuse. It's my non-analytical, joyful transcendent medium.
But I love to know the skeleton and subtext and delicious details of a book.

Posted by: LiteraryMinded | September 16, 2008 at 05:00 AM

i work in finance so i still enjoy reading as a hobby. saramago's "blindness" was good but i thought "the gospel according to jesus christ" trumped...everything. a new book of his is due this november, perhaps he will surpass all my expectations.

Posted by: aera | September 16, 2008 at 07:32 AM

Ah, yes ... getting happily lost in a story. It's one of my lifelong favourite pleasures. Two days ago I finished James Howard Kunstler's *World Made By Hand* ... which casts a speculative, compassionate eye on what might be, say, twenty to fifty years down the road if we humans don't smarten up immediately.

My next read is Kathleen Norris' newest title, *Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life.* Norris explores the history, meaning, and experience of acedia -- a "spiritual morphine" deeper than clinical depression that can take root in the core of a person and lay to waste all capacity for feeling, empathy, and engagement with life ...

Another timely book, I think ...

Posted by: Jaliya | September 16, 2008 at 07:57 AM

This is really just fantastic timing. I had time at work to read some of the book you linked to yesterday and I'm currently reading Blindness, started it a few days ago. So when I sat down to read it yesterday, the idea of otherness was very much in my mind. Though I can't shut off the part of my brain that watches myself read, and the part that watches that (etc.) and I can't stop scrawling in the margins, I stopped pretending I was understanding it as much. I ended up feeling much the way you did, just a pleasantly crushing encounter with the other and responding to that with emotion and humanity. The Plague is a really obvious comparison to make, but most all of Camus has the same effect on me.
I look forward to tomorrow's post.

Posted by: P.T. Smith | September 16, 2008 at 08:04 AM

Excellent timing, indeed. I have a copy of "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" but there are a few books ahead of it in the reading queue. Perhaps they will be bumped.

Posted by: Jay | September 17, 2008 at 12:21 AM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

September 16, 2008

TODD HASAK-LOWY ON BLINDNESS AND WRITING: PART I

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

September 16, 2008

TODD HASAK-LOWY ON BLINDNESS AND WRITING: PART I

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism