Yesterday’s note on Lorenzo Da Ponte was prompted by a remark in David Markson’s Reader’s Block:
Lorenzo da Ponte ended his days teaching Italian at what would later become Columbia University.
It was just a remark, something that came out of the narrator’s memory. (The narrator is called the Reader.) That one line alone did not send me down the rabbit hole. The line hit me because I have been having a conversation with a friend about tolerance — how we behave ethically toward one another even when our values aren’t completely shared. In the context of that conversation, Markson’s line sent me after the rabbit.
I read 15 words in a book Markson calls a novel and spent an hour thinking about implications and possibilities.
That is not the way most novels work. But isn’t that the way conversations with interesting friends work? Isn’t that the way reading works — at least good reading?
It’s slow reading. It’s also delicious fun.
Not long ago, Orange Crate Art had some links to some earlier posts on reading, including one that quoted Zadie Smith. Smith said that we now think of reading as something like going to the movies: we tune in and are entertained. We are passive. She said the classical analogy was that reading was like reading music: you brought your instrument, your attention, your best abilities to the text and tried to play the music an earlier mind had imagined.
It might take me the rest of the year to get through Reader’s Block. I’m in no rush.
• Sources: David Markson, Reader’s Block; Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996, p. 61.
Michael Leddy’s note “Zadie Smith on reading,” Orange Crate Art, Nov. 10, 2006, is here:
https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2006/11/zadie-smith-on-reading.html
No comments:
Post a Comment