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January 19, 2005
OGIC: Truer confessions
Responses to last week's post on demonstrative reading have been all over the map. Most people I heard from seemed to take for granted the attention-seeking dimension of reading in public and wondered what all my fuss was about. I suppose it's become a banal observation what with the boom in Starbuck's-sitting and, of course, the invasion of the bookstore-cafes. More to the point, though, I shied away in my post from admitting just how painfully self-conscious this variety of reading could be when I was younger. Sometimes there was very little turning of pages at all but very much furtive looking up to see whether I'd been noticed. I must have looked ridiculous. Also, on rare occasions I managed to stick myself with a book I really, really didn't want to read. I drew the line at books in other languages, but New Directions translations could be irresistible. These days I'm unlikely to be seen reading anything very impressive at all, since it's the Westlakes (but not the Starks, mind you, which are trade paperbacks), John D. MacDonalds, and Reginald Hills that fit best in my purse.Over at Tingle Alley, Carrie has come up with a few delicious anecdotes about demonstrative reading gone wrong. Herein you'll find the memorable lament "Oh no, you're one of those girls who walk around reading Cortázar."
Meanwhile, one correspondent prefers to keep his reading choices to himself, thank you very much:
I've never been comfortable reading in public. This is probably a relic of growing up around kids who'd beat up any poindexter seen with a book. It probably also has something to do with my insecurity, worrying that some hoity-toity type will spy my reading material and reveal my inferior taste for everyone to see.
Another reader brings up a point that never occurred to me: perhaps that weathered Celine edition I thought so becoming at 17 was actually screaming "Unapproachable!" and even looked, to some blinkered eyes, downright unfeminine:
I used to engage in much demonstrative reading in Ann Arbor coffee shops, though often because I was actually reading what I wanted (not because I picked up The American Scholar or Far Eastern Economic Review just to seem cool). Finally (though this didn't stop me) a female classmate told me that I'd never get a date because I looked too smart and scared guys away. Well, I didn't get many dates then with or without the books so I just kept on reading and married an equally nerdy reader.
This all sounds so healthy and reasonable, I'm starting to think the category of demonstrative reading needs to be subdivided into the innocent and the guilty. A friend here in Chicago is sharp and shameless in dissecting the latter:
I'm a total repeat offender. I think it's one of those fantasies that is kind of irresistible to the bookish-- so seductive because we can fool ourselves into thinking that our act of preening is instead the result of a kind of self-absorption that we (and, I think we imagine, the person who discovers or recognizes or understands us) would see as noble, as opposed to all the vulgar acts of self-absorptive display that the intellectually unwashed engage in at the gym, the lake front, or some wretched nightclub. I remember during my second year of grad school looking for a book at Barnes & Noble, and they had set up this mini Starbuxian coffee-shop next to the philosophy section, and I remember being genuinely offended (!) when seeing this yuppie guy sitting at a table in horn-rims and a black turtleneck (heh--this was still the early 90s) thumbing through some Barthes while sipping his latte-cappuccino. The nerve! Co-opting the pose I was suffering through graduate school to earn. Of course I was feeling these things totally unironically and with an embarrassing lack of self awareness.
Read three John Grishams and a Da Vinci Code on the steps of the AIC and your sins will be forgiven, darling.
Posted January 19, 2005 1:06 AM
