CAAF: Afternoon coffee

The theme of today’s coffee break is “ideal readers.” It was occasioned by Flannery O’Connor’s quote about the “monstrous reader” who always sat beside her as she wrote muttering, “I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.” I would think most writers have a Monstrous Reader living in their home — tall and shambling with a ghastly complexion and seersucker pants, who sleeps on the couch and eats all the chips at night.
But Ideal Readers exist as well, and here’s proof!:
• Nicholas Spice’s review of Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed ran in the London Review of Books many, many moons ago — but it’s stayed with me as a great piece of criticism. Remember hearing that Jelinek had won the Nobel Prize in 2004? Remember the excitement? Your gasp of “?????” I’ve read a few essays and articles about her since, but none of them has done so much to help me understand her books and what about her work gets lost in translation, both literally and culturally. It’s an example to me of a writer finding an Ideal Reader out there — always nice to see, but even more heartening when it’s an author whose work is as unconventional and thorny as Jelinek’s.
I remember when the prize was announced, Jelinek gave several interviews that really delighted me with their dolefulness (a performance by a Nobel Prize winner unchallenged until Doris Lessing’s “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less” in 2007). At the time I thought it’d be nice to start a line of coffee mugs with inspirational wisdom from Jelinek printed on them, my favorites being, “I feel more despair than happiness” and “I have a social phobia, an illness known to doctors.” You know, something nice for around the office. (This is why I’m not Elfriede Jelinek’s Ideal Reader.)
• In this profile, Dave Cole comes across as a writer’s Romantic Ideal of a copy editor. Such tender, gentle hands! (Via sarahw.)
By the way, enjoy the dream, writers, but you should probably know: This is what your copy editor is really thinking about you.