Kyle Minor

Here Is One Good Way for a Reader to Approach a Book:

8 Comments

1. March 31st, 2011 / 8:28 pm Michael de Zayas—

   When I read I like to pretend that a certain friend for family member wrote it. This achieves all the above. My aunt Jennifer (Egan) is a really good writer. Cousin David Foster Wallace (RIP) was even better. My friend Ian (McEwan) tends to the prettified language, and I won’t tell them but I hate the writing of many friends, but I’m still amazed that they are writing books. That’s rather amazing. After all, not everyone can be like my great grandfather Herman.

2. March 31st, 2011 / 8:42 pm Mike Mcquillian—

   I need to remind myself of this every time I open a book. I get frustrated far too easily.

3. April 1st, 2011 / 4:41 am NLY—

   In order to see things more accurately, I tend to both hold a book to the highest possible standard, and assume the book will meet it. If you start from the opposite you have no hope of an accurate reversal (we lose faith easier than we gain it), but when you have high standards and expectations the book naturally corrects you just by your experiencing it. Either your expectations will be met and fleshed, or they will not be met and adjusted accordingly. It has to do, on a phenomenological level, with the way the mind never fully engages with what it has no reason to expect value in. This method ultimately derives from a personal realization that the only books I ever fully came to understand were those I genuinely came to love; that love deepened as the engagement of my mind deepened, as the things it came to see as possible on the part of the book deepened. Most people who talk about this, though, are just describing similar-but-different ways of meeting the book halfway. If as a reader you won’t do that, your chances of interacting meaningfully with it decline sharply.

4. April 1st, 2011 / 5:31 am Kyle Minor—

   That’s another good way to approach a book.

   I was thinking today how there are certain books by certain writers which, if another writer had written them, I would be so happy to have read them, but because they were written by a writer of whom I expected the moon, the sun, and the stars, and because the book only delivered the moon and the stars, I felt disappointed in the book and ultimately disliked the book because it didn’t also deliver the sun, and I thought it was really a screwjob I did on my own ability to fully enter into the pleasures the book had to offer, because of something that existed abstractly outside the book (my previous relationship with the writer through her other books) rather than because of anything inside the book, which, as it turned out, was a pretty excellent book.

   Also, I’m bummed that people can’t seem to enjoy the fact that David Foster Wallace left us one last incomplete gift. I’m planning to go in with low expectations, and hope to be happily surprised that they were too low.

5. April 1st, 2011 / 3:05 pm NLY—

   Yeah, that relationship can hobble one of the other things you mentioned: generosity. Going in with high expectations is fine when you don’t actually know what to expect, but it gets complicated when your preconceived notions are more powerfully formed. Ultimately I think it takes a psychological capacity for adjusting your expectations without conflating that adjustment with disappointment, which immediately shuts the book out of your mind; or, a kind of generosity which can give the book room to work. Because we’re on some level personally tied to whether or not an artist we love sticks the landing, it takes some level of poise to keep from breathing down its neck.

   With the DFW business we seem to have classic build-up backlash. Anytime there’s a reasonable to excessive amount of build-up for something there will always be people who naturally respond negatively to it just because it appears to be expected of them to do otherwise. Heath Ledger’s Joker performance comes to mind–one of the weirdest, most excessive build-ups in recent memory, followed by non-stop praise, followed by a few months of non-stop ‘meh’ before we could get back to seeing it in perspective. Plus there’s probably an element of kick-him-while-he’s-down, here, because the dude’s dead which doesn’t really count as being a person when you’re a writer. So it’s like kicking a park bench with history that you happen to be really envious of but will continue loving for the park bench’s previous contributions to your life (lost my virginity on it, whoop!).
   What I don’t see too many people doing is just experiencing it without taking the time to tell us, in detail, why it’s not a DFW Masterpiece. We get that that’s not what it is because, well, he happened to finish his other ones, guys.

6. April 1st, 2011 / 3:05 pm NLY—

   Yeah, that relationship can hobble one of the other things you mentioned: generosity. Going in with high expectations is fine when you don’t actually know what to expect, but it gets complicated when your preconceived notions are more powerfully formed. Ultimately I think it takes a psychological capacity for adjusting your expectations without conflating that adjustment with disappointment, which immediately shuts the book out of your mind; or, a kind of generosity which can give the book room to work. Because we’re on some level personally tied to whether or not an artist we love sticks the landing, it takes some level of poise to keep from breathing down its neck.

   With the DFW business we seem to have classic build-up backlash. Anytime there’s a reasonable to excessive amount of build-up for something there will always be people who naturally respond negatively to it just because it appears to be expected of them to do otherwise. Heath Ledger’s Joker performance comes to mind–one of the weirdest, most excessive build-ups in recent memory, followed by non-stop praise, followed by a few months of non-stop ‘meh’ before we could get back to seeing it in perspective. Plus there’s probably an element of kick-him-while-he’s-down, here, because the dude’s dead which doesn’t really count as being a person when you’re a writer. So it’s like kicking a park bench with history that you happen to be really envious of but will continue loving for the park bench’s previous contributions to your life (lost my virginity on it, whoop!).
   What I don’t see too many people doing is just experiencing it without taking the time to tell us, in detail, why it’s not a DFW Masterpiece. We get that that’s not what it is because, well, he happened to finish his other ones, guys.

7. April 1st, 2011 / 11:02 pm Aaron G—

   nailed it

8. April 1st, 2011 / 11:42 pm Dreezer—

   Here we are now; entertain us.