New York Diary

I have the beginnings of a robust reading of this book--some already put into well-formed email discussion, even--but I'll spare you for the time being and just let you read it yourself. I'll post again on this sometime next week, okay y'all? Maybe you'll join me?

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Now for the other side of this post, which has to do with the relative virtues of the Book Club. I've never been a member of such a thing. On the one hand, I can see that sharing literature--or, for that matter, nonfictional texts--tends to make it richer, because it allows you to add other peoples' insights and enthusiasms to your own. But the flip side of this is the inability to sustain a lengthy train of thought when conversing amicably. Friendly discussion is not the place for extended monologues; devising strong readings of rich texts may well be best done by exploring an idea rigorously, however.

I think people might jump on me for antisocial tendencies if I suggest that I might rather work through literature alone than with the help of others. To forfend that possibility, I'm going to use an analogy. Let's say you've got a calculus problem in front of you, along with the solution. You have some desire to understand that problem. Well, it makes sense for you to sit down with it and to go through the solution step by step, making sure you really wrap your head around each of the elements that are going into it. It also makes sense for you to sit down with a tutor or an advisor or a friend who understands these things and whose goal is to help you understand them, too. But, I propose to you, you're not going to get nearly as much out of a group of people in a similar situation as yourself, who are all trying to understand the problem for themselves, and who are proposing various ways to solve it and starting here and there and talking about this and that possibility without really knowing what is going on. After an hour of this, you might have some ideas as to what the significance of the problem is and why the solution works. But an hour following the solution step-by-step surely would have gotten you much farther.

A book is interesting; it is analogous both to the problem and the solution. Novels contain within themselves their own answers. (I suppose the "question" of a text is not much more or less than, "What does this mean, is it interesting, and is it beautiful?") I find it immensely satisfying to sit down with a book or poem and to try to work through its richness, to come up with some strong reading of the thing. This is helped by the teacher or friend who says, "Here is what I think this book is about and the way I think these elements come together; why don't you build on that?" It isn't helped as much, at least, by the peers who are as muddle-headed as I am. It's not that I dislike spoken exchange, but that it moves too fast for me; I haven't yet explored notion # 1 to my own satisfaction before notions # 2-12 have been put on the table, tweaked, and summarily dismissed.

There's something satisfying about the written exchange, though. After all, one does get quite a lot out of sharing ideas; it's good to have others to help clear up one's muddle-headedness, if only they can do so at a pace which isn't cloying (and this is what a teacher in an ideal world does). Writing controls the flow, and lets one go at one's own speed, following this or that notion as far as one likes before accepting it--or giving up on it.

This blog thing might just be the perfect medium for group discussion of that sort. Maybe Noir is on to something.