The Nervous Purvis

I’ve just knocked out what I think is a pretty good draft of a poem–a short one, but it still went startlingly quickly. It’s funny how the pace of my writing tends to move like this; a lull, where I struggle to come out with much of anything, and then suddenly it’s as if an incubator opens its doors and chicks start flying everywhere. Some will manage to stay off the ground, others will become my own private dodo sanctuary. I think this one’s aiming itself at the outside world, though. Unfortunately, it’s a poem that comes out of very painful news from someone I know, so…I am satisfied, but not exactly happy about it. So it goes.

In other news, earlier this week Salon published Think you know how to read, do you?, an article by Tom Lutz excoriating the ever-increasing-in-number books about how to read books. It’s an interesting read, and one to which I’m at least semi-sympathetic. God knows I have my own frustrations with academia occasionally. But at the same time, the constant litany from these books of “don’t listen to those scary overeducated professors; make your own decisions!” smacks a little too much of anti-intellectualism to me.

On the other (other?) hand, I actually own one of the books he mentions–Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer;–and it’s…really not that bad. I received it as a Christmas present, and so perhaps I was still in a candy-cane haze while reading it and skimmed over what he seems to find damning polemicals, but I wasn’t as bothered by her own moments of “damn the man!” They’re definitely there, but for me those moments were dwarfed by the rest of the book, which is rhapsodical close reading after rhapsodical close reading. Which I enjoyed thoroughly–I’m a book nerd, and it’s fun to find out what passages someone else geeks out over too.

Hm. Reading over my last paragraph, it strikes me that I’m not actually disagreeing with Lutz’s points; I’m just saying that I still sometimes find this type of book a guilty pleasure. Perhaps that’s the way to view them?–rather than instruction manuals, they’re the equivalent of paging through someone else’s Amazon wishlist. And then snapping particularly interesting-looking books up for myself. A mini-genre of books to spur you into buying other books: roll on, consumer culture…