Reading as Meditation
Every other week, I’m writing a “seed for thought” over on my Substack, The Bird’s Eye. It’s a brief kernel of what I’m thinking about. This week it’s GD Dess’s essay “On the Cult of Craftism” published on Substack and the The Millions last month.
It critiques contemporary fiction (some of which I really like, e.g., Anthony Doerr’s) for paying too much attention to style over substance. Dess also borrows some covering fire from Christian Lorentzen, who says “the dominant literary style in America is careerism,” and Stephen Marche, who blames “the MFA system and of Instagram in equal measure.” It’s a thought-out essay, but also a bit moany: O tempora, o mores. Plenty of writers are telling stories that matter. There are stories enough for every taste. And I doubt that the look on my parents’ faces when young-me said I wanted to write was “optimism for our daughter’s career prospects.” Yet the essay did lead me to Elif Batuman’s nuanced, periodically hilarious, 8,000-word book-review-cum-manifesto on how MFA programs could better serve students by incorporating a deeper historical curriculum.
Yes, obvs. Humans only live so long, and as a species, we’ve been telling stories and having experiences for a long time; understanding as much history as possible is nothing but a good thing, especially if it feeds a sense of curiosity. Which brings me to something I really struggle to remember sometimes.
Internet content is about as meditative as breathing rapidly into a paper bag, and the real pleasure—and work—is in slow curiosity. When I could finally go back to school in 2017, it was to Warren Wilson’s low-res MFA program. The semester was so much about analytical reading. From Nikolai Gogol to the Brothers Grimm to Helene Cixous to Jane Bowles to Audre Lorde, I simply followed questions and drafted a lot of extremely brief essays (2-3 pages!) on minute topics, e.g., “Parenthetical Memories in Mavis Gallant’s ‘Between Zero and One.’” That practice of close attention reminded me of how you can understand something of the nature of an owl simply by examining a single one of its soft-edged feathers.