I probably need to keep a diary. Had been thinking it for a while, since the
spring; as I recovered from illness and ventured out to all sorts of places and
activities that were new and exciting to me after 8-10 years, but boringly
normal to others, I noticed myself emailing friends about the most banal
stuff.Then this article appeared yesterday:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/aug/21/dear-diary-how-keeping-a-journal-can-bring-you-daily-peace.
But I've found myself with another post I wanted to put on here, and more or
less the time to write it (enough if I don't edit, which isn't exactly good for
advertising my editing work...) So it won't sit in drafts like a couple of
others from recent weeks.
----
Many online book discussions that, initially, look interesting to me, founder on the same rocks: of what readership we are talking about, and which areas of publishing we are talking about.
Whilst it appears to be worse on Twitter due to the limited character count, I often saw this come up on Goodreads, where the comments allow c.1500 words, rarely necessary to use in full during this sort of conversation. So there is a perennial failure of participants to agree on terms of engagement. Are we talking about: a) pretty much all fiction books published? b) About the stuff big publishers term literary fiction? c) About formally 'experimental' literature? (Most experimental lit is actually more like school chemistry experiments than major scientific discoveries, it isn't brand new: it uses existing approaches and riffs on stream of consciousness, internet-based variations on the epistolary novel &c.) Are we talking about: a) more or less all adult readers? b) About the typical graduate with a busy job who maybe manages to read two or three or four dozen fairly random books each year, perhaps at least as much popular non-fiction as fiction - from things recommended in the papers, bookshop finds and friend or book group recommendations (at least if they are not in the years of caring for small children)? c) About small sections of online communities where it's common to read and write about 100+ books every year, most of these being weighty classics and what mainstream publishers would consider 'highly literary' or 'difficult'?
I see a lot of posting from the (c) perspectives, of very dedicated readers who, to me, seem so immersed in their cultural communities that they have lost sight of the rest of readers (never mind the huge numbers of non-readers who are also interesting people) and of what I would consider normality. It seems a particular failing of amateur blogging and reviewing communities, whereas journalists and academics appear to retain wider perspective, even if their tastes lean relatively highbrow. The postmodernist, relativist turn towards respecting the middlebrow and popular culture never seems to have arrived in some corners of the internet - or rather, the internet provides a haven for those who dislike it and ignore it in order to focus on their more recherché tastes, which at some points in the past were more prestigious than abstruse. And then I get mixed up with them because I read a little of what they read, and because I like discussion (and still need to make more interesting friends to have one to one, more friendly and interesting and less repetitive equivalents of these discussions).
I also just can't find it *as* important as it seems to be to these people. Overall, they seem very sheltered. Among them, I know, are a few people who've coped with really terrible things by losing themselves in serious literature, but the majority seem to have always been more or less comfortable. I look quite good and healthy these days, but, recovered in some ways from a decade of horrible illness during which it seemed that big parts of my normal life were gone forever (and that's on top of other difficult experiences in childhood and my twenties), I feel inside like an animal that has survived gnawing a couple of paws off in order to escape traps. I am not as many others are. On the other hand, I've never yet starved (up till recently I had reasonable justification for handouts from well-off relatives), and if I was ever anything like homeless in my life it involved being able to pay for interim student halls, or holiday accommodation, albeit with inner dread at the savings, and therefore the days of life itself, dripping ever faster away down the drain. But for a basically middle-class person from a reasonably well-off background, I've been through a lot of shit. And so far, the only new people I feel comfortable with have also been through a lot (generally whilst retaining a partial safety net of financial or cultural capital; like me, middle class culturally and in manners with some rather non-middle-class experiences). Some being more resilient (from whom I need to osmose as much as possible), others more fragile. But, otherwise, all around, and especially so online, are these very comfortable people with the priorities of those who've never really known that edge, who never had to work out over years how to get somewhere near comfortable whilst simultaneously feeling like life had a knife to your throat, or how to sound reasonably polite and composed, especially to mere acquaintances, whilst perpetually in the passenger seat of a car speeding towards a cliff. (Though they probably teach the latter at the top public schools anyway.) Blinkers are necessary, but you also never quite forget.
It's a weird function of this combination of experiences that I readily feel people are placing too much importance on books, or some aspect of them such as reading all of an author's work. They don't seem to have the same voice inside that I do, it doesn't matter that much in general or to most people. (People whom I know use books to cope and survive, or those from backgrounds where books, or interesting books, were a treasure genuinely difficult to obtain, are exempt. Those are very different circumstances.) I am enough of a self-pitying pretentious twat that I once said, to someone who knew all or most of the author's work, "if Linda Grant murdered her library, I hung drew and quartered mine". But cheek aside, whilst it was c.1500 books down to <100, it wasn't just books, it was many things, having to sell them over years, or give away boxes of stuff that (owch again) in the 00s I could have once got money for, but Royal Mail pricing changes had now made impossible, and the wrench and the tearing feeling over and over again of having to get rid of things that were meaningful when, for years, I also never got to spend time in person with anyone at all I found meaningful, and only one absolute stalwart friend by email through those years (though a handful of others appeared or reappeared latterly). Now, I'm having to get rid of more things again, but that's because Stuff is now getting in the way of experiences and people and living somewhere smaller where I can get a better social life with less travelling, and spending time on things that aren't Stuff. I don't want to be like my mum and aunt who forever seemed to be in process of sorting, tidying and decluttering their houses. A perpetual engagement with possessions similar to hoarders but without the dangerous level of clutter. (High-turnover cryptic hoarders?) That's caused by too much stuff. Getting rid of it is still something of a wrench, but at least it's for an optimistic reason. All this makes it easy for me to imagine, that if it really mattered or the result would be worthwhile enough, I'd chuck all my books. Most people in online reading communities aren't like that. The only one I remember talking to who was, had moved countries more than once. (And even then other expats weren't on the same wavelength as she was.)
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