orbis quintus

Just woke up. Kinda bleary. It’s an odd morning to be up this late.

Thumb drives & oven clocks and Ed Champion are going all meta satire over a couple of Guardian blog posts. All it did was make me drool a bit. The words are not soaking into my head.

However, one of the posts that they are commenting on is this post by Mary Fitzgerald about several books about the act of reading, titled How to Bluff – and Why, all tied together by Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Yeah, comedy piece. ROTFLMAO. Or not. No, definitely not. I want to stab someone in the shoulder, set him on fire, and throw the corpse in a river. Fitzgerald points to this other post that i’d missed last month, with some other smug shit writing about How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read without having a clue what it’s about. She even manges to turn it into a little nationalist jab, “In Britain, it would probably be called bullshitting; in France, however, taking about books without having read them is a perfectly acceptable skill.”

For fuck’s sake, Bayard was too flippant in titling his book, but it’s still not a guide on how to bluff. It’s about accepting limitations as a reader, admitting ignorance, and working beyond that. It’s not to impress people, you egomaniac fuckwits, but how to be part of a conversation that has existed since the dawn of the written word.

I’m disgusted. Let them play with their bellybuttons and sniff their fingers, then write a cleverly ironic column about how everyone does it. There is more than one way to accept one’s ignorance, and i’d rather Bayard’s path than these twits pretending that they are somehow more honest readers in dissing How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Back to Fitzgerald though:

How many experts, if any, do we really need to guide our reading? It may be too obvious a question to pose, but isn’t the pleasure to be derived from reading – and writing – largely subjective? And while the “skill” of appearing more well-read and culturally well-rounded than you actually are might impress some people at dinner parties, surely there is still some private gratification to be gained from discovering and reading books yourself, rather than just talking about them?

The answers?

1. As many as possible.
2. Yes… It is too obvious of a question.
3. What the fuck are you talking about? What is all of this nonsense about dinner parties? How many of these things do you social butterflies attend?

The third question might deserve more thought. Again, the skill is not to appear as more than what you are. The skill is in accepting limitations and navigating them. I don’t attend these apparently fabulous dinner parties where everyone sits around talking about books, but knowing just how many books are out there and how many different people there are, why would anyone think that everyone could have a basic grasp of the same canon of books? Because many readers are totally alone in their reading, as it is indeed a solitary act, there is no reason to assume that we are all meeting on a common landscape.

Damn it. I just realized there are contrasts to be made in talking about music versus books. I’ll come back to this topic in a later post.