Learning to Read Again

I lost the ability to fall into a book, lose myself in fiction, sometime back, decades ago, I guess. Writing, trying to write, being frustrated by rejection, scrutinizing and workshopping my text and the texts of others impaired my ability to just slip into the prose.

So I pushed through it.

I still found books that grabbed me, that tugged me along, that gave me the old feeling I used to get from literally every book I read. But more and more started things and did not finish them. Did not feel drawn to finish them.

And the amount of time I could read, that felt normal to read, slipped to about a chapter. I’d read one, enjoy it, close the book. Ruminate on it. And feel full. Also, perpetually sleep deprived, I’d relax while reading, and pass out.

I read a thousand books from the age of 14-18 or so, a book a night most nights for three years. In later years I veered away from reading only SF and fantasy and horror and read literary stuff, old and new, and some other genre’s, a little mystery, true crime, historical fiction, and non-fiction, generally pop-science books my father recommended.

The kid that read a thousand books was miserable of course. Desperately seeking to escape from his life. His perfectly ordinary and trauma free life, I have to add. I suffered from no privation, no abuse. Nowadays they would call me bipolar with ADHD, and could sling some pharmaceuticals in my direction. Not sure if that would have helped. Probably.

But my reading slowed way the fuck down as I found a group of friends to run around with as a late teenager. Tons of friends. I had friends who didn’t party, as we used to say in the late seventies, who I loved, who I walked with and talked with and drew with and worked on Dungeons and Dragons with. And I had my doper friends, and then I had girlfriends, who mixed to some degree with my male friends.

We hung out that way, mostly, until we went to college, and even there, often. Same sex friend groups with these gender foreign exchange student type people who came along with one of your friends.

Surrounded by friends, having a girlfriend, making art, I still read, I think, but not as much. I was still weird in so many ways but my life was full. I think I read then more to explore the world than to be comforted by not being myself. Me and my friends imbibed stale hippy culture that was being eroded steadily by time and reality, and the rising conservatism which would sweep Reagan into office.

When I moved to Jamaica Plain (which I just called ‘Boston,’) I cut myself off from all that. Left all my friends behind. I followed my girlfriend who would become my wife, but with no other friends. I read again. Not a book a night, but more. And I read things that I had always wanted to read that would have upset my father to see lying around the house.

I read about western mysticism; early christianity, UFOs, paranormal phenomena, socialism, communism and intentional community, utopias. I subscribed to The Nation. My parents were centrist democrats. And I started reading the newspaper.

As a kid, I thought reading a daily newspaper was cool. My parents did it effortlessly, like breathing, and I thought that it was a very grown up thing to do. I would struggle through an article, now and then, my eyes grinding to a halt every few paragraphs. When I started devouring fiction, my parents would look up from their newspapers and magazines and say how much they had loved reading fiction, once upon a time, but now they had a much smaller appetite for it.

So I had my kids, twenty three years ago, buying my first cellular phone when my wife was pregnant. We poked at the early internet with our dial-up modems. I read newspapers now at coffeeshops. I had despised the way they cluttered up the home I had grown up in–we had a daily paper and the Sunday New York Times which was, back then, the size of piece of carry on luggage; one that barely fits under the seat in front of you.

And they saved bits and pieces of it, so I never knew if I could throw it out.

So I thought it was a grown-up thing but found the continuous presence of newsprint annoying. But as the internet, and cellphones proliferated so did coffeeshops, which had stacks of newspapers paper in them.

So I read them and drank coffee, working that time into my busy or no so busy freelance schedules. The cell phone mutated into a smart phone; the dial-up evolved into a cable-modem. The Newspaper leaked into both of these things, filling them to the brim.

Then… social media, and rage reading and commenting on news from the feed.

I read to my kids at night, every night, for an hour or so, and found that this was the happiest time of my day, as I could read again, in a way, and I was absorbing stories and studying them. But the trivia and news and social media noise overwhelmed my fiction consumption. The ever escalating number of cable channels turned into streaming content and I watched TV at night.

Remember, that kid I had been, the 1000 book reader, had three network channels to choose from. One fuzzy PBS channel. And they played the national anthem over a clip of the flag waving and told you to _go the fuck to bed_ at one every goddamn evening. Do kids even know this? That the TV once upon a time told you to GO TO BED?

And what could you DO in bed? By yourself? As a teen? I mean, other than that?

Read, mostly.

So that three hundred book a year thing was a perfect storm that wouldn’t be replicated, at least not accidentally, ever again in my life–to date.

But now I find myself sick of the news. Sick of COVID. Sick of climate change. Sick of the daily burping and shrieking of politics. Sick, sick, sick of the endless stream of commentary and news. Aching again, for that tribe of friends that smoked dope and listened to music and midnight-wandered golf courses and cemeteries, that drank beer in places were the music wasn’t so loud you couldn’t talk to each other. Not too many of them. But not too few.

So I’m a few weeks into a social media fast. Blogging, after social media, feels like a sensory deprivation tank. Every now and then someone taps on the lid to make sure you’re not dead, but it’s about as appealing a space to be as laying abed at the age of 16 staring at the ceiling wondering why the world sucks so hard.

So, not addictive.

And I’m reading a paperback I found in a box on the street, printed in 1975, when I was twelve. My Dad owned it, so I read it, or most of it, when I was fifteen or sixteen. It’s the Best of Henry Kuttner, and I’ll talk more about it maybe in another post. The stories in it were written between 1941 and 1953, so this is a collection of twenty year old stuff my father had read in the SF magazines as a young man, who he bought again, as those magazines had been tossed by his mother. This collection itself, would be tossed by my mother, and I would find it again, on the side of the road, a year before my father died.

I stand now seventy years away from the earlier stories. I stand now forty five years away from the printing of the book. I stand now forty years from my first reading of it.

And after three weeks off facebook, I find, I can read an entire story without checking my device.

So I read The Twonky, a seminal story, a story that invents entire sub-genres all by itself, and found I had never read it before; I has mixed it up with The Little Black Bag, which is another story about another Twonky (which means an artifact from the future discovered in the past) by Kuttner.

I slip into Kuttner’s voice, his mind, effortlessly; decoding his time takes a bit of work, but as an SF reader that isn’t hard; it’s harder to understand the 40s and 50s than to absorb the SF elements, of course.

it’s good to read again.

I’m going to keep performing this brain surgery on myself. I miss my Facebook friends, but maybe I’ll figure out, how to have it all, someday. But I need to glue the shattered bits of my concentration together again. I have been poisoned by my feed; rage and friendship and humor, doled out like those little tickets that drive kids mad at Chuckee Cheese.

I wanna be someone who can read a book a night again.

And I want to write a few books a year.

For as long as I have left.

Gotta figure this out.