Walking Words

I have been moving my books around. There are practical reasons for this; though the benefits are more wide-ranging. As my old friend Johannes Speyer used to say: ‘a book, like a dog, should be regularly taken for a walk. It needs to move around; to feel the air curl around its dusty spine: to breathe, in short, to be.’

Fine words, which I have done my best to ignore for the best part of my life. Moving books around, after all, takes up time. Books are heavy objects – and have an aggravating habit of refusing to fit in the space set aside for them. It was all right for Speyer to keep his books in a state of constant flux: the old professor was a bachelor, with little interest in keeping a tidy house. He lived for books – and books alone. I love books; but I have limits (I also have a wife).

And yet I cannot deny the wonders of this latest move. Some books have not travelled far; from one end of a room to another, maybe, or from an upper shelf to a lower (contrary to Speyer’s dictums, I still keep books on shelves) . The shift, small as it is, seems massive. Suddenly the book takes on a completely different character. Last week I was impervious to its charms. Today I cannot stop myself taking it down from its place. The words, which used to drop off the page like sad autumn leaves, now bounce from the paper like rabbits in spring.

It could not be clearer: books, like people, like a bit of change.

Upturn the Nesting Swan!

A nesting swan reminds me/ of a woman reading quietly

Thus spake Alma Koks in her 1967 poem ‘Swoman’. I know many people who would not approve of these lines, for a variety of reasons. The one that most readily comes to mind, however, is Johannes Speyer, whose polemical essay from the same year (‘Upturn the Nesting Swan!’, collected two years later in Seven Essays) vehemently rejects the idea that readers, male or female, should conflate reading with nesting. ‘A book is not an egg that we nurse under warm wings’, Speyer writes. ‘No, a book is a living thing. It needs air. It needs to be taken out for walks. It needs to be treated like the active object it is’.

And so Active Reading was born…

As doth the pissing dog

Sometime over the last week, someone was drawn to this blog by the following search-term: “active reading without damaging books”

I am, as ever, intrigued. Is this person seriously seeking a way of reading actively without damaging books? You might as well desire to travel to the North Pole without having to see or touch snow. Damage is an inevitable outcome of active reading, just as it is an inevitable outcome of living. It is not the purpose of it and, on rare occasions, books may emerge relatively unscathed. But to openly try to avoid damage would be a dangerous thing indeed. The pristine book is something to be feared. A book without scratches, like a face without wrinkles, is something to be highly suspicious of. As doth the pissing dog, so life will leave its mark.

Unless the text becomes completely unreadable, one should not worry about the physical damage a book suffers. One should care only about the relationship between the book and the reader. Only if this is damaged is there cause for concern.

Rather Like Birds

‘To keep his books Cosimo constructed a kind of hanging bookcase, sheltered as best he could from rain and nibbling mouths. But he would continuously change them around, according to his studies and tastes of the moment, for he considered books as rather like birds which it saddened him to see caged or motionless.’ (Italo Calvino, Baron in the Trees)

This passage raises two important issues: that of keeping books outside, and that of keeping books on the move. As one would expect, Johannes Speyer had something to say on both these points.

Firstly: the great outdoors. Should or shouldn’t one run the risk of leaving a book to the natural elements? I know people who wince whenever they pass booksellers taking their precious wares onto the pavement. This is, to them, an act of pure cruelty. What if it rains or snows? Even the sun can bleach a book cover. No, it doesn’t bear thinking about…

But consider it from the book’s point of view. It’s nice to take a breather once in a while; to feel the wind caress your earlobes like the tip of a squirrel’s tail. What novel wouldn’t like to feel a soft breeze ruffling through its back pages? A tricky question to answer – unless your name is Johannes Speyer. ‘Books belong outside,’ he told me several times: ‘it’s the only place for them’. Shortly before his death he began an essay on this very subject. Alas, Dickens Amongst the Leaves was never completed. What it argued, however, is that literature, like living things, needs air. It needs to be exercised in order to work its spell. ‘Take a book for a walk,’ is yet another of Speyer’s famous sayings – but it holds true.

This leads us neatly onto the second point: that books need movement. ‘A bookshelf is like a battery farm,’ wrote Speyer in Riding the Crest of Culture: ‘and we know that battery hens lay inferior eggs’.

Need I say more? Perhaps I ought to. Suffice it to say, Speyer didn’t own any ordinary bookshelves. He struggled, however, to create what he deemed ‘a satisfactory system for the ordered disordering of books’. Several methods were tested, but they all took up too much time. He regularly spent more than four hours a day moving books back and forth – for no good reason other than to ‘keep the little bastards guessing’. One upshot of this was that he was always losing books. This didn’t bother him all that much. ‘One must not keep one’s thoughts too tightly bound’ he once said. Thus was chaos allowed to reign, perhaps a little too freely.

Extreme Reading (Intermission)

The gospel of Georgy Riecke is not, to my small knowledge, widely read. Several of my passions are, nevertheless, clearly shared by others in this strange bedraggled community we call ‘the world’.

Active Reading, a project passed onto me by my late-teacher Johannes Speyer, is one such passion. I’ve written about it many many times (such as here, or better still here). Little did I know, however, that other people have been writing about it also, albeit under a different guise. Where I call it ‘active’, they call it ‘extreme’. See, for example, this essay here.

Closer to home, I note that children across the United Kingdom were asked to participate in some ‘extreme reading’ as part of this year’s ‘World Book Day’. This, I fancy, was one (previously reported) result, though there are many others, (including this and this). All very commendable, in my mind, though one hates to see something as serious as ‘active’ reading treated as a mere fancy: something one does one day of the year, and only when a photographer is close at hand. And why aren’t more people crediting Johannes Speyer as the Father of Extreme Reading? Credit, I think, where credit is due…

The New Readers: Principles and Models (Part Two)

The history of reading, as the last post argued, has its traditions. Each century has its reading habits. There have, however, been few radical changes in the way people read. In recent decades, nonetheless, some critics have noticed a shift in practices. In A History of Reading in the West Armando Petrucci writes:

The impression one gets by frequenting places of higher learning in the United States – in particular, certain university libraries (if I can generalize from personal and relatively casual experience) – is that there, as elsewhere, young readers are changing the rules of reading behaviour…

Interesting. He goes on:

How can we describe the new ‘modus legendi’ of young readers? First of all, the body takes totally free positions determined by individual preferences: a reader can stretch out on the floor, lean against a wall, sit under (yes, under) a reading room table, sit with his or her feet up on a table (the oldest and most widespread stereotype) and so on.

Under a table? Really, this is too much…

Second, the ‘new readers’ either almost totally reject the normal supports for the operation of reading – the table, the reading stand, the desk – or else they use them in inappropriate (that is, unintended) ways.

Can it get any worse? It can…

Finally, the new ‘modus legendi’ also includes a physical relationship with the book that is much more intense and direct than in traditional modes of reading. The book is constantly manipulated, crumpled, bent, forced in various directions and carried on the body. One might say that readers make it their own by an intensive, prolonged and violent use more typical of a relationship of consumption than of reading and learning.

Oh now: consumption is such a dirty word. Petrucci is worried, clearly. All this ‘intensity’ has him hot under the collar. After all, think of the implications:

All this ends up influencing reading habits. The short lifetime of the book and the absence of a precise collocation for it (hence the uncertainty of ever being able to put one’s hands on it) make difficult, if not impossible, an operation that was common in the past: rereading.

Here, it seems, is the rub. Now books are being crumpled and bent by the intensity of the ‘new’, ‘active’ or ‘extreme’ reader, the possibilities of rereading are diminished. The book is treated as something to be consumed and then thrown away: not to be re-read.

But is this really true? If it is, two of my passions (active reading and re-reading) are seen to contradict each other. The book that is read actively is less likely to be read again. Unless of course it is. And why wouldn’t it be? ‘Active’ or ‘extreme’ reading doesn’t necessarily destroy a book. Damage takes place, certainly. To read a book with intensity is not, however, to wish to kill it. Quite the opposite, in fact. The ageing of a book represents a closer, more intimate relationship between book and reader. The book is marked by the reader: it becomes part of their identity. To throw it away would be to throw away a part of themselves. A fresh, un-marked book is easy to give away: it has no life. A dog-eared copy of one’s favourite novel on the other hand: to destroy such a thing would be sacrilege.

Which brings us, I guess, to libraries…

Principles and Models (Part One)

Throughout its reign, the dominant order of reading dictated certain rules about how to read in a civilized manner… They proclaimed that the reader must be seated in an erect position with his arms resting on a table and the book in front of him. Reading must be done with maximum attention, without moving, making noise, annoying others or taking up too much space. One should read in an orderly fashion, following the text section by section, turning pages carefully without rumpling them or folding them down and without mistreating or damaging the book… according to these principles and models, reading is a serious and demanding activity requiring effort and attention… Other modes of reading (alone, anywhere in the house, in total liberty) are of course known and even acknowledged, but as secondary; they are grudgingly tolerated, but felt to be potentially subversive (Armando Petrucci, A History of Reading in the West)

Serious and demanding: yes. Reading is certainly this. But to impose rules upon reading undercuts the seriousness of the endeavour. It makes reading just another silly ritual, like  passing port to the left, or standing for the national anthem. The  more subversive the reader, the more serious. One does not engage by being orderly. Take care, by all means, but take care not to be too polite. Be serious about your carelessness.

Incongruous Reading

Black ice, piercing winds and constantly falling snow. Time, perhaps, for some sunny literature. Not to warm oneself up, necessarily, but to embark upon one of my favourite pastimes: incongruous reading.

It’s an outpost, an offshoot, a tinkling tributary from the sparkling stream of Active Reading. And the idea is, as always, refreshingly simple. One aims to counteract the mood of a book by reading it in comparatively different surroundings; to provide a winning contrast, a revealing new perspective: a fresh context. There is little need for further explanation; nonetheless I have drawn up a small list of possible candidates for incongruous reading. And here it is:

1. Turgidovsky on the beach (I have tried this, with some success).
2. P G Wodehouse in a howling gale (I’m waiting for the right kind of gale).
3. Oa Aayorta (master of cramped, inner spaces) on the Mongolian plains (may require some planning).

The latter parenthetical comment – ‘may require some planning’ – deserves a little expansion. Reading, as I’m constantly reminding people, is not something one turns to in moments of idleness; during one’s ‘spare time’. In fact, all good reading ‘may require some planning’. Dragging your book to your favourite armchair is simply not enough. Plan ahead, dear reader, plan ahead.

Proust and Parsnips

My recent article on Active Reading and pineapples (aka ‘The Doors of Pineappleception’) was welcomed by the online community with an empty cheer; a wave of fierce indifference; a wall of deafening silence. No matter. I trust the world will come around to my way of thinking eventually. We trail-blazers are often misunderstood at first. One day my pioneering efforts will be recognised for what they really are.

Meantime, I notice that other writers have been treading, albeit in inferior footwear, on the same sort of track. Wagtail Books – a small publishing firm, unknown to me before last week – have just annouced a ‘series of short books examining the relationship between eating and reading’. First up, Casimir Edridge’s Proust and Parsnips, to be followed, shortly, by Katherine Alstrep’s Chekhov and Chocolate.

It is left to us to ponder precisely how these two books (and those that come later) will examine the relationship between eating and reading. Inclined as I am to moody cynicism, I can only imagine them skirting the surface of this ocean of possibilities. Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps these aren’t just quirkily titled, soulless scribblings, primed for the Christmas market. Perhaps Edridge really does explore the vast potential that lies in the subject of eating parsnips whilst reading Proust. We’ll have to wait and see.

There is, of course, one telling detail that might lead a reader to the belief that these books won’t be worth their while. And this is the fact that alliteration seems to have been the controlling factor when it comes to partnering the foodstuff with the relevant literature. Proust and Carrots simply would not do. It had to be Proust and Parsnips.

Should this make us suspicious? I am tempted to say ‘yes’ – but then, I too have a history of letting the boat of my work be steered by the rudder of silly rules. My first book, you may recall, was a comparison of novelists whose surname began with the letter ‘G’. Why the letter ‘G’? Why not? Sometimes it takes arbitary structures for us to see things afresh.

The Vanilla Milk Incident

Johannes Speyer was not what you’d call a violent man. Violent language – possibly even violent ideas – were very much a part of his criticism, especially in later life, but beyond the page, well, I have met soft toys with a meaner streak. For all his call to action; his appeal to readers across the world to get up off their backsides and fight the good fight, Speyer himself led a quiet life. Which is not to say that he was a hypocrite; he was simply slow-off-his-feet and hampered, throughout life, by a series of crippling injuries. Had he not had chronically flat feet and a back that would make loners on the roof of Notre Dame chuckle carelessly, who knows – he might have read a few more novels on mountain tops.

Of course, even the calmest souls bubble over into casual violence occasionally. Remember the contretemps with the vociferous magpie? Who could forget it? Speyer in a temper was a dangerous beast. It was lucky that it happened so rarely – and that when it happened, the circumstances were usually so bizarre that the whole thing could be covered by laughs.

Throwing milk in the face of a ten year old isn’t, on reflection, all that funny. But one must appreciate the fact that this was, all things considered, a somewhat ‘difficult’ child – and that the best of us, put in the same situation, might have thought a glass of milk the safe option. Indeed, I’ve heard it said that the same child, on different occasions (and by different people) had the following things chucked in her general direction: a fire extinguisher, a shoe, a large cactus, a hot apple pie and a small-scale model of a cathedral in southern France. So a glass of milk represents restraint: real restraint.

But what was Speyer doing with this child in the first place? That will all become clear when I explain that she was the daughter of Maria von Küppelberg, the infamous German hostess, whose Thursday ‘at homes’ were the heart of the Viennese literary scene in the early 1970s. You’d be hard pressed to find an Austrian writer who wouldn’t have chopped off a limb or two in order to get through von Küppelberg’s front door. Even Speyer, it seems – not usually a social butterfly – was drawn in by her mysterious powers.

Her daughter, however, he was less impressed with – for the very good reason that he had high expectations of her. Too high, one might say – but then Speyer had ridiculously high expectations of all children. As you will no doubt know, his texts are liberally sprinkled with phrases such as ‘seeing with a child’s eye’ or ‘this supreme child-like vision’. The idea of the child-like eye was one with which he was obsessed. Too bad he never met a child who had such an eye. All the children he ever came across saw with somewhat cynical eyes, sorely lacking the profound naivety he praised them for.

Matilda von Küppelberg was one such child. He thought, poor chap, that she of all people would appreciate his forward-thinking theories. Her pure child’s mind would see to the heart of his vision and understand its eternal truths. Her young imagination would be fired up by his thoughts. She would understand, oh yes: she would understand.

Unfortunately not. ‘You are a silly man,’ was all the young girl had to say on the matter. Active Reading was not for her. A glass of vanilla milk in the face, consequently, was.

The Doors of Pineappleception (Part Four)

[Parts One, Two and Three]

Interesting people often appear in Vladivostok – but they just as often disappear. After our initial meeting, I saw very little of Yile. Things weren’t going well for him at the university and he left soon after. We promised to stay in touch, as you do, and I had half an idea that we would – Yile being the sort of man who takes promises seriously (almost as if they actually mattered). For a year, yet, nothing. Not a squeak. Then, one day, a letter from Edinburgh.

He had secured a tutoring job, he said, on top of which he was making strides in what he called his ‘personal research’. Everything was going very well, he said, but he required some volunteers. I wrote back: volunteers for what? (I was simply being curious; not setting myself up as a potential guinea pig). He replied: ‘The participant will be required to consume a large amount of pineapple juice, after which he/she will be expected to perform a series of simple tasks, from walking to reading’.

I thought about this for a while. I will confess, my interest was piqued. I wanted to let Yile go: him and all his crazy pineapple-ventures. But at the same time I couldn’t help but acknowledge that his research interests collided with my own. Drinking copious amounts of pineapple juice and then reading a book. What was that if not an experiment in Active Reading? Granted, a broad stripe of mild lunacy was painted across its pungently fruity chest. But how often can one say that? Johannes Speyer was often coming out with ideas that ballerined on the edge of reality – yet who could deny his genius? Could Yile’s excitement really be so misplaced? He was no amateur scientist, it seemed. He knew his stuff. And if he thought that large amounts of pineapple juice could transform the relationship between reader and text, it seemed churlish to dismiss him just like that.

But this wasn’t, of course, the only reason I volunteered. No – there’s more to it than that. Restless adventurer in the literary wilderness I may be, but as people have often pointed out, there is a smidgen of reluctance lodged deep within my reckless soul. I don’t always rush madly into new experiences. In this case, however, coincidence and convenience were on my side. I was due to be in Edinburgh later that month. I would have a little spare time. Why not take that time and give it over to a strange Belgian scientist? Why not present my young healthy body at his door and say ‘Here you are good sir, now fill me up with pineapple juice until I almost explode’.

Why the hell not?

[Part Five]

Mysterious Telegrams (2)

Picking up on yesterday’s postage: whatever could have provoked an able-minded thinker such as Johannes Speyer to send a seemingly absurd telegram to the equally-significant sage Michael von Stürker? ‘Butter gone rancid. Off to the docks’, read the strange message in question, sent in early 1973 from a personal telegraph machine given to Speyer by a lady who went by the name of Joy (though her actual name was Hephzibah). Oh yes indeed, Speyer personally owned a telegraph machine: on its own an interesting fact, make no bones about it – but, more importantly, why send missives to von Stürker, and why this particular one?

For years it puzzled; and even now sense oozes only slowly from the set of facts we find before us. Speyer and Michael von Stürker were not the best of friends, but for some years (four, to be exact), they did get along relatively well. During these four years they quite often communicated, sometimes by letters, sometimes by the telephone – but most often by telegram. For yes: von Stürker too owned a telegraph machine, which he used for two purposes only – petty flirtation with girls in their early twenties, and messages to Johannes Speyer.

If Speyer’s telegrams tended to lean against the queer cliff of absurdity, the same could certainly be said of von Stürker’s. I will not, can not list them all, but here are a couple of choice examples: ‘Fourteen eagles. I run merrily’ and ‘The egg is canned. Callous jaws collapse’. Intriguing, no? What a weird way for two middle-aged academics to communicate.

Or is it? Not when you realise that Speyer and von Stürker shared a passion for two particular things: early seventeenth century Japanese poetry – and the idea that art should be filtered through unfamiliar mediums (an idea which led Speyer, eventually, to the concept of Active Reading).

Aha. Now it all becomes clear, does it not? These peculiar telegrams are, in fact, poems translated. Or to be more exact, the poems of one Kokimizu Ishu (1681 - 1739), translated into English from the Japanese, by Speyer and von Stürker, friendly competitors in the complex art of Ishu translation. I say competitors: it is interesting to note how many of the telegrams sent between these two appear to represent the same poem. Consider the following from von Stürker: ‘It has become cheese. To the harbour I fly’. Surely a correction of Speyer’s ‘Butter gone rancid. Off to the docks’?

Perhaps this explains why their friendship finally fell apart – and why the ‘Ishu Telegram Project’ never got further than a series of retrospectively curious messages representing a fascinating attempt by two great writers to resurrect interest in a Japanese poet who was, and remains, sadly forgotten. Or perhaps it was something else entirely…

Active Reading and Technology

Many words have been wasted – and just as many justifiably employed – on the future of the book. How long will it last? Is paper already a thing of the past? I’m not writing on it now – and you, most likely, are not reading off it. So why do you insist on buying novels which are printed on the old stuff? Why not download Boris Yashmilye’s latest creation onto some sort of handheld electronic reading device instead?

One of the many fears that flies, like some drowsy wasp, around the strangely scented flower of technology, is the implications it will have for Active Reading. Say what you like about a book, but it’s a hardy beast. Many a book have I dropped into a bath, or tossed from a tree, or had trampled on by a wildebeest: and, on the whole, they’ve seen it through with all or most of their words intact. Though it would be a distinct lie to say that my books enjoy hanging out in saunas, they suffer in silence, and survive without fatal loss of limb (with one or two shrivelled exceptions).

Could the same be said for any of these new-fangled reading devices? Can one cuddle a kindle to one’s chest in a rainstorm without fear of it coughing up faults (and you coughing up serious cash for a replacement)? Do these devices function in a dusty desert, or in sub zero temperatures? Would you even have the confidence to take one with you into all the grubby places to which any serious reader ought to gravitate? Is the very future of Active Reading – and, by association, the future of reading itself – at risk from the advent of electronic books?

The Transcendent Reader

According to this postage over at Hooting Yard: ‘an eighteenth-century subscription library in London divided its readers into four categories: the Sedate, the Historian, the Theatrical Amateur, and the Gay and Volatile.’

More work needs to be done, clearly, on the precise features of these four categories, although I can already say for sure which of the types I would like to see pushed off a rocky promontory into a shark-strewn sea. I refer, of course, to the ‘sedate’ reader.

Now I’ve got nothing against sitting down, or sitting still. An action-packed life is not for all of us. Nevertheless, seeing the word ‘sedate’ placed next to the word ‘reader’ makes me choke. Reading is a journey, is movement, is progress, is exploration, is momentum, is activity. A ‘sedate’ reader is not a reader at all: it is just a person looking at words.

A quick glance at the remaining categories makes me wonder whether they hold any more promise. Probably not. Categories can be pitiful things – and it would be dangerous for any reader to slot themselves into any one of these. The true reader is transcendent. They must slip into no and into every category. They must burrow like moles, soar like kites, scuttle like crabs, glide like eels, bounce like kangaroos, trot like ponies and dance like a cowboy’s daughter. They must transcend.

I’ll Have Whatever He’s Having

I once had a friend who liked to shape his reading experience around that of the characters in the book. i.e. he never read Raymond Chandler without a good bottle of scotch by his side – and a large packet of cigarettes. Jane Austen didn’t make sense to him, he said, unless he was kitted out in full Regency regalia. And if music is mentioned in the text (for example, Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale) he had to have that music playing in the background.

In this sense, my friend was an exemplary active reader. But – as I used to argue, incessantly - he ought to have made a greater effort to see things from the other side: to employ oppositional as well as complimentary juxtapositions. Which is to say: Raymond Chandler while eating  hot cross buns, Jane Austen while dressed as a goth and Gide while listening to modern jazz funk. For variation lies at the heart of active reading. As I have stressed so many times: it isn’t about finding the best conditions for reading, but exploring a range of them.

Of course, some writers have gone down my friend’s path; trying to bring their readers further into the work by manipulating the conditions in which their text is consumed. Oa Aayorta is a good example. In his second novel, An Everlasting Evening, he invites readers to make the dishes mentioned by the food-loving hero – and to eat them as they read the next chapter. At the time of its publication, I praised the book for ‘creating a synthesis of language and taste unprecedented in the history of culture’. Whilst I have no intention of withdrawing that statement, it is worth noting that Aayorta’s methods do have their downside. Follow them and you are guaranteed a great reading experience. But there is just as much to be said for not following them also. Second time round you ought to ditch the writer’s instructions and go your own way. Third time round, go another way. Fourth time, yet another.

There is, and should be, no set way of reading a novel.