On re-reading

I maybe shouldn’t admit to this but I will anyway.

The other day, I was doing some reading for my course, a chapter from a book. As I read, it seemed familiar — no, not quite familiar, more like somewhere between the understood and the known. Now and again, I’d find myself thinking: I’ve read this before. And I’d think of climbing off the sofa where I was reading and walking up the stairs to my office to check on my reading log*. Then the next sentence would seem novel and fresh and I couldn’t be bothered to make the journey.

I must have been three-quarters the way through it — and this wasn’t a short, easily read chapter — when I eventually realised that I had read it before. I wish I could tell you exactly what made me realise it but I was so embarrassed at myself that I went into a state of what I can now think of as psychic blushing.

Maybe it wasn’t a sudden realisation, maybe it was a gradual evolution. But, whichever it was, there was a state change. One moment I was a person doing something for the first time. The next I was a person doing something they’d already done before. Or rather, one moment I was a person doing something they’d already done before and the next I was a person knowing they’d done something before. It wasn’t comfortable.

I decided: incipient Alzheimer’s. Of course. I thought: you stupid fool, you are too old to go back to university.

I went to my office and checked. Yes, I had read it before, about six months ago. There it was in the file, highlighted and annotated. I noticed one little thing — though I didn’t grasp its significance till later. I’d marked quite different things first time round.

Some time later, when I’d stopped blushing and trying to hide from myself, I thought again about my forgetting. I found myself thinking about those different marks. Had I really understood it that badly on first reading? I went back, looked again at those marks and highlightings. I realised that they were different for a reason. I’d read it for a different unit on the course so I was reading it through a different pair of — metaphorical — glasses.

More than that, I was a different person. The I that had read it first time was not the I who had read it the other day. Things had changed. I’d read more. I’d learned more. I grasped more, more quickly — on this subject at least.

I thought of two Frenchmen. Rimbaud: j’est un autre (I is another). And Pierre Bayard, psychoanalyst and author of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (see Further contributions to an understanding of On reading and not reading, February 29, 2008). Here, I decided, was a fine example of what Bayard suggests is the utility of not-reading. Or rather, regressing to a state of having-not-read. By forgetting, I had made it possible for me to slip the conceptual bonds of my previous understanding of the text. My suppression of my original reading had facilitated the creation of a new text. I was now not just its reader but its writer, too.

I had freed myself from myself to be myself: the core conceptual aim of psychoanalysis some would say.

So maybe I wasn’t so senile after all. Or maybe wishful thinking is an early indicator of senility.

* Actually, all my reading is logged on a custom database I built — which is why I know exactly how many papers etc I’ve read and how many I’ve finished (see Studying by numbers, April 29, 2008). But I’m much too embarrassed about that to tell you. I am proud, though, of its colour scheme.

Studying by numbers

Time, I thought, for a (slightly obsessional) report on how far I’ve got so far. At the end of the autumn term, I did a reckoning of what I’d managed, in numbers. I posted it on January 11. Here’s an update, till the end of the spring term. The total since the start is in brackets.

28 (65) Seminars attended
2 (2) Seminars missed
2 (4/5) Seminars late for
4 (4) Films watched (part of the course, early Sunday mornings)
2 (2) Dissertation presentations attended
1 (1) Essays written
36 (113) Books, papers, etc read*
28 (79) Books, papers, etc finished
13 (13) Extra books and papers read (or skimmed) for essay
2 (4) Parties invited to
1 (2) Parties attended
10 (16) Alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
2 (1) Non-alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
3 (22) Mochas and cappuccinos bought (to drink in seminars)
4 (0) Espressos bought (to drink in seminars — I’d had enough mochas and cappuccinos for a lifetime)
1 (1) Tuna baguettes bought from Eat
1 (1) Chicken baguettes bought from Eat
6 (6) Ham and cheese baguettes bought from Eat**
c10 (c30) Pre-dawn starts (less than the first term only because it’s been getting lighter earlier)

* I think there is an under-reporting error here. It certainly felt like I read an awful lot more than that this term.

** I tried the other varieties but settled on the ham-and-cheese, Wittgenstein-style. Arriving at a country house for the first time, his hostess asked what he would like for dinner, Wittgenstein replied: ‘I don’t mind what I have to eat as long as it’s the same as yesterday. Always.’

The student on the couch

I’ve just finished my essay, the first piece of writing I’ve had to do for the course, the first piece of academic writing I’ve done since, well, since Gary Glitter was a chart-topper and Margaret Thatcher was the education minister.

I won’t tell you what I wrote about. You don’t have the time, frankly. I read the question aloud to one friend and, by the time I’d finished reading it, we’d buried him and on our way back to the house for a cup of tea, a sausage roll and just-a-small-one-to-take -the-chill-off.

Instead, I’ll just tell you how hard I found it. Moan, more like it. Unlike my family and everyone else I’ve told about it, you can’t walk away while I’m talking . . . though you can click away, I suppose. Oh, well, goodbye.

So now none of you are left, I’ll have a little chat with myself about it. I’ll put one of me on the couch and the other of me on a chair, stroking my chin. There’s a regular section in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis called the Analyst At Work. I’ll think of this as the Theoretical Psychoanalytic Student On The Couch and use the IJP format, in which the one on the couch is P (for patient) and the one on the chair is A (for analyst).

First the analyst sets the scene . . .

Peter is a 53-year-old-writer who has been coming to see me for 53 years now. For this paper, I’ve chosen one recent session. As usual, he is dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. He could do with a haircut. Currently, his presenting problem is — he says — writing his first essay. This is not the first time he has brought this kind of issue to our daily sessions. I perhaps should make the point here that not all my interpretations and comments are strictly orthodox.

P: I had no idea how difficult it would be writing an essay. I shouldn’t have done the course. I should’ve stayed in bed.

A: You’re a professional writer. I’m sure it will be fine.

P: That’s what everyone tells me. I don’t believe them.

A: They’re probably right.

P: You, too?

A: Tell me, what exactly is the problem? Or rather, what do you think it is?

P: I know I can write. See, that last sentence made sense — this one, too. I know I did the reading. I know I got it in on time.

A: Was that a problem?

P: Only the normal problem. Three printers went wrong on me the day I had to hand it in. All attempts to email it failed.

A: So why are you so worried? The worst they can do is fail you. What’s the real problem?

P: That I’ve somehow got it all wrong. I know it was clear and made sense, had an argument and some references — though I’m not sure if I got the citations quite right. They weren’t obsessive about citations in my day.

A: Mine neither. Anything else?

P: They’re really tough and fussy. One word over the limit and you get a five per cent penalty. The full-time students have already done an essay. One told me hers came back with marks all over it about things like bracket placement in the references.

A: Sounds like a sub’s job to me.

P: Abso-psycho-lutely. I’m hiring one next time.

A: So, again, what’s the problem?

P: So I’m not sure it’s what they want. I worry it’s not ‘academic’ enough. know there’s an ‘academic’ way of writing things. Someone I know started an MA in military history and got into endless rows with his lecturers whenever they raised that post-modernist stuff they do at universities these days. He gave up in the end and dropped out. I’m not daft. I’m quite happy to bend their way. I’m just not sure how to.

A: Are you telling me the truth here?

P: Possibly not. I suppose I could have bent further their way.

A: So why didn’t you?

P: I guess I was worried about what you’d say.

On not-writing

It’s been some time. I’ve been busy. See picture above. See the (tidied-up) pile of stuff for writing an essay. See you tomorrow.

Even further considerations on Reading and not reading

When writing about How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard (see below), I intended to tell you about the major English writer whose works I have managed to not-read, with great success, over several decades. Not that this not-reading has in any way restrained me from commenting on the writer and all their works — of which it might be fair to say I have not-read in their entirety.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I have read the opening sentence of one novel. Then again, it depends what you mean by read. I know for certain I’ve heard it spoken and I do, I think, remember seeing it over someone’s shoulder. Perhaps I also checked it in a dictionary of quotations when I wanted to play with it in my own writing.

I did, however, possess a copy of one of the other novels for a while. I’ve no idea why. I may have bought it — unlikely. I may have stolen it — if so it must have been in error. I certainly never intended to read it. I didn’t even think much of the painting on the cover. If I’m entirely honest — well, as honest as I can try to be, given the circumstances — I may actually have skimmed the introduction. May have.

Nonetheless, I am completely confident that I have a pretty accurate, balanced and nuanced view of both the author and their books’ status, relevance, strengths, weaknesses and historical significance — perhaps better than some who’ve actually read them all cover-to-cover. How, I hear you think, can I possibly say that? For three reasons.

One, I’ve seen the films and TV shows etc. So I know all the plots, themes, characters etc.

Two, I’ve read other books (and seen other movies and TV shows) from the same era. I know the history — some of it anyway. I know what time dinner was served then, in which order courses were served and where the chairs were placed. I’ve read EP Thompson’s The Making Of The English Working Class. I’ve seen Sharpe on TV — even if my most striking memories of it are that Sean Bean’s uniform was green, that his sidekick had an Irish accent and that one show featured Elizabeth Hurley’s breasts.

Three, perhaps most importantly, I’ve heard lots of interesting, different people make interesting, different comments on all interesting, different elements and views of the author and all their works. Some of them may even have read some or more of the books themselves — not that I have any way of knowing whether this is so. By listening to these other apparently well-informed people, though, I stopped myself being blinded by my own knowledge — a much harder thing to do if you’ve actually read the books.

I have incorporated all this author’s books into what Bayard calls my virtual library. I just haven’t actually had them stamped out. Accordingly, I see no reason why I, as a non-reader of those books, shouldn’t be as free to comment on them as those who have merely read them.

Perhaps freer, says Bayard. He sees books’ true worth as repositories for projections of bits of ourselves, our histories, our thoughts, our feelings — and what we learn from considering those projections. ‘It is ourselves we should be listening to, not the “actual” book — even if it sometimes provides us momentum — and it is the writing of self that we must pursue without swerving.’

And again: ‘In the end, we need not fear lying about the text, but only lying about ourselves.’

PS As I said at the start, I intended to tell you honestly about my non-reading of this major English writer. I was going to tell you their name. Then, quite casually, in the course of telling my wife about Bayard’s book (long before I’d finished it, of course), I happened to mention the extent of my non-reading of this particular author. She was shocked, into silence. The extent of her shock indicated to me that I should follow her lead and retreat into silence. So, I’m afraid, I can’t tell you who it is I’ve not-read with such attentive inattentiveness over such a long period.

I was, I must say, though, stunned by her silence. Obviously, she thought: this man is a liar, what other lies has he told me over the years? But there must have been more to it than simply that, surely.

I couldn’t work it out. I can’t work it out. I’ll have to think about it. Let me get back to you.

Interpreting Dreams, Themes & Schemes

I've had a small involvement in the production of a compilation of songs from Bob Dylan's radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour. It's on the American satellite channel XM . It's also on BBC Radio 2 — where it is somewhat behind the times, 43 weeks last time I looked. And on BBC Radio 6 — where it is a mere 30 weeks behind. You can also download it here, at Night time in the big city.

It was the album of the week in The Sunday Times and the lead review in Mojo magazine, with five stars.

I helped with the words for the gorgeous-looking booklet. This is something I wrote about the collection for a bulletin which goes out to everyone on Ace Records mailing list.

What, I wonder, do we dream of when we dream of Bob Dylan? And, more intriguingly, what does Bob Dylan dream of when he dreams of us?

This is what I think: he dreams of a small boy called Robert who lives in a small city, an industrial centre in a rural landscape. It’s a nowhere town that was once called Alice but had its name changed when an enormous hole was dug where its new name used to be. That giant hole was — and still is — the biggest of its kind in the world, an open-cast iron mine.

It’s a place that seems to doze on the periphery but is, in fact, also surprisingly at the heart of things. When Robert was growing up, it had the most lavishly appointed high school auditorium in the whole country. He played there, in a rock and roll band.

It’s the head point for the drainages to three great seas, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Swim up any of the great rivers of the eastern United States (Canada, too) and it’s where you’ll end up, like a salmon returning to spawn.

It’s where the Greyhound Bus company was founded and headquartered for many years. It sits between the two great spinal cords of the continent — to the west, the eternal geographical one, the Mississippi River, to the east, the old national one, Highway 61.

Here, young Robert took in all the musics that swam to him up all those rivers, that spilled out of all those long-haul buses, that drifted up the great natural wonder that the Cheyenne called Big Greasy River — and the first European to see it called the River of the Holy Ghost.

Blues and folk and country and R&B, that’s what Robert’s dreams were made of. And I think he had a dream of a radio dee-jay out there somewhere, distant enough to be mythic, close enough to be real. This dee-jay would play records for Robert and his imaginary friends. He’d link song with song, mixing and matching and combining and recombining them. It’d be a bridal outfit of a radio show: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And the dee-jay would tell stories to go with the songs: about them, inspired by them, around them.

In dreams begin responsibilities, wrote Delmore Schwartz, poet, drunk, Lou Reed’s teacher. And so Robert eventually became his own dream, hosting Theme Time Radio Hour, week in, week out. Last time, I looked there had been 69 shows. I’ve got them all in my iTunes and so, whenever I shuffle-play, I’ll always hear Bob Dylan’s voice, reading me a Robert Frost poem or making one of those wry digs he makes every time he plays a Beatles track. It’s strange: one of the most elusive of performers now shares his thoughts with me on an almost daily basis.

Theme Time Radio Hour is the mix-tapes collection we’ve all dreamed of making. It’s both a taxonomy and a topography of 20th century popular musics. Not all of them, it’s true. There’s no Charles Trenet, say. No Abba, either. But Grandpa Jones is there. Jack Teagarden, Charles Mingus, the Donays and the White Stripes, too. The show is always as happy to let songs collide and divorce as it is following them up the aisle or encouraging them to cuddle up in bed together.

Dylan (and his collaborators, I guess) approach 20th century pop the way 18th century naturalists figured out how tomatoes are related to tobacco and where swallows go to in the winter. Making sense of things nearly always involves categorising them somehow.

As these things do, it started with life’s basics, things like Weather, Mother, Father. And it’s pretty much stuck with the everyday: School, Sleep, Food, Tears. It’s addressed life’s two great certainties, Death and Taxes — though not yet the third, Nurses. It’s travelled a bit: Tennessee, New York. It’s even found space for a little product placement: Cadillac.

Roger Armstrong (and his collaborators, I should imagine) have taken this great, ongoing taxonomic and topographic project and refined it down into an elegant precis of the original. A taxonomy of a taxonomy, a topography of a topography. I found myself thinking about something I was told only recently: that any chip of any diamond will always be a mini-version of the whole diamond, a microcosm of all its glories.

So this double CD, too, takes and shakes the everyday world, raising all kinds of new questions and notions along the way. Listen — carefully or lightly, or both — and you find new thoughts on something as old and universal as the Heart (show 41, Billie Holiday’s Good Morning Heartache) or the potential erotogenic symbolism of Musical Instruments (show 37, Dinah Washington’s Big Long Slidin’ Thing) or the bibbity-bobbity relationship between family life, heredity and alcoholic Drink (show 3, Mary Gauthier’s I Drink).

Then there’s the two versions — one black, one white — of Pistol Packin’ Mama (show 25, Guns). They got me thinking afresh about what really is one of pop’s oddest megahits. It had a 15-year run as a scene-maker, from around the time the time the world went to war to the time Elvis went into the army. Maybe there’s another song recorded by both Bing Crosby (plus Andrews Sisters) and Gene Vincent (plus Blue Caps). I never heard it.

If it weren’t for the jauntiness and accordion of Al Dexter’s original, I’d have realised long ago that it’s a pop musical parallel to the same period’s film noir, with the same anxieties about women’s new place in a new world (and the bedroom). Personally, I see Joan Crawford in the lead, reprising her role in Mildred Pierce, only with a blam-blam-blam in every hand, as Dylan put it in John Wesley Harding.

A fast dance tune about sex and violence, drink, guns and girls that ends with the singer’s murder. If you can’t find your own dreams, schemes and themes in there somewhere, I doubt you’re human.

Further contributions to an understanding of On reading and not reading

I’ve just finished a wonderful book. It’s called How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Actually, I haven’t finished it. I’ve only read some of it, plus a review — in the Sunday Times, I think — and perhaps the online blurb at Amazon.*

Which is exactly the point of the book: that most of what we call reading is actually non-reading. We skim. We skip. We forget what we’ve read. What we do remember we often remember quite wrongly. (If I understand right, this is what Freud called nachtraglichkeit and what certain modern psychoanalysts call apres-coup, according to the entry in A Child's Dictionary Of Psychoanalysis anyway.)

Even when we’re reading the same book as someone, we’re actually reading a different book. We all recast what we read (see, hear, eat, etc etc, too) according to the shapes of our minds and inner worlds. When people talk to us about a book we happen to have some recall of, their version of the book rarely accords with our memory. They might as well be talking about a completely different book. Of course, the fact is they are.

How To etc is a lucid and simple book, with a subtle, intricate argument, proposed by Pierre Bayard, a French psychoanalyst with a taste for Mark Twain** and Oscar Wilde.

Along with Louise Bourgeois’ hilariously violent cages and couples, it’s quite restored my faith in French culture. In particular, it introduced me to the wry wit of Paul Valery, a chair of L’Acadamie Francaise. His accession speech seems to have focused on praising his predecessor’s writing while acknowledging that he, Valery, had never read a word of it. In fact, Valery went further, suggesting that this non-reading probably made him the best judge of its worth. He seems to have been right, too.

Accordingly, I have now acquired, in Valery, a new favourite French writer. I have also made a belated new year’s resolution: never to read any more Valery. That might only complicate matters.

* True when written but not now. I finished it about three-quarters of the way through writing this blog. Finishing it did, though, add one significant thought. That if all worthwhile writing is a kind of disguised autobiography, so all creative reading (and non-reading) is, too. By reading (and not-reading), we create and develop our own story, our own self. So reading really is a kind of writing. So, earlier French writers were wrong in asserting the death of the author. We are all authors now, even if only through our creative non-reading (and reading).

** Intending to quote Bayard’s quote of Twain, I looked it up online, for speed. This is what Twain said: ‘I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.’

Or rather that is what that source said Twain said. But there was no source given and it wasn’t quite how I remembered it. So I looked it up in the book itself but couldn’t find it. There’s no index so, without reading the whole book again, I can’t be sure if it’s there or not.

Wondering if I’d mixed things up, I looked into another book I was reading, The Stuff Of Thought by Steven Pinker. And there it was. Or rather there another it was. Or perhaps another Mark Twain — Pinker’s Twain as opposed to internet Twain. This is what this Twain said. ‘When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now, and soon . . . I will remember [only] the things that never happened.’

Allegedly wrote? Yet the square brackets and the elllipsis in the quote imply a real source. But while Pinker’s previous quote from Twain, just one line earlier, has a numbered reference, this one does not. It is orphaned, cast adrift from its homeland — which might or might not have been in Twain’s brain.

Thus we have a quote I remember from one book which is not in that book but in two other places. One, the notoriously unreliable, slippy world of the internet. One, in another book — where the words surrounding it create insuperable contradictions. It is given the appearance of real, grounded existence — according to the standards of academic quoting. Yet it is denied the standards of academic referencing. It is presented without history: its birth certificate has not just been hidden from the reader, its non-existence has been elided. Its status is deliberately made unclear. Who wrote it? Who knows? Certainly not Pinker. He’s told us as much.

Also, I recall that the author (or rather, the possible author) himself was not the man he said he was, having also separated his identity from his birth certificate, with a pen name which originates in the author’s Mississippi dream life (it indicates two fathoms of water) but also contains an inherent self-unfolding joke. Mark Twain: Write Double.

And the subject matter of Mr Write Double’s quote (or rather of both his quotes) is the vagaries (or vicissitudes, if you want me to come over all Freudian) of memory, of how we create and recreate pasts as the present changes.