Reading Time
Another long day at work and hot too. The main bulk of the marking is complete although there seemed to be a last lap of administrative hurdles to get through today. But at least this provides a chance to catch up with colleagues completing similar work. More marking for the Open University and External Examiner reports to complete this week, among other duties. Not possible, with this bulk of academic close work, to settle down with a book, despite my longing to do so. I can't even get on with my short story anthologies at the moment. Next week perhaps.
But a quick surf through the papers and the blogosphere and I came across a discussion of influential stories - fiction that's had a real impact on you as reader; if not life changing, then perspective enhancing, mood lifting, consciousness raising. The Russian novelists got an immediate good press - I haven't read Turgenev but remember my own discovery of Dostoyevksy, particularly The Idiot, in fact. Strange how one can remember the location of a resounding read like that, similar to the association of music, or food, or people, to a particular place and time. A bit like Proust's madeleine, or meta-madeleine - remembering a text brings back all its surrounding context.
In the case of Dostoyevsky and me it was in the freezing Norwegian suburbs of Bergen during my pre-university 'gap' year of 1986/7. I'd done my stint as a disastrously bad au pair. Mind you, it was a terrible gig, that job - I was supposed to keep house for this well-to-do family, and then make English conversation with their two teenage boys upon their return from school. Neither ever wanted to talk to me, which I suppose I was grateful for. But one day I was instructed to change the curtains in their room, and found a stash of porn magazines hidden in the clean folded drapes. Unsure what to do I left the allocated task undone, and got fired some days later. Come to think of it I was found one other day at that time reading De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater when I was supposed to be ironing. Well you would wouldn't you, steal the time for a first encounter with such a classic subversive read. Domestic engineering was never my strong point.
But Dostoyevksy demanded a more concentrated stretch of time so it was after my au pair stint and before I became a hotel worker (a job I was equally talentless at to be honest, though at least I made more friends) that I really got into him. I remember unrelentingly white snow-bound walks around the flat where I was lodging, sitting in unlikely coffee shops, bus stations, back of churches even; reading, reading.
How difficult it is to find the time for such luxurious stretches of reading, or writing, these days. I'm nostalgic for that almost as much as for the text which has triggered the memory of it in my mind. Nowadays one has to cultivate the art of - as Stephen King puts it in 'On Writing' - sipping at texts in odd moments; bus queues, supermarket queues if you're particularly agile; waiting rooms. Snatching time, stealing it in slivers. It takes some discipline and determination nonetheless - funny how difficult it is even to get a poem in some days. It can all too easily turn into a case of time stealing recreational reading opportunities away from you. But a little cognitive reframing helps in the short term. For all the pressures of workload I'm perusing new voices reaching the end of their 'training', wondering who will provide the literary madeleines of the future.
But a quick surf through the papers and the blogosphere and I came across a discussion of influential stories - fiction that's had a real impact on you as reader; if not life changing, then perspective enhancing, mood lifting, consciousness raising. The Russian novelists got an immediate good press - I haven't read Turgenev but remember my own discovery of Dostoyevksy, particularly The Idiot, in fact. Strange how one can remember the location of a resounding read like that, similar to the association of music, or food, or people, to a particular place and time. A bit like Proust's madeleine, or meta-madeleine - remembering a text brings back all its surrounding context.
In the case of Dostoyevsky and me it was in the freezing Norwegian suburbs of Bergen during my pre-university 'gap' year of 1986/7. I'd done my stint as a disastrously bad au pair. Mind you, it was a terrible gig, that job - I was supposed to keep house for this well-to-do family, and then make English conversation with their two teenage boys upon their return from school. Neither ever wanted to talk to me, which I suppose I was grateful for. But one day I was instructed to change the curtains in their room, and found a stash of porn magazines hidden in the clean folded drapes. Unsure what to do I left the allocated task undone, and got fired some days later. Come to think of it I was found one other day at that time reading De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater when I was supposed to be ironing. Well you would wouldn't you, steal the time for a first encounter with such a classic subversive read. Domestic engineering was never my strong point.
But Dostoyevksy demanded a more concentrated stretch of time so it was after my au pair stint and before I became a hotel worker (a job I was equally talentless at to be honest, though at least I made more friends) that I really got into him. I remember unrelentingly white snow-bound walks around the flat where I was lodging, sitting in unlikely coffee shops, bus stations, back of churches even; reading, reading.
How difficult it is to find the time for such luxurious stretches of reading, or writing, these days. I'm nostalgic for that almost as much as for the text which has triggered the memory of it in my mind. Nowadays one has to cultivate the art of - as Stephen King puts it in 'On Writing' - sipping at texts in odd moments; bus queues, supermarket queues if you're particularly agile; waiting rooms. Snatching time, stealing it in slivers. It takes some discipline and determination nonetheless - funny how difficult it is even to get a poem in some days. It can all too easily turn into a case of time stealing recreational reading opportunities away from you. But a little cognitive reframing helps in the short term. For all the pressures of workload I'm perusing new voices reaching the end of their 'training', wondering who will provide the literary madeleines of the future.
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