Blog #118; In Defense of the Slow Read

 In Defense of the Slow Read

 

 

At various times in my life I have attempted to learn to speed read, particularly in college, or later, working as a technical writer on documents meant to convey purely technical information.   With technical information I had much better results.

 

The experience in college was a disaster, because I tried to speed read fiction and other "creative prose".  I just lost too much of the nuance, the flavor of the prose.  I think of prose and poetry like the verbal paint of a visual artist, where words form the colors and sound of the experience of the artistic work.  It took me over a year to finish War and Peace, and your average novel takes me at least a month to fully take in.   It took me over five years to write the novel In Love and War.  There is a certain enjoyment to reading and writing slowly, though.  The flavors, the textures of language.  Reading is no longer flat information, it is an experience to be immersed in.  Do you wish to immerse yourself in the fictive experience, swim in the waters of the world through another's point of view? 

 

Even as far back as thirty years ago, at the particular institution at which I was teaching, the composition director decided to focus composition 2 solely on research papers and framing arguments.  Prior to that, Composition 2 in the state of Florida had been primarily literature based, both analyzing literature and producing original fiction.  I truly enjoyed teaching fiction, both analyzing and practicing it.   It was a sad realization when I saw that the university no longer saw writing as an art and a skill to aspire too.  It soon became just another technical "competency", like coding in Fortran.

But today, with the shift of the "humanities" towards a tech-based world, as Jacques Barzun noted in his last eminent master work From Dawn to Decadence, the vital life force in contemporary fiction is under attack from the forces of AI, as Barzun foretold, and the academy is helping big tech along in the race to dehumanize the humanities.  The future of the art of literature darkens.  Please don’t let the sweetness and light fade away in your own writing and the choices you make for your nightstand.

And as a reader, in this blog, I am asking you to slow down and soak up the author's voice as a human being having a shared experience.  Try not to glean.  Rather, absorb more fully.  Slowly.  Thoughtfully.

Blog #117; Kinds and Purposes of Writing, Particularly the Narrative versus the Lyric and Spiritual

 Kinds and Purposes of Writing, Particularly the Narrative versus the Lyric and Spiritual

 

This blog is going to be a little "herr professor" talk regarding writing and its purpose.  If you aren't interested in this kind of thing, just skip it and we should have another blog here in about a week or so.  

--Cheers!

I see writing as divided into two main types, and each one serves multiple purposes regarding what the aims of the writer are.  Prose is generally the vehicle of communication of information, and sometimes appeals to getting the readers’ attention, sometimes not.  Its main function is raw data collecting and transmission.  Kind of like what the Mars Rovers send back to Earth. This kind of writing does not appeal much to me in terms of meaning, particularly from an artistic point of view.

Prose that tells stories, particularly stories that are not literally true, but peak interest in what it means to be human, have more value to me creatively.  In this realm are narrative poems, short stories, tales, etc.  Here a writer develops characters, builds settings, infuses the writing with spirit and liveliness and generally makes a world that the reader can get lost in, populated by people that one usually wants to know (or not know!).   JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a good example, albeit somewhat fantastical.  Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates is another work of fiction that explores the nature of sanity and what it means to be human and functional as a human being striving to connect with others.

Some prose reaches for even more.  I am thinking of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which is so lyrical that it barely even qualifies as prose.  It is song more than anything.  So much of the language is figurative.  But like the scholar Joseph Campbell has said, that is what makes Finnegan’s Wake one of the most transcendent novels ever written, how close it gets to the infinite.  It is a poem, really, a song praising not only one woman (or river, depending on how you look at her)  but also God the Father and the whole universe, while giving Man his due.

Then there is Goethe’s poetic drama, Faust.  It is meant as a dramatic piece never to be staged, about spirituality and natural versus spiritual man, a song, like Finnegan’s Wake, but about a man who has too much ambition, so much so that he aspires to becoming a creator of worlds himself, not in a beneficial, life-affirming way, but in a self-aggrandizing, form of life appropriation.  Angels feature prominently in this work, and Goethe has been called a genius for daring to tackle this subject matter.  In the end, Goethe leads us to believe that poetry is as close as we can get to the divine, but I think one must first learn what the divine learns, study what He studies, inherit His treasures, and focus creative energy, again, on life-giving.

As a result, the prophets and holy men, old and new, are perhaps some of the most talented poets our society knows of.  Crafters of hymns.  Scribes, both known and unknown, of the scriptures and the messages they carry to us from beyond the mists of time and space.  Poets and prophets are those most close, I believe, to Truth, and most closely aligned, I think, to each other and Heavenly Father.