Sunday, September 05, 2004
(10:31 PM) | Anonymous:
I Am A Literary Poseur.
This is a confessional shit and garbage post.My books were scattered throughout the house and I worried for their safety because of it. I had to rearrange the bookshelf so that managing the growing collection would be easy. And so I set myself to the task of organizing my books ala. I even created "The Final Solution" for what all the books in the house. A bookshelf would be dedicated to strictly academic work, another to literature and another to our art/coffee table/cook books/ and other such kitsch. We don't actually have the bookshelves needed at the moment (maybe with the next paycheck) so most of the fiction is lying in stacks around the house. With the titles of these works staring back at me I can admit that I am a poseur.
My love of reading began with science fiction in the 2nd grade. To be really specific I feel in love with the My Teacher is an Alien series and subsequently all the works by the author Bruce Coville (I still highly recommend for pre-teens). Sometime during the transition from middle school to high school I lost interest in literature and didn't read much besides what they assigned in English class (a dismal thing that was). Then in my senior year of high school once again I started reading science fiction. This time it was C.S. Lewis's The Space Trilogy which I read in 5 days, neglecting all my homework for that week. (This also led to my introduction with all of C.S. Lewis's intellectual works but I don't want to admit how many C.S. Lewis books I own so let's skip that.) I then read Issac Asimov and some others in the canon. But of course coming into college I didn't want to be some kind of nerd and so, most luckily, I found Kurt Vonnegut to be a source of science fiction nerdery but also a part of the semi-respected, despair style high literature. True to Adam's black-hole literature theory (this will turn literary criticism on its head) I own around 6 or 7 of his books which made up the only fiction I read my freshman year.
I have always only read what was expected of any intelligent person to read. Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm (to my credit I read these for the first time in 7th grade), Heese's Steppenwolf, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, O'Conner's Wise Blood and "A Good Man is Hard to Find", On the Road, Stranger in a Strange Land, etc. Then I went through what I thought was a step forward - the Russian period. I really enjoyed Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment and so I would tell people such. Finally, I thought, I was reading some real literature. Of course it didn't go beyond this because I was caught up in philosophy, theory and theology books and haven't given literature the time it demands. So when I say I like Russian authors I am like every poseur who says he likes Russian authors even though they've only read Crime and Punishment in their senior year literature class (like me).
I don't really mind my status as a poseur. Sure it sucks that I may never fully realize the beauty of Blanchot's minor works and my knowledge of C.S. Lewis's moral theory will always outweigh my understanding of Joyce's linguistic playfulness but what are you gonna do? We can’t all be Jacques Derrida.
Check out Infinite Thought's recent confessional about her culture deficiency. At least I've seen some of those movies! Ok, ok only Casablanca and It's a Wonderful Life.
