A writing instructor recently called me literary.
“From your word choice,” he said, “especially in this first paragraph, it’s obvious that you read a lot.”
Then, like that pretty, yet insecure friend who insists on detailing to you every schlub who blatantly hit on her in the cereal aisle, every suit who grinned at her on the train, and every yogi who inadvertently (inadvertent my ass, she says) grazed her boob while adjusting her shoulders in the Cobra position, I set out to convince myself that my instructor was right:
ME: God, this chili is toothsome!
COWORKER: Tooth? What? In the chili?
ME: No, dear friend, toothsome means delicious, pleasing to the palate.
COWORKER: God, now all I can think of is that woman who found a fingertip in her Wendy’s chili. I can’t eat. Thanks.
- - - - - -
SISTER (lamenting the failings of inner-city schools): And so half the kids in the eighth grade aren’t even at a fifth grade literacy level!
ME: That’s so sad, because being literary is really such a joy.
SISTER: You mean literate?
ME: Well, that too, of course. I mean first you have to be literate and then, perhaps one day a writing instructor will tell you that you are literary, which actually a writing instructor did tell me the other day. And it really is such a joy.
- - - - - -
ME: Hey Tony! So what’d you do this weekend?"
TONY (Barista at my regular coffee shop): Well, on Friday the wife and I saw The DaVinci Code.
ME: Was it good?
TONY: Yeah. I mean the book was better. Did you read it?
ME: No. Well, I mean I read the first two chapters and then just couldn’t continue. It was just so poorly written.
TONY: Yeah, I suppose it was. But the plot just hooked me, you know?
ME: I suppose. I just prefer more literary pieces, I guess.
TONY: Well, I was reading The Trial at the time, too, just for old times’ sake and because I felt like it related so much to all the shit going down at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo at the time, and I just needed kind of a fluffy piece to offset all the gloom.
ME: Uh huh.
TONY: You like Kafka?
ME: I’m sorry? No, just a green tea.
TONY: No. Kafka. The Trial?
ME: Oh, right. No, he’s a little too, what’d you say? . . . gloomy? . . . He’s a little too gloomy for me.
TONY: Yeah, seriously. So what’re you reading then? (motions toward the magazine peaking from the top of my purse)
ME: Oh, this? Elle.
TONY: Mm. Literary.
- - - - - -
As brightly as I recall the spray of thin wrinkles spreading from the corners of my mom’s eyes as she combed her fingers through my bangs and told me that my singing voice was absolutely good enough to try out for the solo at my high school’s annual Christmas pageant, I remember the warm light in the room and the crumb of bagel caught in the writing instructor’s patchy white and brown beard when he said that I was literary. What a lovely thing to believe, I’d thought, but it’s simply not true.
Coming of age in a town of 3,000 people had its perks. Set loose at age nine to bicycle through the familiar streets until sundown, slumber parties on the big trampoline in the front yard and an easy spot on the volleyball team, Student Council and the National Honors Society, concerns about danger or competition almost never applied. I grew up feeling safe and, for the most part, above average.
It wasn’t until college that I realized that my rural education had lacked certain elements. The girls in my dorm talked of their senior-year term papers on Emily Bronte and Jane Austen and their impact on early feminism. When classmates casually referenced Chekhov and Nabokov, I thought they were talking about Russian ballet. Yes, I’d read some classic literature – parts of Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf and excerpts from Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby in the English Comp I and II courses I’d taken for college credit senior year of high school. And I had a chance encounter with Catcher in the Rye while skimming the library shelves during a dull study period, finding intrigue in the book’s threadbare cover and taking it home, but it wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I learned this was an important book by an important author.
I took the final college English course required for my business degree senior year, reading Heart of Darkness and a few others in the travel literature genre that I don’t recall. I made it through Lolita and The Awakening one summer break when I wasn’t taking classes, but never found extra time for the Russians and the Frenchmen and the early feminists I’d missed out on in high school.
In the years since college, I’ve often regretted missing the opportunity to piss and moan at having the classics forced upon me as a teenager. The writing instructor was right – I do read a lot – but literary I’m not. At least not in the way I interpret the word. I fake my way through with some really great writers - David Sedaris, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates – but I’ve yet to crack open a Hemingway, Woolf or Dostoyevsky. To hope to write while ignoring literature that’s endured for decades and centuries is like an aspiring architect satisfied at never having seen the Colosseum close up, to be satisfied with a superficial, two-dimensional understanding, to never have immersed oneself in the center of it.
So I picked up a book called Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, who invites the reader to “sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters.” The idea’s that by reading great writing, you learn how to be a great writer. The last chapter of the book is titled “Books To Be Read Immediately.” I skipped to this chapter and found that of the 117 must-reads, I’ve read four. Seriously. I’ve read 3.4% of the recommended books.
My goal for 2007 is to finish 11 more books off this list, at which point I’ll have increased my literariness by over 10%! Any suggestions? The four I’ve already read are: The Corrections (Jonathon Franzen), The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien), Lolita (Nabokov) and Frannie and Zooey (Salinger).
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