Realising, with some horror, that such a list does not currently exist on the internet, I have compiled the following:
Books published by the Austrian-born critic Johannes Speyer (1913-1984)
Russian Literature in Context (1953)
Passages into Passages (1954)
Anticipating the Move Towards a New Approach to Reading (1955)
The Poetry of Kokimizu Ishu: Illustrated Edition (1957) Read the rest of this entry »
[Ever out to confuse my readers I present this article, written shortly before the article re-published below - i.e. early summer 2008]
Should or should not the writer be a ‘man of action’? A question, I would say, for another day (next Thursday perhaps?) I am, after all, of the Johannes Speyer school of thought; where the pressure is laid more firmly on the reader than the writer. The question most frequently in my mind is, thus, should or not the reader be a ‘man of action’? To which the answer is, invariably, yes.
One of the most common preconceptions surrounding the late great Speyer is that his thought revolved around the single idea of re-reading. Admittedly, death struck him down before he could go much further than this, but all those close to him knew that his intentions were always to explore the whole sphere of reading. This was also to take into account the multiple situations in which reading could take place. To scoop out the stuffing of this theoretical goose, I present to you a true story: Read the rest of this entry »
[Yet another vaguely-flawed attempt to outline the various problems surrounding the modern reader...]
What Is a Reader?
In proposing this question, I am merely repeating an enquiry I have made many times before. But then repetition is the handmaiden of understanding (by which I mean, of course, the process of successfully ramming an idea into the soft mushy mess of people’s brains).
For the purposes of this introduction I will set aside sociohistorical analysis of the reader as an individual and numerous related questions. Words are not, after all, source material for sleeping pills. In the right hands they are aphrodisiacs, hallucinogenic drugs: aspirin for the weary soul. And when I talk of hands, I refer not only to the well worn fingers of the writer, beavering away in his/her garret, but to the altogether softer digits of the reader, idly stroking the spine of some tome or other, wherever he/she may be.
The reader – who or what in purgatory’s name is it? Read the rest of this entry »
[Anyone who has read my blog will know that Active Reading (known to some as Extreme Reading) is something I harp on about rather a lot. I make no apologies for this. When a topic is as important as this, one simply cannot say enough about it. In the following article I introduce the subject in question, and present a handful of 'Active Reading Heroes'; few of whom, on reflection, really deserve the praise I once alloted them...]
What is Active Reading? The term has about it a hint of some diabolical governmental initiative designed to pull the obese masses out of a glutinous burger and into a good book. Withdraw your gathering fears: we would never sell our souls to any such programme. So far as I am concerned, the truly ignorant may stay where they are: swimming like fag ends in the fatty acids of a second-rate battery-farmed culture. It’s hard enough trying to educate the educated without these other morons trying to squeeze their way into the frame.
When it comes to reading books, many people think they know precisely ‘what is what’. But do they? Invariably, no. The windows of their focus are not only steamed, but pointing in the wrong direction; looking out, as I like to say, upon an invalid vista. We find the attention of these otherwise enthusiastic readers securely fastened onto those that ‘create’ literature: the writers. They think that the writers are everything. And the literary journals (poor reader-less rags that they are) do nothing to push them off course. It is a web of deception into which even I find myself drawn every now and again; a vast tangle of trickery that traps us all from time to time. Read the rest of this entry »
