Booknesia

If you saw my post from last week, you’ll probably not be surprised to hear that I’m doing a lot of sitting around at the moment.

Because I have to. 

Because objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and heavily pregnant objects at rest don’t move AT ALL, plus they call out for snacks, drinks, and the remote control, much to the annoyance of their husbands who are, unbelievably enough, still refusing to take adequate (read: full) responsibility for their role in this sorry state of bloated affairs. I’m telling ya, my feet are so swollen at the moment, I feel like I’m trying to lace two heads of cabbage into my Chucks every time I put them on.

But I guess the good thing is that in my sedentary state, I’m getting a lot of reading done. 

Sort of. 

What I’m really doing is engaging in a lot of comfort reading. I do this when I’m hungry for literary distraction, but for whatever reason, am too fragile/tired/whatever to embark on something new. So I open up a few books I’ve read a million times and look through them, somewhat glad for their familiarity, but really, yearning for the novelty and thrill they once brought me.

These are definitely the times I wish I had the power to put myself into a state of booknesia. You know – I wish I could wipe the slate clean and read a well-loved book all over again as if for the first time. 

Wouldn’t that be great?

Alas, we never wade into the same book twice, and for this reason, there are some books that I may never read again because I don’t want to tarnish the memory of the impact they had on me when I first read them. I want to remember the way my brain clanged like a bell the first time I experienced them.

Back in college, I took Italian, and our Italian professor was this very enthusiastic, courtly gentleman in his 70s. Midway through the semester, he encouraged us to attend a performance of an opera that was touring campus in order to expose ourselves to the glories of Italian operatic artistry. 

A couple of us went, mostly out of sense of duty because he was so thrilled that we could share in this experience, but, you know, I was nineteen, and it was opera, and my Italian at that point allowed me to understand phrases like, “My pants are yellow,” or “Where may I obtain a headache tablet?” So, a lot of it was lost on me. Plus musical theater generally… I just. Can’t.

At the end of the performance, our professor asked us how we liked it, and whatever our collective response was at the time, we must have communicated that we 1) didn’t; and 2) were sorry about that fact. He said, “Well, opera’s a different experience when you’re older. You'll see. When someone sings about heartbreak, you feel a whole lifetime’s worth.”

And so it is with books. As time goes on, the text is ever the same, but the reader is not. Sometimes you get more out of a book, but sometimes you get less. Or at least, you never again experience that revelatory rush or thrill upon successive readings. Which is why this booknesia thing is an exercise in wishful thinking, of course. 

Still, I ask you: What book do you wish you could read all over again as if for the first time?*

And if I’m asking that question, I really should ask this as well: Would you want to be the person you were the first time you read it?**

*Middlemarch

**No way, man.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

We’ve all got our favorite authors. The ones we’ll vigorously defend, especially when some fool sucks her teeth and says, “I so totally HATE [your favorite author]. His/her stuff is drivel.”

To which you respond, “WHAT?! Are you out of your mind? Were you raised by mentally unstable wolves with bad taste or something? How can you possibly believe [my favorite author] is anything but awesome?”

And then the fool shrugs and says, “Meh.”

Then you say something ill-advised. And then this tacky fool who clearly has ZERO CLASS says something equally ill-advised, perhaps about your mother’s moral laxity, and the next thing you know, you’re taking off your earrings and telling the nearest bystander, “Hold my purse.” That’s when you both start pulling each other’s hair weaves while everyone is standing around chanting fight, fight, fight.

ANYWAY.

Your favorite author is obviously someone you like, but is your favorite author someone who you attempt to write like? Probably, yes. A little. Or maybe a lot.

I would say that there were two authors who I made an attempt to write like. Not in the sense that they had a very particular style of writing that I copied. Like. They used. A lot. Of. Staccato. Sentences. Or. Conversely, huge blocks of impenetrabletextthatallruntogether. It was more their sensibility, which, by the way, ranks slightly higher to me on the writing hierarchy than “voice.” In other words, what they said was more important to me than how they said it.

The reason I copied them was that I felt like, OK, this is good writing, so this is what I should aspire to do myself. But there seems to be this odd irony to emulating another writer to the point of imitating them. They inspire you, sure, which strengthens you in some ways, but attempts to copy another writer weaken you as well. First of all, nobody wants to be the poor man’s version of anyone else, right? And even if you were a near perfect facsimile of your favorite writer, no one will ever believe the best Elvis imitator is better than the original. So you’re doomed to failure in any event.

Everyone complains that when a book becomes super popular, there are a million copycat projects that seem to follow. I guess that’s because we don’t know what to do with influence sometimes. The simplest and most obvious approach to it is to copy it. Which almost always fails. But absorbing influence, processing it, and then evolving it into something new takes a long time. Longer than most publishing trend cycles certainly.

So. What to do, what to do? In one sense, you can’t help but be swayed by the authors you love, on the other hand, you cannot ever hope to find your own voice unless you step out of their creative shadow. I’m curious to know how you’ve handled that “tyranny of influence” thang in your own work.

(Oh, my, this is such an artsy post I’m doing today. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I really gotta lay off the absinthe and Paris Review back issues.)

By the way, I’m not going to tell you who those two writers are who I attempted to imitate. No, I certainly am not. See, I just got my weave re-done, and I don’t want to ruin it in the event you roll your eyes when I disclose their names.