from Pamela Lu about readership & community
That's a good question about ideal readership. I think I'm like you, in that I do imagine a general, abstract reader, one who I don't know personally anddon't travel in the same circles as. Maybe because I imagine that reading experience to be somehow "purer" than one informed by coterie dynamics. Of course, I totally value my coterie readers too, and in many ways depend on them most of all. I think I as a person benefit greatly from their reading, whereas when my work is read by a stranger, it's more the work that benefits; that is, I may never personally know about the impact my work has had on the stranger. I think that's what I mean by "purer"-- it has less to do with my personal standing in the world and more to do with the role the work plays in the world of reading. More religious somehow, something to take on faith. Sometimes I think of writers who write pseudonymously, not of the Kent Johnson variety, but the writers who segregate their authorial persona totally from their personal persona, as extremists of this kind of faith. Or maybe they just like disguises.
I like what Jalal Toufic says in Distracted, about his untimely collaboration with other writers dead or not yet living, about these collaborations being like "perforations in the wall," through which some form of communication passes through. I was listening to the Michael Krasny Forum show on the radio once, and they were talking about Dickens. It was interesting that all of the "experts" who were guests wanted to put in their two cents about the personal qualities of the people who read Dickens. "I believe Dickens readers are essentially good and kind people who value justice and want to do the right thing," is what one of them said. In another context I might have grinned at such a corny-sounding statement, but I was reading David Copperfield at the time and could see what the speaker was trying to get at. The sense of a shared value system between author and reader, transmitted through the book. Even if this value system, and the sharing of it, is largely imagined, I think it's still important for the writer and reader to acknowledge it, and imagine it into being.
from an 10/14 email
Laura
That's a good question about ideal readership. I think I'm like you, in that I do imagine a general, abstract reader, one who I don't know personally anddon't travel in the same circles as. Maybe because I imagine that reading experience to be somehow "purer" than one informed by coterie dynamics. Of course, I totally value my coterie readers too, and in many ways depend on them most of all. I think I as a person benefit greatly from their reading, whereas when my work is read by a stranger, it's more the work that benefits; that is, I may never personally know about the impact my work has had on the stranger. I think that's what I mean by "purer"-- it has less to do with my personal standing in the world and more to do with the role the work plays in the world of reading. More religious somehow, something to take on faith. Sometimes I think of writers who write pseudonymously, not of the Kent Johnson variety, but the writers who segregate their authorial persona totally from their personal persona, as extremists of this kind of faith. Or maybe they just like disguises.
I like what Jalal Toufic says in Distracted, about his untimely collaboration with other writers dead or not yet living, about these collaborations being like "perforations in the wall," through which some form of communication passes through. I was listening to the Michael Krasny Forum show on the radio once, and they were talking about Dickens. It was interesting that all of the "experts" who were guests wanted to put in their two cents about the personal qualities of the people who read Dickens. "I believe Dickens readers are essentially good and kind people who value justice and want to do the right thing," is what one of them said. In another context I might have grinned at such a corny-sounding statement, but I was reading David Copperfield at the time and could see what the speaker was trying to get at. The sense of a shared value system between author and reader, transmitted through the book. Even if this value system, and the sharing of it, is largely imagined, I think it's still important for the writer and reader to acknowledge it, and imagine it into being.
from an 10/14 email
Laura
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