Welcome

Welcome to Academy of Readers! If you, like me, are intimidated by screens, keyboards, and conversations with strangers whose names we might never know or whose faces we might never see, then I invite you to imagine this blog into something more comfortable for you. It could be a friend’s party, and a handful of you meander out onto his balcony and wind up in an impassioned discussion of Shakespeare, forgetting the rest of the party, your brimming martinis, the chilly air, the moths beseechingly circling the halogen floodlights. The conversation does not have to be about Shakespeare, but whatever its subject, when you travel home at the end of the night, you feel rich, expanded, inspired--you look in front of you and see lights and swirls of color as hope plunges and soars, and satisfaction stretches, reclines, murmuring “yes yes yes” without stop. The impassioned discussion, you think, tickled, massaged, and invigorated every part of you, even rubbed clean those cobwebby parts in the shadows and corners that choke up your soul with ennui. But even as you fall onto your bed in perfect satiation, some ghost trace of you leaps up and rushes out into the night, crying, “More, more! I must feel this again! I must act on that long-ignored dream! I must tell so-and-so I love her/him! I must…I must create this feeling again for myself, every day, so that I don‘t waste a minute, so that on my dying day I can say I did not just do do do, I really lived, my eyes were open!” I want Academy of Readers to excite and touch you like any truly worthwhile experience will do.

Here I’ve gotten all carried away, like a nervous, over-eager host. My sole excuse is that literature is an outlet to me not only for rigorous analytical exercise, but also (and not separately) for every inarticulate yearning, sorrow, joy, and passion I have ever felt and will feel. I feel like I can thunder like a giant around books, be a bull and make impossible demands (love them to decrepitude like so many velveteen rabbits, elicit life in them, vivify my life), and the books are meant to, and must, withstand everything. And all that intensity elicited by and brought to books…I do not know how best to articulate it. I do not know how best to share it with others, and engage them in conversation about it. It often seems to me that the richest, most interesting way to discuss literature is through formal and rigorous study of it in an academic setting. But in that setting, literary discourse too easily becomes brittle and impotent, bold words full of promise that is never realized; it all degenerates into hubris the way a drowned body bloats like a sponge but is dead dead dead. I am not someone who feels hostility towards theory; theory excites me as an impressive aggregate of sophisticated lenses that enhance the naked eye of shared human experience. But without an acknowledgement of and conscious working within an experience of sensual reading, theory, along with its subject, crumbles into meaninglessness. I do not think the sensual reading experience—what elsewhere in this blog I call “passionate reading,” among other things—receives its due in the academic discourse surrounding literature. Disdain curls the lips of colleagues into scorpions’ tails if anyone dares ask, “But what does this passage in the text make you feel?” I dream of a literary discourse that holds “intellect” to be an exquisite marriage between analytical rigor and emotional receptivity, linear reasoning and intuitive logic, and thoughtful and scrupulous discipline and lightning-flash imagination. Such a discourse would never conceive of dispensing with close reading; reading would be elevated to an Art, an act of creation, not a laying of train tracks for the latest theoretical trend. Such a discourse would be its own institution, aptly named the Academy of Readers--as opposed to being dubbed the "English Department" or "Department of Comparative Literature." So I dream it, and this blog aims to initiate the invention of this discursive institution, one word at a time.

Though I may post only sporadically, the concept of an Academy of Readers is always at the forefront of my mind. I am admittedly uncomfortable with the blogging medium, being much more accustomed to private writing notebooks and writings shared only when they exhibit some semblance of cohesion. I do not promise cohesion in my postings; that will come as the language takes shape around the idea of an Academy of Readers. I invite any readers to post comments, suggestions, thoughts, dissentions and questions liberally; ideally I’d like this blog to develop into a community of passionate readers.

Again, welcome, and thank you for reading.