ANT FARM by Robert Lloyd | |
The Binge |
L.A. Weekly, March 29, 2002 |
NOT SO VERY LONG AGO, around the time I stopped watching
television for a living, I began to read again, compulsively. Read
books, I mean. There are plenty of other things in the typographical world
to peruse: magazines, recipes, free alternative newsweeklies whose ink
comes off on your fingers, badly translated instructions for installing
and operating AS AFFLICTIONS GO, this is of course more blessing than
curse. I took advantage of my last attack of bibliomania to remedy a
near-complete ignorance of 19th-century English literature, of which I am
now -- having read a bit of the Brontės, of Eliot, of Hardy, of Trollope,
of Thackeray -- less completely ignorant. (I marvel still at how little of
substance I was required to read in 13 years of public school education,
and how ill-read I remain in the Harvard Classics sense of being really
well-read. Not that everyone subscribes to the Harvard Classics theory of
well-readness.) Now, as then, I'm reading not only to read, but to have
read. I am today, for example, a person who has read two books by Hermann
Hesse, whereas a month ago -- when Steppenwolf was just a rock band
to me -- I was not. I have done something! I am different! But I have no
overarching plan; I discriminate only in that I choose books I think will
give me pleasure. (When I was younger, my reading was economically
determined by what turned up cheap in used-book stores. And when I was
younger than that, I mostly read Mad magazine and the Hardy Boys.)
For the rest, I am happy to drift; one book suggests another, one author
the next, or more of the same, and if I've been willful at all it's in
avoiding a plan, having in these last days undertaken not only Saul Bellow
and Henry Green, but Lemony Snicket, Lewis Carroll, Haruki Murakami, H.G.
Wells, Woody Guthrie and Fleming -- Ian
Fleming. HOW LONG WILL IT LAST? Yesterday, I went . . .
hours between books, got hung up on the first page of a new one,
and thought, It's over. And with so much left to read. I haven't
even started on the Greeks, the Romans, the Babysitters Club . . . Even
considering what time and taste have cast aside, there is a mountain of
literature to scale, a mountain that grows faster than you can climb it,
and which was already insurmountable the day you were born. It's
depressing, in a way, and so very much a metaphor for life itself. (Sorry
-- it is!) But it's better in the end to strike out for the top than to
moon about at the bottom; even a few steps up that slope the view
improves, the shape and patterns of the world grow more
legible.
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