reading

reading is becoming more and more an academic pursuit. college educated people read ‘serious’ fiction (the masses, if they read, read genre fiction). but these readers learn to read, are educated to read, in college and high school. they have been pre-selected for this process. They are the privileged few who will be initiated into the mysteries of Critical Thinking. academia sets out to take readers and turn them into analyzers. the close identification of reader and text, the absorption of the reader into the writer’s imaginative universe, which is a dimension, a collaborative experience with writer as Mage or Adept or Shaman, which is the typical experience of the person who early on loves to read, is thrown into question. it is seen in ethical and political terms, and ultimately intellectual terms. That myserium is suspect wherever it turns up and must be broken. The initial impulse is love, desire, identification, empathy, introjection, projection, cathexis. Time travel, transcendence. Synesthesia. That must be diverted towards separation, analysis, breakdown, purpose, function. Readers come out on the other side, degree in hand, and read fiction created by writers who have been subjected to the same indoctrination. The writer’s defense against creating a text that invites close identification is constant irony. The reader then looks for this irony as a support to the distance they are trying to maintain. Both now cut off the possibility of art to create, sustain and REVEAL the interconnectedness of BEING.