The Promiscuous Reader.

I can’t seem to break the habit of reading.

It occurs to me that if I am to become the Promiscuous Writer I wish to be perhaps I should first process my Promiscuous Reading. Otherwise it’s another case of the Return of the Repressed, which seems to be the anthem of my recent days, and which is an entirely different post. Ahem.

As I was saying, I can’t seem to break the habit of reading.

I read, even when I find myself having dreams about being behind — missing teaching, forgetting to read for my seminar, months going by without writing a blog, forgetting to fill out quals paperwork, to find a chair, struggling to drag together a committee without a clear project, forgetting even to study for quals . . . luckily most of these really are dreams. Still, I read and read and read. More to the point, I read what I’m not “supposed” to be reading.

I tell myself, and others, that reading is “my TV.” This is true, to some degree, primarily because I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, and yet still need the mental escape. Yes, I read for escape. Growing older, and therapy, and my struggles to pay attention to my graduate studies (to borrow Daddy’s phrasing, “I’m forgetting to remember”), and an overwhelming tide of memories of myself reading to get through my childhood — to ESCAPE my childhood — combine into this realization. There is escape reading and then there is . . . serious reading? I think of it as reading that demands a couple of pens, post-its, and at least two notebooks next to me, especially whatever current Dissertation notebook I’m filling. Whereas reading Kushiel’s Dart, for example — a fantasy, the heroine of which is destined to feel pain as pleasure, in other words, a masochist for a heroine; you should read the astonishment of the reviewers on this point! — has me dog-earring pages, and mulling over certain passages, but renouncing any sort of recording beyond what my mind chooses to retain.

I like my escape reading. No — I love it. I need it. I crave it. It renders me happy and guilty, all together (a quintessential masochistic experience?). After all, the only thing I ever consistently got in trouble for in school was reading something else, something other than the assigned text (which I had usually always already finished). So there are feelings of shame, even, in being caught at something I shouldn’t be doing. I wonder how gendered this feeling is. I think of my high school poetry teacher, telling the class that she had locked herself in the bathroom to finish a novel; she also retired there to talk on the phone with her best friend, away from the husband and kids. I think of my undergraduate poetry professor, confessing to locking herself in the bathroom to read the latest Harry Potter, before wrapping it up as a gift for her daughter’s birthday; and I remember her husband’s disapproval at her choice of text, the disdain of a poet toward fiction, not to mention genre fiction! Most recently, I remember stories of my step-daughter locking herself in the bathroom this summer, to lounge in a cool bath with one of her favorite fantasy quartets in order to escape the sweltering heat and her chores. I think of myself, sneaking a chapter here and there at school — novels, young adult, some fantasy and some erotica — and being slightly ashamed when anyone catches me doing it.

I try to balance my addiction. Read a little fun stuff, read a little serious stuff, read some fun stuff, grade papers, read some fun stuff . . . Or, in this case, read a little fun stuff, read some more fun stuff, play around with my wordpress template and finally work up the nerve to begin setting words down on the page. I know that I speak to a general struggle with the Demon of Procrastination, a struggle most people I know face. I understand that balance is the key. It is always difficult to sit down and do the “real” work.

I write about discipline, in other words. Self-discipline. There is a delicious indulgence that floods me when I read something I shouldn’t, something for fun — indulgence made all the sweeter because it’s somehow forbidden (masochism, encore?). As privileged and indulgent as my studies in English (loosely defined) may be, this path is full of obligation, deadlines, bureaucracy — things to avoid — whereas reading Kushiel’s Dart is not. At least, not apparently. Though I am reminded, as I always am, of one of Foucault’s amazing phrases: “insidious leniencies.” Yes, perhaps my escape reading is exactly that . . . because what exactly do I feel I’m escaping?

* * *

Somewhere in this post I meant to get at my fears of the Text. It is what I have been obligated to write about for some time, one of the only goals I was to complete this semester, through this blog. I have escaped into other writing, for certain. But I wonder if the process of producing these things called Dissertations and Books and the like — I wonder if that process should be as linear as it is drawn? I am, of course, just looking for a way to excuse my avoidance. I circle the issue of texts.

I’ll return for a while to my fantasy, where the heroine’s fate is embedded and unavoidable — a source of comfort to me, when there is so much we can so successfully avoid, so much we can circle, hem and haw, marinate, and just generally escape. Where does one draw the line?

More to the point: can those sources of apparent escape (nontraditional, shameful, fantasy, etc.) serve as the objects of “real” and “serious” study?

Yes, of course.

But even more to the point, which I knew, dammit, when I sat down to write this blog: do I want such objects? Or would I prefer to preserve my escape?