Quick Hits: Procrastination Edition

It's the early part of the semester here in Ann Arbor, which can mean only one thing: I have tons of work to do, and I'm not managing it as well as I should be. Research and writing have taken over my life, including the times when I'm not actively working on my article. Although last term ate up all my blogging willpower -- it's hard to want to write more words when getting out a pile of them on a specific topic is the only thing on your to-do list for today -- I've decided that keeping things updated is both an effective means of procrastination and a way to take a break from reading past issues of the ASR over, and over, and over, and over.

For those of you who are looking for some good reads to distract you from more important things, I've got a few that should serve just fine:

• From back in May of this year, Jonathan Franzen on technology and love in the NYT. The article also covers birdwatching and mirrors, but as with any Franzen piece, it's best to let him take you along for the ride:  "To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self...Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn." 

•  A fantastic piece on Anonymous by Gabrielle Coleman in Triple Canopy. Coleman's exactly the right person to be writing about Anonymous -- a professor at McGill University in Montreal, she styles herself an anthropologist of "digital media, hackers and the law". But unlike most writers on the subject, Coleman clearly has an affection for Anonymous and 4chan, the community that sprouted it. It's not often you hear 4chan called "endearing", but it happens here. Also has one of the best explanations of "for the lulz" that I've seen in a more traditional-style publication. 

•  On the subject of online activism, the SOPA/PIPA protests led to a lot of good links floating around. While most of them were of the "here's why SOPA is bad for the internet" variety -- a statement with which I heartily agree -- I also wound up devouring a few less targeted pieces on intellectual property in general. If you don't mind your politics Left, this piece by sociologist Peter Frase is an excellent parsing of the intellectual property debate, as specifically relates to legislation like SOPA/PIPA: Intellectual Property and the Progressive Bourgeoisie. An unexpected response from the left is here at Mr. Teacup's highly readable blog: Facing the Google Vanguard.

On the subject of Franzen: his recently published collection of essays, The Ecstasy of Influence, is one of a kind. Drawing its title from his fantastic 2007 piece in Harper's (a must-read!), it's got essays on everything from sci-fi to Dylan to clerking in a used bookstore to sex in cinema. On top of that it has two of my current favourite essays, both of which have inspired me to get back to blogging: "What I Learned at the Science Fiction Convention" and "Postmodernism as Liberty Valance". Can't go wrong with titles like that!

On books and reading

Today I came across two different (or maybe the same) ideas about reading, by two very different authors coming from two very different places. The first is from Italo Calvino, and it reminds me of every trip I've ever made to a used bookstore:

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: 

the Books You've Been Planning Top Read For Ages,
the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

Dawn Treader Bookshop, one of my favourite bookstores in the world.

 The second is from Nick Hornby, from his preface to Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, and informs all of my book choices that aren't directly necessary for school-related reading:

But what's proper? Whose books will make us more intelligent? Not mine, that's for sure. But has Ian McEwan got the right stuff? Julian Barnes? Jane Austen, Zadie Smith, E. M. Forster? Hardy or Dickens? Those Dickens readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell -- were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is Literary now, of course, because the books are old. But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters...How much cleverer will we be if we read Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck's beautiful, simple novella? Or Tobias Wolff's brilliant This Boy's Life, or Lucky Jim, or To Kill a Mockingbird. Enormous intelligence has gone into the creation of all of theses books, just as it has into the creation of the iPod, but the intelligence is not transferable. It's there to serve a purpose.

But there it is. It's set in stone, apparently: books must be hard work; otherwise they're a waste of time. And so we grind out war through serious, and sometimes seriously dull, novels, or enormous biographies of political figures, and every time we do so, books come to seem a little more like a duty, and Pop Idol starts to look a little more attractive. Please, please, put it down.

...reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don't mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that's what you want to read, it's find by me, because here's something else no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy to blame. 

And, finally, in the words of Cory Doctorow:

We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children...We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.

Some days other people's words are better than my own. Today was one of those days.

The Most Photographed Barn in America

Corinne Vionnet's St Basil's Cathedral, Moscow; part of Photo Opportunities, a series of images by layering 200-300 tourist of the same landmarks on top of one another.

     Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides--pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some noes in a little book. 

     "No one sees the barn," he said finally.

     A long silence followed.
     "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
     He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated side, replaced at once by others.
     "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."
     There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
     "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be a part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."
     Another silence ensued.
     "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.
     He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers the advanced the film.
     "What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now."
     He seemed immensely pleased by this. 

          -- Don DeLillo, White Noise

---

I've been away from the blog for the last week or so -- reading week in sunny (har har) Halifax has had me reading Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, marathoning on the third season of Deadwood and drinking copious amounts of Propellor beer. Should be back to my regular (if it can be called that) posting schedule later in the week; upcoming subjects include the byline gender gap, popular press books that take a dystopic view of the effect of the Internet on the human mind, and what it's like to watch The Godfather a million years after everyone else has seen it. Because I just did that. At the age of twenty-four.

Quick Hits

• Phillip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials trilogy) defends public libraries in the face of funding cuts in the UK: "No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?"
• Turns out Vladimir Nabokov wasn't just one of the most beautiful writers of the the past century. He was also a self-taught lepidopterist, and his theories about butterfly evolution were recently confirmed by Harvard scientists.
• An excellent post on the historical intersections between slavery and abortion, and a wonderful response to the right-wing rhetoric that equates a woman's right to choose with the institutionalized subjugation of Black Americans.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates hosts Brendan Koerner's essay on the future of reading. In the same vein, John McPhee in the Paris review on the future of writing.
• Margaret Atwood has an upcoming book on science fiction and the human imagination. Must. Have. Although it's unclear if this means she's backing off her eternal distinction between SF and speculative fiction.
• From the BBC, an interesting interview with Ursula LeGuin. She discusses how social anthropology has influenced her writing, among other things.
• And finally, check out this 1994 Today Show clip (and Katie Couric's magnificently terrible hairstyle) as we ask that age-old question: What IS the Internet? The future is now guys!

Ambiguous Utopias: the Science Fiction of Ursula K. LeGuin

As a long time fan of Ursula K. LeGuin, I am almost embarrassed to admit that it's taken me this long to read The Dispossessed, one of her most lauded novels (both in science fiction circles and outside of them).

Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award, as well as the 1975 Hugo and Locus awards, The Dispossessed is at once a sci-fi exploration of alien social worlds, and a philosophical exploration of our own. The novel is set on two neighbouring planets: Anarres and Urras. The inhabitants of these planets were once one people, but in order to prevent an anarcho-syndicalist worker's rebellion, the states of Urras grant the revolutionaries the right to settle on the barren, harsh moon of Anarres, with a promise of non-interference; all of this occurs approximately 200 years before the events of the novel. Anarres maintains an anarchist system of social organization, while Urras is more familiar--state governments, from capitalist-patriarchal to authoritarian-socialist vie with one another for global dominance.

We enter the dual worlds alongside the protagonist, Shevek, a Anarresti physicist who is making the first ever trip by a citizen of Anarres back to Urras. The novel's structure mirrors Shevek's disorientation; every even numbered chapter takes place on Anarres, detailing Shevek's past, while each odd numbered chapter follows his experiences on Urras. This device manages to maintain suspense in two timelines at once--why does Shevek leave Anarres? And does he ever come back?

As in many of her genre books, LeGuin's taught writing and well-rounded characters keep the novel moving, but it is the setting that takes centre stage. The subtitle of the The Dispossessed is "an ambiguous utopia", and this is a telling signifier. The world of Anarres--which could easily be a vicious caricature of anarchist ideas or an uncritical and unrealistic utopia--is, in LeGuin's capable hands, a fully developed social world. Its populace is not unrecognizable; there is vice and avarice, as well as love and altruism. Its materiality is harsh and unforgiving; Anarres is consistently described as a bleak desert landscape, bereft of plants and animals, as well as of magnificent architecture and labour-saving technology. But the characters are warm and believable, and their personalities clearly structured by their membership in a world where ownership is unknown and the worst thing you can be is an "egoist" or a "propertarian".

LeGuin has often been critiqued on for this detail-oriented focus on world building. For science fiction novels, her works display a surprising lack of space battles, hi-tech weaponry, and even significant action sequences of any kind. Despite this, they remain compelling. My interest in LeGuin's work is less about the characters or the plot, and more about her complex--sometimes dauntingly so--explorations of social worlds that, despite being set on alien planets, so closely mirror our own.

The daughter of a prominent anthropologist (Alfred L Kroeber, founder of the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley), LeGuin has noted in multiple places that her fiction has been deeply influenced by anthropological and social thought, as well as her encounters with her father's subjects of study. The Dispossessed is not the only novel of LeGuin's that deserves to be labelled an ambiguous utopia. Her most well-regarded work, The Left Hand of Darkness, describes a planet on which where is no gender. The Telling is set on a world where nature has been subsumed by technology, and The Word for World is Forest is a novella about the clash between a logging colony and the indigenous inhabitants of the planet they share (sci-fi critic Gary Westfahl, in his excellent review of James Cameron's Avatar said that the film most closely resembled LeGuin's novella, out of all its possible predecessors). Perhaps the most beautiful, and disturbing, is LeGuin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"; which is absolutely worth the twenty minutes it takes to read it online.

What all of these works have in common, and what makes LeGuin's writing so endlessly compelling to me, is that they all share a common commitment to exploring anthropological and sociological ideas. In her essay "A War Without End", LeGuin writes:

In the sense that it offers a glimpse of some imagined alternative to 'the way we live now', much of my fiction can be called utopian, but I continue to resist the word. Many of my invented societies strike me as an improvement in one way or another on our own, but I find Utopia far too grand and too rigid a name for them. Utopia, and Dystopia, are intellectual places. I write from passion and playfulness. My stories are neither dire warning nor blueprints for what we ought to do...To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader's mind, from the lazy timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.

 By displacing these alternative societies to alien planets, LeGuin allows the reader to accept these ideas as she presents them; a story similar to the one told in The Dispossessed could not be set in the present day, nor the recent past, and maintain its effect. Always nuanced and rarely didactic, The Dispossessed presents the anarchism of Anarres as a real political possibility--with all the flaws and vagaries that come with human social life--in a way that a novel set on Earth never could. Divested from the baggage of the Cold War, and yet subtly pointing towards the politics of that era, The Dispossessed explicitly recognizes the ambiguity of the characters utopias. In a passage toward the end of the novel, Shevek discusses his time on Urras with an ambassador from a future Earth:

"There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it...There is no freedom. It is a box--Urras is box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras."

For all his passion he spoke simply, with a kind of humility, and again the Ambassador from Terra watched him with a guarded yet sympathetic wonder, as if she had no idea how to take that simplicity.

 "We are both aliens here, Shevek," she said at last. "I am from much farther away in space and time. Yet I begin to think that I am much less alien to Urras than you are... Let me tell you how this world seems to me. To me, and to all my fellow Terrans who have seen the planet, Urras is the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of all the inhavited worlds. It is the world that comes as close as any could to Paradise."

The structure of the novel facilitates this ambiguity, with the final chapters detailing Shevek's escape from capitalist Urras, as well as his decision to leave anarcho-syndicalist Anarres in the first place. All the while, it is clear that while the material relations of the world make the man, it is his human relationships that make the world home.

Another passage in the novel captures LeGuin's commitment to both the intimacy of day-to-day social relationships, and the broader impact that these relationships have on the shape of collective social life:

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."

"It is sad", LeGuin writes in 'A War Without End', "that so many stories that might offer a true vision settle for patriotic of religious platitude, technological miracle working, or wishful thinking, the writers not trying to imagine truth...We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we cannot imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable." Despite the alien settings of her novels, LeGuin's work renders imaginable worlds where social life is organized differently, and, in doing so, allows us the opportunity to re-imagine our own.

The Female Body and Alien Territory

Whenever I want to explain to someone what I think feminist literature looks like, the first person who comes to mind is Margaret Atwood. I first encountered Atwood when I was in grade ten; I read Alias Grace, and hated it (I've since rethought that particular opinion).

Most women I know had their first encounter with Atwood through The Handmaid's Tale; most men through Oryx & Crake. My first real engagement with Atwood was through one of her early works: The Edible Woman. When I was struggling with anxieties about eating The Edible Woman helped me think through my relationship with food not only as a personal idiosyncrasy, but also as a symptom of wider social issues.

Two of my favourite Atwood books are Good Bones and The Tent. Part short story collections, part prose poetry, both books contain some of Atwood's most insightful -- and cutting -- writing on the subject of gender. Two pieces in Good Bones stand out in particular; I always read them in tandem. I've excerpted both of them here:

The Female Body has many uses. It's been used as a door-knocker, a bottle-opener, as a clock with a ticking belly, as something to hold up lampshades, as a nutcracker, just squeeze the brass legs together and out comes your nut. It bears torches, lifts victorious wreaths, grows copper wings and raises aloft a ring of neon stars; whole buildings rest on its marble heads.

It sells cars, beer, shaving lotion, cigarettes, hard liquor; it sells diet plans and diamonds, and desire in tiny crystal bottles. Is this the face that launched a thousand products? You bet it is, but don't get any funny big ideas, honey, that smile is a dime a dozen.

It does not merely sell, it is sold. Money flows into this country or that country, flies in, practically crawls in, suitful after suitful, lured by all those hairless pre-teen legs. Listen, you want to reduce the national debt, don't you? Aren't you patriotic? That's the spirit. That's my girl. -- from "The Female Body"

On the other hand, it could be argued that men don't have any bodies at all. Look at the magazines! Magazines for women have women's bodies on the covers, magazines for men have women's bodies on the covers. When men appear on the covers of magazines, it's magazines about money, or about world news. Invasions, rocket launches, political coups, interests rates, elections, medical breakthroughs. Reality. Not entertainment. Such magazines show only the heads, the unsmiling heads, the talking heads, the decision-making heads, and maybe a little glimpse, a coy flash of suit. How do we know there's a body, under all that discreet pinstriped tailoring? We don't, and maybe there isn't.

What does this lead us to suppose? That women are bodies with heads attached, and men are heads with bodies attached? Or not, depending.

You can have a body, though, if you're a rock star, an athlete, or a gay model. As I said, entertainment. Having a body is not altogether serious. -- from "Alien Territory"

I've always thought these pieces would be excellent for an introductory sociology class on gender, particularly one that dealt with representations of gender in popular culture. I'm thinking about integrating them into my own teaching, if the opportunity arises.

Beautiful books

As you may or may not have noticed (although I hope by now it's kind of obvious), I have a thing for books. Jonathan Lethem once said: "What I like are books in their homely actuality—the insides of the books, the mysterious movements of characters and situations and the emotions that accompany those movements. The play of sentences, their infinite variety". I would add to that description of the homely actuality of books the pleasure received from the book as a physical object. The way a book feels in your hands when you lift it, the smoothness of the pages, the smell of the binding glue in mass market paperbacks in an in academic trades, the art on the cover.


On this, the eve of my receiving a Kindle, here is an ode to the physical book. I am what Cory Doctorow calls a book-person. In a lecture on universal access and copyright, Doctorow described the relationship that some people have to books:

We are the people of the book. We love our books; we fill our houses with books. We treasure the books that we inherit from our parents and we relish the idea of passing our beloved books on to our children. We enforce worthy books on our friends and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird, and possibly inappropriate kinship with people we see reading beloved books on public transit or airplanes...We know our tribespeople, the other people of the book, because they inhabit homes given over to books -- walls lined with books, piled on the stairs and beside the bed, even bathrooms filled with damp, swollen paperbacks. Our books are us.

I've never been one to pay much attention to the design of a home (anyone who's been in my apartment knows that I live in what has kindly been called an "intellectual fugue state", which is a nice way of saying that it isn't readily apparent that I pay attention to anything that isn't housed between two covers, like tidiness or cooking), but homes without bookcases feel empty to me. I am loathe to travel without at least five or six books -- hence the Kindle -- and it's a rare moment when any surface of my home isn't host to a haphazard pile of hardcovers and paperbacks.

Today, I bought a lovely cloth-bound hardback copy of Raymond Williams' Culture & Materialism, and it got me thinking about book covers. I've never been a believer that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. You shouldn't judge them by only their covers, but a beautiful cover can be as much of a factor in my purchase of a book I'm not sure I'll like as an ugly cover is a factor in me putting it back in the shelf. And so, without further ado, here are some pictures of books that I love with covers I love. You can't feel their weight or touch their pages, but beautiful covers are one part of what I love books, in all of their homely actuality.

For more book covers, visit The Book Cover Archive. If your tastes run less towards beautiful books and more toward beautiful ways to house your books, try Bookshelf Porn.

On Ideal Readers

I've been thinking lately about reading, and what makes me return to some books again and again, while others languish, unfinished or unstarted, on my bookshelves. There are four authors I repeatedly turn to in times of crisis or boredom or need: Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Ursula LeGuin, and Annie Dillard. I didn't know this about myself until I started giving away copies of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Tent in hopes that someone else would share what I felt when reading the words inside. Eventually I realized that even the people who enjoyed my recommendations -- and that was certainly not everyone I hassled to read what I was reading -- didn't effusively express the same connection to the books that I did. 

Over the years, Borges has started to creep into the ranks (strangely the only man in my pantheon on writers, despite the fact that most of the books I read are written by men), but the sensation of being known by an author is few and far between. I sometimes experience it with theorists -- C. Wright Mills, Richard Rorty, and Foucault come to mind, although only Rorty regularly makes it into my work -- but it remains a sensation tied to words, and not to ideas. I find myself picking up books by writers who express similar feelings about my beloved quintet; two weeks ago I bought Roberto Bolano's 2666 on the basis that he once said he could live under a kitchen table, reading Borges. 

It turns out there's a term for this sensation: that of being the ideal reader. In her introduction to The Best American Non-Required Reading 2003, Zadie Smith wrote about the experience of discovering yourself as an ideal reader:

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

...

A cult book, of course, is one that induces the feeling of "being chosen as ideal" in every one of its readers. This is a rare, mysterious quality. The difference between, for example, a fine book like Philip Roth's The Human Stain and a cult book like J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is that no one is in any doubt that Roth's book was written for the general reader, whereas a Salinger reader must fight the irrational sensation that the book was written for her alone. It happens more often in music: Prince fans thought Prince their own private mirage; all of the boys who liked Morissey thought he sang for each of them...It is all of it delusional, probably, like simultaneous orgasm, but to think of oneself as the perfect receptacle for an artwork is one of the few wholly benign human vanities.

Ideal reading is aspirational, like dating. It happens that I am E.M. Forster's ideal reader, but I would much prefer to be Gustave Flaubert's or William Gaddis's or Franz Kafka's or Borges's. But early on Forster and I saw how we suited, how we fit, how we felt comfortable (too much so?) in each others company. I am Forster's ideal reader because, I think, nothing that he left on the page escapes me. Rightly or wrongly, I feel I get all his jokes and appreciate his nuances, that I am as hurt by his flaws as I am by my own, and as please when he is great as I would be if I did something great...You might know three or four writers like this in your life, and likely as not, you will meet them when you are very young. Understand: They are not the writers that you most respect, most envy, or even most enjoy. They are the ones you know.

This is not the ideal reader of the writer, as presented in Stephen King's excellent On Writing. The writer may indeed have an ideal reader in mind while she works -- this person is not the same as the reader who feels themselves to be ideal. Goethe, in a letter Johann Rochlitz, wrote that there are three kinds of readers: one who enjoys without judging, one who judges without enjoying, and a third who judges while enjoying and enjoys while judging. It is the final class of reader -- though the smallest class -- "who reproduces a work of art anew". This is the reader who holds, for the books that matter most to them, the promise of resurrection. They are the cumulative reader: each re-reading, each new piece of writing by the author, adds new layers of memory to the narrative.

From Nick Hornby's Songbook:

But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are, perfectly. And they don't do this with words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that...It's a process somewhat like falling in love. You don't necessarily choose the best person, or the wisest or the most beautiful; there's something else going on. There was a part of me that would rather have fallen for Updike, or Kerouac, or DeLillo -- for someone masculine, at least, maybe somebody a little more opaque, and certainly someone who uses more swear words -- and though I have admired those writers, at various stages in my life, admiration is a very different thing from the kind of transference I'm talking about. I'm talking about understanding -- or at least feeling like I understand -- every artistic decision, every impulse, the soul of both the work and its creator.  

Who are you the ideal reader for?