Commiserating with one of my PhD peers last night, we both came to the solemn realization that we will never be given the opportunity to read for pleasure again.
As we stood in his carrel hefting the tomes of the Canadian literary canon, weighing Not Wanted on the Voyage against The Diviners against Surfacing against The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Adam shifted the books around his bookshelf with the jocularity of a three-card Monty dealer.
"Find the lady, find the lady," I thought, as he palmed Margaret Atwood across the desk, slipping her in between Ondaatje and Davies. "One, two, three, nothing up my sleeve. Easy as pie. Find the lady and win."
"Fifth Business was pretty good," Adam said.
"When you're done," I said, "You should read World of Wonders. It's even better."
As Adam and I stood there in uncomfortably close proximity, me with one foot literally out the door, him practically straddling his desk as we valiantly tried to chat without inadvertently engaging in a consummation of our relationship (ah, the joys of the carrel!), I was struck with yet another longing for a past life that slipped by without ceremony.
I'm not going to be reading any more Canadian literature in furious quantities, nor Romantic poetry, nor Medieval lyric, nor modern drama, nor randy eighteenth-century verse. The moment for taking a course in the American novel has long past, and there seems to be no future opportunities for doing so anywhere visible on my career horizon. Somehow, by finishing my course work and declaring my specialties, I've whittled my field down and enclosed it with hedgerows, clearly demarcating where I stand knee-deep in the texts of the Renaissance.
I can wave to Adam four fields over as he wades through his own puddles of the modern novel, but I don't think I'll ever get the chance to visit there.
No, I've made my flower-bed, and now I'll have to sow and weed it for the years to come, defending my hedgerows from the rioting Oxfordian peasantry and offering toothsome, homegrown delicacies to the crown in return for her hoped-for patronage (read: tenure). This isn't to say that I don't like my field best of all - I do, I'm just struck by the sudden realization of what I've lost. Reading the Books section of the Globe and Mail or the Guardian, I find myself missing the long drink of narrative that novels have and suffering from their fierce omnipresence.
"Have you read this?" someone will ask in a bookstore, holding up a G-G Award winner. "It must be lovely to read all day long."
"Er, no," I'm forced to say. "Have you read Erasmus' Praise of Folly? It was huge in 1509."
"But aren't you in English? You must've read a lot of the classics. I just read War and Peace. What did you think of it?"
"Er, I don't," I say, blushing. "But the ballad of Protestant martyr Anne Askew is fabulous. I highly recommend it."
This is always the most embarrassing conversation for an English specialist to have: an admission of what you haven't read. It's even developed into a graduate student drinking game called "Humiliation", where you declare a classic work you've still not read, and everyone who has read it has to take a swig of their beverage. Even in a crowd of my Renaissance peers, I can still win with Macbeth (I've been saving it for a rainy day).
And from the looks of it, I'll be kicking ass at "Humiliation" for years, lobbing David Copperfield and Pamela and Ulysses and Vanity Fair at my friends as they feebly toss the Faerie Queene my way.
So I'm feeling a bit morose this week, realizing that the more I read, the more I'll never have a chance to read.
Of course, my embargo on the modern novel ("modern" here, meaning anything post-1660) means I'm spared this sort of thing:
And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he'd ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.
Personally, though, I'm rooting for Marlon Brando:
In a moment Annie was on his side, Madame Lai was like a plant growing over him, and her little fist (holding the biggest black pearl) was up his asshole planting the pearl in the most appreciated place.
"Oh, Lord," he cried out. "I'm a-comin'!"
Though, truth-be-told, the late Brando is probably not going to be "a-comin" anywhere anytime soon, least of all to pick up his award. Maybe that's why I'm rooting for him: I seem to have a thing for dead authors, all lined up nicely in furrows of well-tilled soil.
'Course, I've never encountered one who writes about pearls being inserted into bumholes before, but I'm sure that's just because I haven't read enough.
Happens to us non-lit phd types too. I almost never read for pleasure anymore. Mostly just blogs and crappy magazines.
It sucks. But not as much as that sex writing. Bleh.
Posted by: Steph | December 01, 2005 at 16:38