Mark Athitakis Newsletter #32

Reading: We're doing it wrong.

When I was in high school, a girl I was friends with suggested we go to a park where I could read poetry to her. It was a sweet idea, though we had different ideas about what this suggestion meant---she was a senior heading to college, and wanted a nice moment of closure with another bookish pal. I was a junior, and wanted [insert riot of hormones here]. But even though this wasn't a romantic meeting as such, it was built on romantic notions of what reading is supposed to be like. Shade trees, warm sun, open air, fine literature. Plus a couple of angsty, overthinking high-schoolers---My So-Called Life by way of the Levenger Catalog.

This orderly plan went south quickly. The first complication was my choice in reading material. Rather than something swoony from Shakespeare or darkly romantic from Dickinson, I'd opted for e.e. cummings; inexplicably, my go-to choice was "anyone lived in a pretty how town"---a lovely poem in its way, but not a particularly romantic or gentle one. Its cadence is redolent of a hoedown. 

The locale we opted for was a small park in downtown Riverside, Illinois, a leafy and tony burg whose sinuous, curving streets were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. It exists in marked contrast to the scruffier neighboring towns we hailed from, which mainly looked like they were designed by a guy named Biff. Alas, this was the year of a 17-year cicada brood, so pockets of the suburbs were all but coated in cicada shells; our sylvan retreat now looked like it'd been landscaped by H.R. Giger. So much for that. We retreated to the nearby public library, a handsome gray neo-Gothic pile, but I have a deep voice, and cummings' loping rhythms got me shushed quick. I tried reading more quietly. I got shushed again.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that I've been reading at the mall a lot lately.

We get sold on ideal ways to read---a quiet house or back porch, a comfy couch, a reading desk. But those options have been failing me of late---the house is either too quiet or reminds me of various honey-do projects to be accomplished. The laptop is too close at hand, twitchy to distract. Sitting on the back porch in August in Phoenix is equivalent to reading in a rotisserie oven. That rules out reading in parks here, too, though I'm inclined to think that people who say they love reading in parks are lying to themselves. Even if I could have swept that Riverside park clean of cicada shells that afternoon, there's still mud and bugs to deal with. And reading in parks is an avocation built for people with stronger backs than mine.

Similarly, the non-home places where we usually get told to do our reading are uniformly overrated. Commuter trains? I find it hard to focus during train delays, something the Washington, DC, Metro had copious supplies of when I lived there. Public libraries? They always falling short of the monastic silence you imagine is there, because for very good reasons libraries are now community and coworking spaces. Coffee shops and bars? You shouldn't have to pay a fee to have a place to read a book. 

So, that's left me with the mall, where I've found something like the platonic ideal for a reading environment: plenty of light, comfortable seating, the assurance that you won't be bothered by either pressing home needs or people interrupting you. (Trust me, nobody will strike up a conversation with you about books at the mall. Even if you sit near the Barnes & Noble.) And yet, there's a steady hum of humanity there that feels like clapping on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Anodyne adult-contemporary pop wafts somewhere in the distance (Adele, 70s Hall and Oates, like that); families stop at a neighboring couch to gather themselves and consume pretzel-based snacks, then move on.

I've never concentrated better, though I recognize this makes me seem a bit ridiculous; confessing this feels dangerously close to being the first step in becoming an Arizona stereotype who wants his AARP card a few years early, ready to power-walk past the Nordstrom and Macy's at a temple of late capitalism before dumping myself at the Sbarro, gorging myself through a hellscape with a soft-rock soundtrack and calling it healthy living. But being in the midst of all that at once allows me to recognize it as much as tune it out. Books are about people; reading while you're around them is useful reminder of that.

Your mileage may vary when it comes to this. Some malls are noisier than others, and these days many are so financially unstable that sitting in a failing one would strike the wrong mood. The one I go to is hanging on, but it hasn't found a replacement for the Sears that shuttered last year. Half the food-court stalls are vacant; boutiques swap in and out as if the mall were a lab testing whether one place can sustain a dozen athleisure outlets. Probably not; in time the mall will likely be yet another imperfect reading environment, like all the others. But if the shopping-mall model collapses entirely, maybe we can move the libraries there. Open air, sunlight, plenty of books, and people nearby---but not too close. Finally, we'd all be reading properly.

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Things I enjoyed reading this week: Ian Frazier on the white-supremacist rhetoric of a century past; Ilana Masad on The World According to Garp and its pioneering "blurring of the lines between sexes and genders"; Art Spiegelman on the origin story of the superhero comic; Soraya Roberts on writing about black culture as a white (or nonblack) critic. As for me, at USA Today I reviewed Nell Zink's Doxology, an irreverent gen-X novel; I'd have needed triple the word count to explore its peculiar and funny fetishization of Ian MacKaye.

Thanks for reading. Email me: mathitak@gmail.com.