This morning, e-mail from a California friend, someone I have been pals with since seventh grade. After college, marriage, and two children, she attended law school at night, earned her law degree, and later was appointed a judge to a California court, and served on the bench until her retirement. Then Sue dove into the art world and has created arresting works in fabric, with her creations garnering prizes and hanging in noteworthy places. I mention Sue because of what she shared with me. She reads my blog and few do. No matter. I write this blog because I love literature and the English language.
The e-mail Sue sent me was from a blog she’d read, which was borrowed from another blogger. (Truly I dislike this word. No matter # 2). Sue wrote of the rabbit hole she fell into related to me. Recently, I spent weeks writing about William from Old Miss. The blog my friend read mentioned Faulkner. Thus, the conjunction with me and why my old friend sent e-mail today.
The blogger Sue referenced asked readers if it was important to read Faulker.
The writer then admitted dislike of him and said William was not going to make you a better person. Next the writer moved into her blog’s intent. If the larger world “wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized” then sitting around and reading a work of art is a rebellious act that insists, “I am a human being and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop… fed to me.” This declaration ended by calling such a stance of doing difficult things like reading, “a beautiful act of rebellion.”
I smiled while reading this phrase, remembering when I and other junior high girls like Sue, somehow secured a copy of the tawdry Peyton Place and passed it around. Yet I remember no time when I felt the rebel while reading a book. I kept Gone with the Wind in my desk at school in fourth grade and felt sneaky, not rebellious. From the day I read The Yearling in third grade, I found in literature a way to wander in unknown worlds. Since then, my literary search has not ended for seventy-three years.
Yet if the “commercial internet is the capture and commodification of life,” as Rebecca Solnit writes “In the Shadow of Silicon Valley” (London Review of Books, 8 February 2024 ), then in this sense, I am a rebel bound to books in print, books that I hold in my hands, that I underline with a pen, that I return to often for another voyage. Didn’t Emily Dickinson claim there is no frigate like a book? So yes, I rebel in our brummagem times and keep reading fine literature.
Next week… what was promised last week -😊
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