Since my return to the hot and humid and sordid ways of Houston, I have picked up more reading, and started writing again. I am once again attempting to read The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer while continuing Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and, now, World War Z by Max Brooks. With all this random and strange and unnecessary time on my hands, I am rediscovering my love for "fantasy" and "science fiction." Yes, I just put those genres in quotes. I do not want my idea of these categories to be confused with what others' preconceived notions are. "Science Fiction" for me rests on a post-modernist ledge with a slight push of literary snobbery (Phillip K. Dick & Dan DeLillo anyone?). "Fantasy" is a little harder to define. The last books I read that could be considered "fantasy" were probably the entire Harry Potter series (I will admit to having read Twilight as well, because I was in high school when they came out and no one had any teams and I was/still am a hopeless romantic, slightly unpopular, with a knack for wondering if there really was a love that wouldn't just up and walk away one day. Okay. Maybe I was a cynical high school kid. Anyway, they're great to read when you don't want to read Frankenstein (that I have read, by now, 4 times all for different classes) or The Scarlet Letter (which I still hate with an undying passion) or school books in general). My not-so-recent, but ever-growing, obsession with Doctor Who has lead me to revisit my assumed, automatic apathy for the "fantasy" genre. I realized, I need to stop judging books by their genre (thank you B.A. in Literature) and just relearn my love of reading.
If you would like a sob story, you should get a degree in literature based on an intense love of reading. You walk in one day, lost in a novel, a story, a person (or 10), craving this alternate reality and walk out with a cultivation of close reading, analysis, and judgment. English majors are really good judges. If the composition style is too lofty: you notice it and despise and can't not keep noticing it. If the author likes descriptives (i.e. Charles Dickens): you want to relish in it and then throw it at the teacher because they didn't give you enough time to properly read it. If the story line is lacking: you skim it and call it good. If it's contemporary: you look down your nose. If it's a classic: you feel horrible for having to force yourself through it because hey! you're an English major, you should really love the canon. We walk away craving an escape, only to dive deeper into the minds of our teachers and ourselves. We are only able to see the words on the page, and the meaning they convey. There is no escape, there is no alternate reality; and there is nothing more depressing than this acknowledgment.
I want to fight this so badly. I want to tell my brain to let it go, just this once, please oh please. But if I get lost in the novel, will I be objective? Will I lose what makes me a great analyst? Will I be judged by my own brain? Worse, who else will judge me? I end up as paralyzed as poor Hamlet, and with no Yoric for a contemplation companion. But yet, I beat on, as a tiny boat against a world-sized current. Wait, that's too familiar. Damn Fitzgerald, stole the words out of my mouth before I was even close to being close to being born.
We all fear inadequacy, and some days you just have to indulge the very possibility that plaques you. We must give in to the fear in order to create. We must continually create and never, ever think that anything is inadequate. "Ain't nobody got time for that!"
In other words, I've decided to partake in a writing project with a dear friend of mine, long-distance. I want to see what will come of the tiny people living in my brain dying for a voice of their own (even though it really is never theirs). Maybe, one day we will decide to let others read it. For now, I will get back to reading Dream of Perpetual Motion because it's less depressing than the crazy ramblings of a war hero on the brink. Vonnegut really is a literary genius, but reading inside a tortured mind while mine is already recovering from its own tortures is really too much. Maybe I will just read it all and kick it to the curb with my own crazy ramblings. For now, adieu, good evening, good morning, good everything.
(originally published 31 May, 2013)
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