As far back as I can remember, I have always loved to read. The obsession was initially centered on fantasies and science-fiction, like The Lord of the Rings and the like, but I also fed from a regular diet of Agatha Christie’s mysteries and Louis L’Amour’s westerns. My reading habits since have expanded to include almost any and everything – although I must admit fiction, and in particular novels, still hold a powerful place in my reading tendencies.
I read quite a bit (but, of course, never as much I feel I should). As an English teacher, I read for school; as a student, I read for classes. And I hardly ever read a text without having some sort of reaction, whether it is emotional, intellectual, or something quite else. I don’t often write out these responses, reactions, or analyses, even though I feel led to do this. I hope for this blog to be a space for me to put my unbiased reactions to what I’ve read recently into words; and hopefully I will do this more often than I won’t.
I hope, as well, that this blog is a space to enter intro dialogue with others about books and words. It has been said that no two people have ever read the same book, and while I may not agree to the full extent of what this quotation intends to convey, I do think that every single reader offers to the world a unique perspective on every text.
On a more intellectual and artist level, I hope this blog also serves as a space for me and others to ask the bigger questions of art and literature. What is art? More importantly, why is art? What does it mean to respond to art? What does it mean to analyze art? As opposed to contemporary ideas of the analysis of art that see it simply as a gateway into various ideological perceptions of the world – i.e. the Marxist sees art as a mode of demonstrating the power and economic structures of a particular society; the post-modernist sees art as a demonstrating the fact that man as a product of social and cultural surroundings – I see art as a product of the individual person, in all his glory and divinity and sin and tendencies.
There are specific questions I have about narrative art such as novels, short stories, movies, narrative poetry, and the like. Why does man tell stories? Why is man so inclined to reinterpret his experience in this world through a fictitious medium? What is it that we’re doing, or supposed to do, when we discuss these stories? What is important about story-telling as a human trait?
The best I can do in answering these questions in the small amount of space afforded me at the very end of this post is to point back to the words of Evelyn Waugh that this blog takes its title from: “There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.”
