I love Moby-Dick & have read it many times, including once as part of a nonstop 24-hour sign-up-for-a-chapter at Mystic Seaport, where we could have slept on a sailing boat but stayed in a hotel & came back the next day for the rest of the book. I'm reading it now, our loud, a chapter a day, & getting more pleasure than you can imagine. It's funny, deep, smart, American... everything you could want in a book. I had a conversation yesterday with my friend Louis, on why it's elitist to enjoy Moby-Dick. I mean, I don't think it is, it just happens to be the kind of book I enjoy. But the perception is it's show-offy.
And then today I came upon this article in the (elitist!) New Yorker: "The Curious Notoriety of 'Performative Reading"": Is the term a new way of calling people pretentious, or does it reflect a deprioritization of the written word? by Brady Brickner-Wood.
It begins: Here's a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." He could very well be reading "Moby-Dick" or "Gravity's Rainbow" or "Middlemarch," but, for the sake of this setup, let's say it's Wallace's 1996 novel, with its thousand-plus pages and hundreds of endnotes and the ghosts of a million bespectacled graduate students whispering, "You know it's got a nonlinear plot, right?" To the severely online, this guy is not simply enjoying a good book in the company of strangers but participating in the practice of "performative reading," a concept that's recently gained a curious notoriety. A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-"B" book.
(I also love Middlemarch & have not read the other two.)
The article is largely about authenticity, which is what Louis & I were getting at. People who are not putting on airs generally like a mix of highbrow, middlebrow, & lowbrow. You might have advanced appreciation in painting & prefer 19th-century architecture, for example. Any combination of tastes is possible, at least so long as you know what you really like & don't choose because it's what's being sold by the taste-makers of TikTok or wherever tastemakers come from these days. I once told Rudy Burckhardt that my favorite painting was Bastien-Lepage's Joan of Arc. He was a little surprised & maybe amused ~ apparently, it showed what an uneducated twit I was ~ I didn't know enough to choose a more sophisticated artwork.
As one gets older, it comes full circle, you like what you like not because you don't know better but because you know better how to explain (or defend) what you like.
