3.6.10: The Art Of Violent Reading
My grandmother’s name is Imelda. She has been dead many years now. But not a single day goes by that I do not think of her. I grew up with her. She was the first influential women in my life.
As the perfect wife to my grandfather, Cornelio, who was a lawyer, and as a home economics teacher at the nearby school where I went, she took joy in teaching me many practical things: the proper order of manually washing the dishes (no dishwashers then), the right way to perfectly iron clothes, and how to mend buttons and darn socks. She also encouraged me how to play the ukulele and to start the habit of saving money in a bank. And, it was from her lap where I learned how to read, to care for, and to love books, and from whose guidance and prodding I learned how to use a library card. This is the one thing she passed on to me, above all else, where she took the best pride in.
For sure, she will be delighted to know that her gentle nudge, her loving tutelage, and her larger-than-life influence, has not been wasted on me. All the time she spent on me has not been in vain, has been for naught, that I was able to absorb, and carry on in my own life the many things she taught me, including her abiding love of reading. (I can almost smell the mustiness stoically hanging in the air of her modest personal library crammed with hardbound books, text books, paperback novels, and magazines. In my youth, this little corner has become my sanctuary as much as it was hers. She happily and generously shared the space with me. If I’m not on the attic playing hide-and-seek, I’d be in her library trying to figure out on my own what the fairy tales meant when not trying to understand the jokes from hundreds and hundreds of Readers’ Digest magazines.)
But some things have changed a bit, and almost unexpectedly. My love of books is still there, but the way I read them and care for them and store them is not the same. My grandmother, who tended to her collection of books with amazing care, will surely be horrified, even scandalized, to know how I read and treat books nowadays. She who constantly admonished me to handle books with gentleness, to rightfully bestow respect on them, and to cultivate them as loving friends, as I should, particularly books that are borrowed for a brief time from the library, she will surely be displeased and disapprove to see how I literally and typically manhandle, but not willfully or maliciously, the books in my possession. I wouldn’t, of course, dare to desecrate the books I borrow today from the New York Public Library for fear that they’d confiscate my library card and suspend my book-borrowing and book-reading privileges, even if it leaves me unrequited and thirsting for more, but when it comes to my own books, let’s just say that I’m not a model reader or model book reader.
I treat my own books as possessions that must be truly possessed. Though the years, my way of reading and manner of handling books has devolved into some kind of rabid possession, to the point where no one in his or her right mind will buy anything that I’ve laid my hands and eyes, and devoured, not even if I put it up for sale on eBay or Amazon. By the time I’m done reading a book in mint condition, it will look anything but mint.
I sometimes read books, cover to cover (yes, including the acknowledgement pages), not once but twice or even thrice. And once I’m done with a book, it invariably ends up looking like an unrecognizable heap of a mess. The once pristine book, prim and proper, smelling of freshly pressed paper and glue, ends up looking like a tired trash, as any trash looks like, after read it. I’m not proud of this, but this is the only way for me to truly and deeply engage and burrow myself into the author’s mind. When reading, a bookmark is not enough, as most people might require. I have this compelling need to slash it to its core, with several highlighters of yellows, greens and blues, and pens and pencils to underscore and violate with thick lines, and to argue or appraise points by sullying its white margins, dirty with hastily and barely legible scribbled notes. Add to that the heavy encumbrance of loose sheets of paper with more scribbled scrawls and illustrations painfully wedged between virginal pages in more than one place, straining its spine. If the concept of personal property is physical ownership of a book, my concept, as you can see, goes beyond that—I like to own not just its physical nature but I embrace its essence with punishing fervor. I chain my soul to my books.
Indeed a strange, strange way to read a book, my friend, Jennifer, might have said to me, to whom I felt compelled to apologize (although probably needlessly so), when I lent her one of mine, a heavy reference book on a very technical subject. Wisely, my friend breathed not a word for the book’s unusually dilapidated condition and sorry state, out of necessity perhaps, grateful enough to have borrowed and not paid for a copy, but perhaps more so for when she read it, because in pages, she will come upon the mind not solely of the author but of mine as well, a discourse probably made more rich and so much more interesting because of what I’ve done to it.
There’s no excuse, for sure, for such a bad habit, as I am perfectly capable of being very civil with books that I borrow, specially those from the New York Public Library, in which case, I note passages by snapping photos of some pages with my iPhone and storing these images on a fancy notation software along side photos I’ve snapped of my illustrations and diagrams, as well as typed notes, thereby all neatly depositing all of my scrambled thoughts. It’s like behaving civilly whenever in a public place where others are watching. I tried to read a book once, the normal way, without my usual involvement. And I was miserable. I didn’t understand what I was reading. I can see the words but the string of it was incomprehensible to me. I cried. I don’t know how many others out there are like me, when it comes to reading books this way. As for myself, I can’t read a book as fully if not like this.
This is my art of reading. If not, I wouldn’t have read about photography and become one, which, after all, is really all for the love of it. And so, thank you, Imelda.
–Dominique James
Contact Dominique James at djphotographer@mac.com
Visit his fine art photography website at Zatista
