Reading in public

My new favorite blog is Underground New York Public Library. It's a lot like my wife's favorite blog, Sartorialist, but instead of being about people wearing stylish clothes, it's about people reading books in public.

Here's a typical example from each:


Sometimes, it's hard to tell which blog is which ...
 

... especially when everyone's reading. 

Is there some correlation between stylish people and people who read? Maybe.

But I think the more important correlation is that both kinds of people are interesting in some way--both kinds stick out in a crowd, both invite (intentionally or not) the kind of attention that earns them a place on someone's flickr feed. Both kinds of people are assertively themselves, wholly contextualized into their environments (i.e., looking natural) while at the same time doing their own thing. That's pretty cool. In fact, it might be a useable definition of that illusive trait of "cool."

Anyway, this interest in photos of people reading in public carries over into the classroom. In my Literature and Cinema class, the first film we watched this semester was Adaptation, a movie about one screenwriter's near failed attempt to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. 

The movie's about how hard it is to make something as public as a movie out of something as private experience of reading a beautiful book about flowers.

I started the semester with this movie because it's a way of starting a conversation about what it means to write and read stories. Writing a story involves deciding how to translate an experience into a coherent narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. And reading a story involves interacting with those decisions, projecting in your mind the world, people, and actions that the writer's decisions convey in her story.

Adaptation includes a lot of scenes of people reading:

Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) reading about Orchids.

Susan Orlean having a sublime experience while reading. 

Notice the private setting--the home office--and the private rapture.

Compare that to this:

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) reading Orlean's book. 

Kaufman is digging into the text not for pleasure but because he has to make something out of it. Specifically, he has to make a movie. He starts obsession over the book, specifically over its unadaptability. Can one make a page of beautiful words into a screen of entertaining sights and sounds? That is a question I will be asking my students a lot this semester.

Kaufman fails to interact with Orlean's text. He simply loves her book. (He may even love Orlean.) But he can't offer either thing anything in return.

In other words, Charlie is bad at being in public. At a diner, when a nice server shows some interest in the book he's reading and in doing the job of being a nice server ...

Charlie "misreads" her kindness and (very awkwardly) asks her out. 

She gets scared and tells her boss. The message: Reading less dangerous than socializing, and the former is likely to make the latter more difficult.

Now, cognitive scientists have discovered that the opposite is the case, that reading--especially reading literature--enhances one's ability to navigate the complexities of social interaction, to more fully inhabit the moments in which they interact with other people.

And that's a long-term hope of mine: That the stereotype of the socially-awkward bookworm will die out and be replaced by, well, this guy.