To read? To perform? To compose and perform?

A blog-endnote to a few things I recently read regarding the reading of papers at CCCC.

The anecdote:

A Cub Scout meeting. We have some kind of book. Everyone reads a passage. Afterwards, I hear my father complain: “Why don’t these kids know how to read?” He’s right. Most of the kids struggle to form sentences. I read well.

Another anecdote:

We might call this anecdote “Learning to Teach.” The first book I taught from at the college level: The Little Brown Reader. The generic compositional textbook is framed as reading (one reads selected essays or even literature in order to have something to write about). One reading I remember teaching from the book was “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” When I wanted to include a brief discussion of King’s essay in The Rhetoric of Cool, I turned to my old copy of The Little Brown Reader to locate the quote I wanted to use. What kind of extremists will we be? King asked? Teaching from a reader is not a form of extremism.

Sometimes I’m told I’m a good paper reader. Once, two people cried at a reading I (and two others) gave. I watched Derrida (twice) give a two hour reading of his work (who can follow such thinking for two hours? I asked and still ask). When graduate students give presentations in class, I chide: “Don’t read!” I try to put something funny into papers I read (give). Once, at NCTE, I said something like “It’s not hard to imagine composition not being funky” and Kathi Yancey laughed out loud. By the time our panel was done, most of the crowd had left the room. I guess we didn’t read well.

I would have liked to hear Jim Corder give (read) a paper. His work is always wound up in a narrative, much like Sirc’s. I imagine Coder getting so chocked up at a reading he gives about rhetoric, West Texas, and being depressed that he breaks down and cries. When I read a paper these days, I try to compose a narrative. The best narratives begin with anecdotes. The other day, I was walking down the street and I saw a . . .

A Final Anecdote That Resists Being an Actual Anecdote

Other advice I give (and it is always unsolicited advice; I can read the faces of students who probably want me to keep the advice to myself) to graduate students is read. Read two articles a week; one book a month. This is how you become interpellated by the academic conversation. My last published essay began with an anecdote about an ALA reading campaign called Celebrity Read! The hardest thing to get students (of all levels) to do is read! “Who did the readings?” Our academic narrative pushes reading as the ultimate practice. “My students don’t read the newspaper” someone once complained on WPA-L, offering his anecdote as proof that lack of reading leads to bad writing. “So what?” I answered. “Neither do I.” I’m interested in how we read, celebrities and students alike, myself and maybe even you. Maybe this is why my interest in Barthes has grown in the last few years: a figure who is always talking about reading. He reads signs, culture, cities, himself. And in those readings, he is always finding what an initial reading could not account for: jouissance, the punctum, the third meaning, pleasure. A reading is a performance - at a conference or elsewhere - but also an ability to deliver that “thing” structure cannot account for. Readings that do that kind of work are always the most interesting ones we hear. Or read.