Labun Jordan: Rules Of Reading

Print More
MP3

(Host)
In her work at e-Vermont, commentator Helen Labun Jordan reads and
writes quite a bit, but recently she decided to pursue a writing degree –
and while she’s enjoying the experience, it’s made her start to wonder
about the future of hobbies.

(Labun Jordan) Here’s something you don’t appreciate until it’s gone – pleasure reading.

In
the decade since my last English class I’ve avoided tales of
middle-aged male angst, bailed from dull novels, and kept my
intellectual depth at your basic murder mystery. That’s pleasure
reading. It was pleasurable.

And then, I enrolled in a master’s
degree program in fine arts. I wanted more professional skills in
writing. My first clues of the difference came at the residency, when
pleasure reading was replaced by something else.

Turns out,
reading leaves a lot of room for error. I tried to interpret poetry, and
short stories, and memoir, and when the professor said "tell me what
feelings this piece evokes for you" he soon added "I really don’t see
how you got there". I fumbled through enjambment, stopline, found line,
partial villanelle. I learned that ‘suspension of disbelief’ has all the
details of a formal legal contract.

Exhausted by new rules of
reading, residency novices gathered around the cafeteria’s frozen yogurt
machine to eat sugar and talk about anything but whether we’d read a
good book lately. Then we went back to unraveling fragmented narrative.

The
career advice to do what you love comes with plenty of risks – less so
if what you love is engineering, more so if it’s playing lead guitar in a
rock band. One risk we don’t talk much about is that the process of
turning what you love into a job might very well knock the pleasure out
of it.

It’s easy to get that risk intuitively – like when you’re
struggling to define the cadence of dialogue instead of enjoying Janet
Evanovich. What hasn’t been so easy is drawing the line. "Do what you
love" now means a trend where hobbies aren’t hobbies anymore, they’re
careers waiting to happen.

Look at writing. Anyone can publish
work online, print books for a small fee, dabble in multimedia. Some
states have turned public libraries into publishing houses. The book
‘Fifty Shades of Gray’ transformed an online fan fiction writer into New
York Times bestseller, and gave us all a taste of the new no man’s land
between amateur and professional. The book’s writing quality is
reported to be terrible, but then it started as something written for
the writer’s own amusement… quality was beside the point.

Expectations
shift when amateurs use publishing tools – sometimes subtly, sometimes
in a major book deal. Either way, just for fun isn’t the only goal any
more. And there are a lot of places where new tools have upgraded our
hobbies into something quasi-professional: 3-D printers let us turn
garages into factories, our kitchen gadgets could appear on Iron Chef,
there’s even DIY race car design.

It’s a golden age for people
who want to blur that line between hobbyist and professional. But we’re
starting to confuse ‘better’ – measured in higher skills, fancier tools,
greater recognition – with more enjoyable. It’s time to re-embrace
hobbies that are simply hobbies and nothing more.

Comments are closed.