Ya Gotta Close-Read!

Well this is an outdated blog post about how I interpreted "A Study of Reading Habits" and what I did wrong in doing so. I've spent about a week writing this upstairs in my noggin, and finally the nerve impulse oozed its way to my fingers where it can become text.

In class last Monday we were picking apart at the poem and discussing its overall intention. Everyone was saying things about how the subject read too much and missed out on life (the correct intention), and meanwhile I sat back thinking "Just WAIT until I raise my hand and blow you all away with the REAL interpretation." Well, I ventured my interpretation and was myself blown away by the overwhelming air of confusion in the room. My idea of the poem went something like "The character read books his whole youth and then began to himself become one of the depraved literary characters, thus scaring him away from literature and making books unsettling because they were too close to home." This was nothing like the general consensus.

After reading the poem a couple times, I got absolutely nothing. This is pretty standard, just letting the words flow through my head. Then somewhere on the 3rd, 4th, or 5th reading, the phrase "The women I clubbed with sex!" stuck out, of course, because it was awesome. And it had an exclamation point, no one can argue with that. So I began formulating my hypothesis based on this line being legitimate and the obvious fact that the main character has quit reading. I re-read and re-read and made each phrase somehow fit into this analysis by bending them just a little. The only thing I couldn't really make fit was 'inch-thick specs'. I developed the character into the kindof person who's a really big nerd in high school, then gets to college and suddenly his intellect is suave, not anti-social, and he goes wild (with the sex). I know many of these people, thus this was a very anti-Nabokovian thing to do. So with all the puzzle pieces of the poem cut up and reassembled to fit together, my version of the intent of the poem makes sense. But it doesn't make the picture on the front of the puzzle-box.

In class, the next student speaking, after I was astonished by silence, pointed out the real meaning of the word 'inch-thick specs', and suddenly the physical content of the poem seemed a lot more rational to me. I was duly embarrassed. It was like watching Donnie Darko for the umpteenth time and saying "Oh! Those guys he hung out with were never actually his friends! He never had a Halloween party!" Suddenly I was filled with "Oh, inch-thick specs! He actually had inch-thick specs!" So let this blog post (my first, as it were) serve as both an explanation to all those who were baffled by what I said in class, and also as a warning not to put yourself or anyone you know into what you read.