Six Personal Investigations of the Act of Reading:

Amelia Gray's Am/PM

By Pablo D'Stair

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Unfortunately, I am the sort who argues with myself about the meaning of what I’m doing while I do it, unable to separate this argument, this consideration, from the simple “doing”. Nowhere is this feature of me more on display than in reading, or more specifically, in how I read—indeed, I’m forever on the fence, as evidenced in this series to date, about whether or not I (in anything but the most superficial adoption of the technical term) read, at all.

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Amelia Gray

It may sound harsh to suggest that a piece of writing elicited no reaction at all—it is a bit much, anyway—so let me be emphatic in pointing out that when I say my reading (my multiple readings, to be fair) of AM/PM by Amelia Gray elicited no reaction, I mean this only in the sense that I had no reaction to the specifics of the prose, the figmentary individuals, the “story” as it were—I had no reaction to it as a specific fiction. The book itself, however (not the artifact, but the form)—regardless of whether or not there was any intentionality on the part of the author concerning this—did (and does, even now gathering some thoughts about it) have a thoroughly intricate and somewhat unnerving effect on me, the book as “thing” elicited quite a personal response.

A large part of this, though, came from my personal inability to get myself to differentiate between the particular “thing” of AM/PM and any other “thing” I have, for whatever reason, labeled “the same kind of thing” as it.

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Admittedly, I have a personal prejudice when it comes to short-short pieces—even short-short pieces constituting, or purporting to constitute, a single longer piece—in that, as I writer, I find nothing easier than to write something interesting (at least superficially) for a few hundred words, even if I don’t have any idea in particular to write.

Redoubling this prejudice is the fact that I think pretty much anything is interesting, even beautiful, for a few hundred words. Or better to say, superficially interesting, surface-level beautiful.

And so any series-of-writing composed of pieces each only several hundred words long, regardless of whether they specifically connect to each other or do not, is, intrinsically, easily interesting.

Add in a deep rooted suspicion that the “artistic thrust” of a short-short piece is to suggest, by the very blankness of the page, that there is something more (or indeed, something at all “total”) to the glimpse written and you get the idea what kind of noisy mess was in my head when I read Gray’s book.

Now, I want to note that I have many colleagues who seem to gush affection on the “short-short work”, colleagues who suggest often that it is actually a profoundly more difficult thing to write “something good” in just a short space of words than in a long form (though in my experience I have never heard a lover of the short-short form particularly “not like” anything done in it, the only differentiation to “lovers of this form” in my experience is that a piece is either “very good” or else hyperbolically fantastic—the central point of praise often times being the fact that the piece is…short).

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But so what? What did I think my duty was to this piece (or to any piece) in fact?

My own stance is that my (and anyone else’s) opinion of a piece of literature is entirely irrelevant to the question of a piece being Art or being anything—so what could it matter if I approached it with a clean, even headspace versus a moody, bleak frame of mind? Certainly my mission as a reader is not to “figure out do I like or dislike” a piece of writing and doubly certain is the fact that I have no duty to even “figure out what I think about it”—to read a piece all I have to do is read and my experience is whatever my experience is.

With AM/PM my experience was with the form—and whether or not my response would have been exactly the same to any book I dubbed “the same form” is not something that devalues or even makes impertinent my experience.

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An odd response I have to form is that I only consider it specific in certain circumstances—and when it comes to form-qualified-by-way-of-length, I only assume conscious, specifically deliberated choice on the part of an artist as integral to understanding a piece when the piece is, to me, notably “short”. That is, if a novel were three-hundred-thousand words in length, I would not think to myself “This author specifically wanted to express something in three-hundred-thousand words”, nor were a piece thirty thousand words long, nor a piece two thousand. Those lengths seem to me (whether they individually turn out to be or not, I am in no position ever to know) organic, neither here nor there, just how long the writing turned out to be.

When a piece winds up shorter—I have no set figure, but for sake of vague specifics I’ll say one thousand words or less—I begin to think it is pertinent (at least to the author) that the piece be just so and when length dips below five hundred, dips below three, I cannot shut myself of the idea that “This is something specifically this length—this length and a contemplation of it, a filtering through it, is meant to be component to the impact, the meaning, the thrust”. That is, the author did not write three hundred words, look at them, and only then consider “Yes, this is the totality of my expression”, rather I always think they beforehand (maybe not to the specific count) decided “I will write something three hundred words long”, wrote, and when it got there, or around there, they stopped (perhaps then tinkering with it, perhaps not).

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So all of this was clogging me up as soon as I held Gray’s book, turned through the pages idly, set it down to go about whatever business it was I had before I gave it anything like a proper glimpse. And this “pre-reaction” carried over into being my “reaction absolute”.

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Not to say my reading experience (which I will still out of stubbornness insist on calling it) stayed wholly away from arguments I consider principally literary, indeed not. Because these feelings I have on length and conscious consideration (oversimplified as they may be for sake of space, here) are at the very heart of my reaction-aesthetic.

I value more than anything in literature the notion of the unconscious and how it displays itself so coyly through the filter of consideration—and so in a “longer work” I see more opportunity (no matter what on the part of the particular artist’s sensibilities) for unconscious display to be made. Keeping something short—no matter what rhetoric might be spun to this idea—to me limits the chance for unconscious bloom, makes each and every letter something specifically handled. Only so much unconscious can be displayed in the space of a single sentence and very little of unconscious progression, for example—in such a space, a considered, purposeful demeanor seems to me to come across the words.

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It would not be the same to write a full novel or a work-of-some-length and then excise this or that paragraph at random and then call these “shorter works”, though it may seem there would be no tangible way to discern a difference—in my thinking, something elementally different would be at work in the formation of “excised shorts” than in the pieces of equivalent length specifically written to be said length.

Now also, I must admit to a seething dislike of “quote-ables” and particular passages excised with the suggestion that they, as singular objects of writing, have specific beauties or merits—I do not like piecemeal response to larger work, it kind of strikes me as removing body parts from someone and putting them in formalin to admire, it is a kind of perverse and misshapen attraction, a repurposed and ultimately destructive thing to do.

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To return to AM/PM as specifically as I can, under my poor circumstances, I can say that each and every tick of it seemed deliberate, seemed chosen—whether or not it was conscious to the point that each word was specifically designed to align to another is immaterial, I do not mean the book was a secret code for another book, I mean each passage read to me like it had a mind to be a “nice passage” extracted from or connected to something larger, but for me the absence of an “actual larger” could not be replaced by the implicit suggestion that I “imagine a larger thing the smaller thing is part of”.

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I would certainly (even enthusiastically) admit that there are many forms I lack even the most rudimentary understanding of, or better to say that as a reader I am entirely an “unconscious reactionary”—and so when approaching forms which have a large, defining element of conscious deliberation to them I am going to find myself the odd duck, unwilling to cross what I consider an entirely fanciful, immaterial bridge, disinterested in consciously deciphering the conscious choice of an author.

That being said, the interesting dilemma (a general dilemma) my time spent with Amelia Gray’s book put me in was this: certainly in keeping with my often stated aesthetic, it should be that AM/PM (or a like title) would personal satisfy me as it did nothing but delve me into my own thoughts—this is my preferred way of “interacting” with a literature—but, what I found illustrated to me, instead, was the limit of this aesthetic.

Because if it is a question of “form alone” and thinking about it, how am I to differentiate my reaction to a literature from my reaction looking at a road sign or cracker package or , indeed, my reaction to an entirely unread book I might skim through, catching a glimpse of this or that odd sentence of?

Certainly I am capable of generating reaction from anything, but is it “literary reaction” if the content of the writing is not somewhere, is not actively a driving force?

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“What do I do when I read?” (I have to face facts) cannot be answered of something I did not read—I discover through Gray that “my own definition of reading is undefined” , something I take on faith and something that may just, in the end, be an extension of my personal quirks and preferences in prose styling or plot construction.

I find myself at an impasse, wondering whether the stamp of “I read this” is anything, means anything to me—there would be no great tragedy, if not, but still it is a tricky, squirming thing to try to get my hand around, a frustrating thing that I might actually want to bring my foot heel down on, instead, it seems.

Pablo D’Stair is a writer of novels, shorts stories, and essays. Founder of Brown Paper Publishing (which is closing its doors in 2012) and co-founder of KUBOA (an independent press launching July 2011) he also conducts the book-length dialogue series Predicate.

His four existential noir novellas (Kaspar Traulhaine, approximate; i poisoned you; twelve ELEVEN thirteen; man standing behind) will be re-issued through KUBOA as individual novella and in the collection they say the owl was a baker’s daughter: four existential noirs.