Okay, so the title of this post is kind of meant to get your attention. I am actually a fan of high standards and what having them can do to improve your life. I will likewise have high standards for my child and encourage him to have them for himself and others. However, one of those "things I've learned while getting older and more adult-like" is that high standards are - sometimes - wrong standards. Or at the very least wrong-ish. There are many things in life to which I can apply this lesson--times when I thought I was having high standards but really I was just foolishly creating a false set of expectations outside of which lay different and, more importantly, preferable options.
Many of us do this with potential life partners. Come on, this isn't a surprise, as much as we are shocked when it becomes an actual realization. We all know that we build a resume of our ideal partner--a set of standards for the person who would make us the most happy and full of feelings of achievement. A "look who I bagged, I must be pretty special!" kind of thing. We are told by all sorts of fictions from classic lit to romcoms, and our family and friends who are, like us, at least partly products of that cultural environment, that at some point we must wisely and sheepishly put away the list in our keepsake box and "settle" for a more reasonable (and available) match. This is in no way (well, maybe part-ways) an argument against the search for passion and excitement--but it is an expression of disagreement in the idea that the reasonable choice is somehow always settling for a lower standard. In my experience, IT IS NOT. Obviously the world is full of different experiences both negative and positive in the love and partnership department (understatement). But it turns out that in retrospect, the romantic standards of my younger self were mostly ridiculous and ill-advised. I'm not going to go into any gory details, but suffice it to say that it was not until I buried that stupid list and opened myself up to less-expected options that I discovered another set of (decidedly more adult) standards that were much higher and more commendable in a long-lasting partnership. And guess what? Turns out that the person who fulfilled those higher, more commendable standards also delightfully happened to fulfill many of those less important standards of the High Fidelity variety (at one point in the movie version Rob makes the fan-centric claim that [paraphrasing] it's what you like that matters, not what you are like. Turns out you shouldn't take romantic advice from Rob in High Fidelity. Why was this not always completely obvious to me? It's basically what the whole movie is about!). Also turns out that passion and excitement are still there and, more importantly, have a higher chance of being there for a long time to come. Look, I want flowers, surprise candle paths and steamy declarations as much as the next romantic, but come on. Who really wants that height of emotional engagement every day? Seriously, people--maybe it makes me boring but I'd oftentimes prefer to sit in sweatpants with a bowl of kimchi and watch Bones with my sweetie-pie than get all dressed up for a whirlwind night of romance and the pseudo-athletic stuff that's supposed to follow. Wow, I've really gotten side-tracked here. This was supposed to be a side example. Anyway, the point is that the love department is one area where sometimes supposed high standards can turn out to be wrong standards, and one must be open to going outside those previous standards to realize it.
Believe it or not, my main example is much more trivial than the side one. It starts with a dangerous confession:
I hate Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I really do. I struggled through it for hours, trying to decipher its post-modern code of coolness and smartness with a concordance/guide next to the book on my laptop. It was one of the single most liberating moments in my academic career (and maybe my life) when my advisors told me that it was okay if I didn't like it and took it off of my University Oral Exam reading list. HALLELUJAH!! No book has ever made me feel more dumb--and I resent that because I know that while I'm sure I'm dumb in several ways, I'm overall not dumb at reading books. I mean, I get what he was trying to do. I see the techniques and have read the analyses and know how it's an example of what post-modernism is about, but I just found reading it to be an excruciating experience. Soul-crushing really. I'm so pleased that there are many many people that seem to really love it and find it enjoyable, even though a little part of me doesn't quite believe them. It's one of those books that you're supposed to really admire and compliment because it makes you part of a smarty-pants club. Don't get me wrong--I love the smarty-pants club (I mean look how many years I've been in school); but in this case, for me, the entrance cost was just too high. Gravity's Rainbow, maybe unjustly (maybe not) became a symbol of what grad school can sometimes do to your love of your discipline.
When reading becomes your job, your requirement, the measure of your success at life, sometimes it makes you stop reading. For fun, anyway. It is baffling to me how hard it is for me to decide on and get into a book in my leisure time these days. Somehow TV is so much less threatening (see my television addiction). I realized recently that grad school in literature had raised my standards so 'high' that it limited the list of 'acceptable' books for me to read to an impossibly narrow list. Granted, the items on the list are theoretically there because they are extremely well-written examples of artistry and exciting in their various innovations, transgressions or masteries--and on one level I'm excited to read all of them one day, but they are almost all books that I can't fully read at my leisure. They are books that I may one day have to teach or at least talk about with someone who is smart at literature, so when I read them I inevitably feel the need to have my stickies or little notebook nearby, a pencil for the margins or at least keep my brain engagement on a more analytical level. This type of loaded reading, while clearly rewarding and fulfilling to me (again, see years of education), is absolutely different from the type of reading that made me a fan of books for life. This is not how I originally devoured the Anne of Green Gables series (multiple times), Ursula K. LeGuin's fantastical tales or even Garcia Marquez's novels and short stories. I gobbled them up with relish, enjoying the dickens (yep, I see the pun) out of every page that I tore past. I read fast because I consumed books as if they were films, stories in full color unraveling before me with no room to pause. Being a scholar has made me a slower, more careful and deliberate reader--which on one hand has greatly amplified my appreciation and understanding of these works to a level I would clearly not ever want to take back, but on the other hand has made it very difficult for me to shift back to a mode of reading in which I can just enjoy the story. That slow kind of reading sometimes feels for me like I imagine a race car driver might feel hitting the brakes on a 35mph road.
In addition, I am a big-time plot addict. This is something that is a little embarrassing to say as a literary scholar, since I still have the feeling I'm supposed to value form over story. And yes, of course I find form fascinating (duh). But man, I love a good story--and if you give me one, it's nearly impossible for me to stop until it's over (which you know if you've experienced my epic consumptions of entire television series on DVD - such as my college-vacation marathon of all of Cowboy Bebop in 27 hours, recent K-Drama sleep-robbing obsessions, and many many early mornings buried in a book). I suspect that I'm still reading/watching The Walking Dead just because I need to know what happens, even though it may never actually end. That might help you see why I hate Gravity's Rainbow (if you've read it).
Because of all of the above, I have been desperate for a way to get back my love of reading--to return to that mode of total immersion and enjoyment that made me that little nerdy bookworm back in the day (or at least capable of choosing and reading a bedstand book). Thankfully (and thankfully for you this is where the argument comes full circle), I've recently discovered a couple of things that are helping me reopen myself to that experience. It was really about--you guessed it--high standards that were, at least partially, false standards. I couldn't pick up books that I would just enjoy because there were other more 'worthy' books in line ahead of them. And I couldn't pick up those books because I was deterred by my standard for how to read them. My solution, therefore, is two-fold.
First, I've been reading and enjoying books that fall outside of those standards. I don't want to insult them as being under lower standards, because I love them, so instead I want to clarify that point about the supposed lower standard sometimes being actually a different set of qualities that are excellent in their own way. For example, I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Tina Fey's book Bossypants, which gave me permission to buy and enjoy the book I'm currently reading, Mindy Kaling's likewise comedic memoir/list/essay collection Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). First, can I mention how awesome those titles are? I am major title appreciator. Also, these books are hilarious and so clever! These ladies are genius at being funny and awesome at putting their own lives out there for other people to better appreciate the humor of their own. I read them just for fun and guess what? They get me to read instead of watching TV all the time, I laugh out loud frequently, and I'm learning great things like appreciating parts of my life in a different way and even becoming a better, more well-rounded writer (academic writers could probably all use a little influence from comedy writers). By the way, you may know Kaling as Kelly Kapoor from The Office. I picked up her book because we are currently really into her new show The Mindy Project. It's awesome. WATCH IT IT'S FREE. The other example is self-help books. They get a bad wrap because some of them aren't so great - big surprise. Other genres also have books that aren't so great (like sci-fi, realism, autobiography or postmodernism), but like those other areas there are some self-help books that have actually been really nice to read and had a positive impact on my daily life, like The Happiness Project, which is delightful, intellectually stimulating, hilarious, historically information and super helpful or more religiously-minded books by Max Lucado like Great Day Every Day. A few years ago I also got a big boost from What Should I Do With My Life?, which almost scared me away with its title but ended up helping out during a major career change that culminated in my wonderful life in literature and academia.
Secondly, and this part is still in progress, I want to find away to allow myself to read those books I 'should' read in the more appealing enjoyment mode while still finding a way to process them intellectually. Reading them twice isn't a great option, as it's hard enough to read them all once without doubling the commitment. Any suggestions from the audience? My first strategy is to read books that will probably have absolutely no resonance with my dissertation. Right now I'm trying it with Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, which I'm resisting a bit for other, unrelated reasons I'll go into another time.
If there is a moral to this unexpectedly long-winded post (you should be grateful that my son is making awake sounds in the other room), it's that occasionally high standards are really limitations in stuffy outfits. And who wants to live life full of limitations, or in stuffy outfits for that matter?
Oh, and also that Mindy Kaling and Tina Fey's books are really funny and I love them. And so are The Mindy Project and 30 Rock. I should've just said that, huh?
Lemon out!
