SPHERES OF READING

Demographic spheres are critical when publishing books in any form, indeed, when moving manuscripts between the forms.  But even as delineated a group as "educated white women" can be re-sorted according to where they get their books.  Do they patronize the library or bookstores or used book sources online?  Do they read what their friends read or go by the best seller and prize lists?  Do they read paper or cyberscreens?  Last thing at night or on the bus to work?  Or via audible books in the car while driving?  The answers point out the differences.

Mostly they read novels, I guess, which means they are "living" alternative lives, often historical or class based, either high or low.  The notorious misery lit when I was young was almost always funny.  Does anyone remember "Mrs. Wiggs in the Cabbage Patch?"  The Cabbage Patch was an English place like Moccasin Flats.  If these women who read sociology fiction were to dip into their own children's books these days, they would be liable to be shocked: insanity, non-conforming sexuality, surviving war, race stigma.  Themes may be edgier than their own adult books.

Some spheres are claimed, "owned," by minorities who forbid anyone else to use that context for writing.  There is a schlock "Indian" category of an imaginary land which tries to legitimate paperback sex and violence in the name of power.  It's popular both in and out of indigenous groups.  There is a group that tries to say that DNA means special access to a particular view of the natural world -- "super"natural.  There are not many in the indigenous reading group who have become successful doctors, lawyers, and small business owners.  They can afford books but they are too busy to read.  

The most rarefied category of "Indian" reading is occupied by books written by those who are white but know indigenous people on the rez and write about them.  These often succeed with the award makers and popularity polls as well.  "Ramona," "Stay Away, Joe", "When the Legends Die," "Laughing Boy," "Billy Jack."  "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," "The Education of Little Tree," "The Indian in the Cupboard," "The Light in the Forest."  They range from romantic to slapstick.  As a category, they are never acknowledged.  I am sometimes in that category:  "12 Blackfeet Stories," "Heartbreak Butte," many contemporary short stories.

As these "types" go on through time, they change and their edges become more ragged, less like the central category type.  This gives rise to wars about who is "real" and how to tell.  Some people take it upon themselves to judge what is "in" and what is "out" and often demand drastic punishment for those who don't fit their ideas, raging and raging as a way of claiming their own identity.  But they are rarely readers.  They just hear about books.

The Unitarian Universalist sphere is one gingerly explored by those who want books that help them reflect on free-thinking without becoming secular.  Or maybe so they can identify with one of the "recovering" peoples like "recovering Catholics" or even bigger "recovering Christians", though they often set about forming UU groups that are like what they wanted to lose, what attracted them to the context they are leaving, cussing and loving the lost at once.

"Indians" and UU's both commit to secrecy about shortfalls and tragedies in order to protect the status of the group.  They don't want you to know when they don't succeed because they want failure to seem impossible in spite of racism.  They don't want you to know they are not an elite after all.

Writers can be intrigued by a context from which they are necessarily excluded by their very nature.  For instance writing about the "Other," maybe in sexual terms.  I find sex/gender/roles endlessly intriguing because it is all so very basic and yet is so drastically morphing, changing the taboos and even the laws practically overnight.  Strangely, major fights are about things like plumbing: peeing as him, her or who-knows?  Which comes down to privacy, the ability of persons to defend their own boundaries.  This can be about eating, too, so that some people prefer to eat in their cars and few will sit at long tables with benches for everyone hip-to-hip.  Separate tables, please.

So books can be about this sort of categorizing even without considering the subject matter.  We read separately, maybe privately in bed, and experience the words on unique terms.  Reading, screwing, peeing, eating -- one leaves the primitive indiscriminate mass by using privacy, right?

So what do the sexwork people read?  It's something to do in bed.  I doubt they read porn.  They get enough of that and think they know better anyway.  Probably do.  I expect the young ones like adventure, the same as all young ones.  And the older ones are often pretty sophisticated, esp. since grad school was once partly a sublimation for being queer.  

The hardest part about setting up these categories is that they are soon old-fashioned and tell us very little.  In fact, when I go back over this piece, I see that I keep drifting from "spheres of reading" to "spheres of writing."  I think about writing all the time and don't read much at all.  Locals and people who knew me in the past assume I read "voraciously", but I don't.  When I do, it's often printed out from the computer so I can mark it up, put it in binders, save it for reference.  I'm really looking for ideas, new angles on the structure of the world.

Most books now are repetitious, over-marketed, and clumsily written.  But there is a new category that absorbs many people, which is political history tracing.  Not promoting the issues, because those pretty much stay the same, but long threads of how we got into this trap and how to get out.  (Less so.)  I follow Rachel Maddow every single show, not so much because of her final opinions as that she explains every step and then checks her conclusions with her guests.  I hate haranguing, even if it's in print which is one way to avoid the kind of hate-mongering Warren rightly rejects.  Much of my reading is on Twitter which is another way to chase one's own tail, but there are some people who use the "thread" feature in enlightening ways.  This is where the guys are.