March 29, 2008
It’s Not You, It’s Your Books
From The New York Times:
Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”
Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”
Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”
More here. (Note: Just for the record, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance did change my life when I read it at 18, and last year, I was completely ravished by Eugene Onegin).
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:55 AM | Permalink
Comments
Books have ideas and thoughts in them. Ideas and thoughts move people and change them in fundamental ways. So it is likely that books with certain ideas will effect certain people in fundamental ways.
Judy Heiblum sounds like one of those stone cold career rising women who have taken a job for prestige and money rather than the passion of the work.
I didn't realise that to be a literary agent you had to dissect books and ideas from a detached sociopathic perspective.
I recommend writers boycott Sterling Lord Literistic if their company allows a literary agent who doesn't believe books can't change people.
Posted by: jehnmot | Mar 29, 2008 11:58:26 PM
"After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship."
-yeah right...she's messin' with us for sure at this point... she's gotta be.
I read "Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" back when I was young and searching but I have to admit I was probably tedious as well. Then again my life changes every time I read a book, they just do that, ya know.
Here's what I've found.
Women that read Robert Heinlein are from Mars (they also have intense if largely imaginary relationships with their fathers and are totally 420, I mean seriously chronic)- Women that are into Ayn Rand are much meaner than guys that are into Ayn Rand- Women that are into Anne Rice wear way too much makeup-Women that are into Steven King think that Andrew Lloyd Webber is a serious composer. Women that adore Jane Austen don't get the jokes while women that like Jane Austen seem to pick up on all the riffs-more women are reading comics oops- sorry- Graphic Novels-the ones that like Justice League are very cool and the ones that read Maus have a sad, serious, wistful quality with a charming self-deprecating manner that speaks to...okay enough of that-Women that read manga are girls and men should not get involved with girls but if you are boy and you read manga, I don't think you're really into girls a much as you are into giant robots, unless of course you are a Japanese boy in which case you can pull this off. Watch out for women that are into George Bataille they can do you serious harm and they are not as good in bed as they think they are,seriously-Women that are into Bukowski are time consuming. If the first time you meet a woman and she quotes C.S.Lewis three or more times during the conversation and you meet her a year later and she's reading murder mysteries set in ancient Egypt and opines forcefully the Akhenaton was a jerk then you can safely assume that in the interval she had a quick but messy divorce. Lastly, it's way more fun to watch a woman read Martin Amis than it is to read Martin Amis.
Oh...and men that make sweeping statements about women based on shoddier intelligence work than the stuff used to justify the invasion of Iraq are tediously searching poseurs with far too much time on their hands.
Posted by: Pete Chapman | Mar 30, 2008 11:26:05 AM
Pete, your comment made me laugh quite a lot.
I can forgive a fondness for "Zen and the Art of..." as long as it's in remission but I agree that Ayn Rand is a real turn-off.
I think any interest a man shows in the books by her side of the bed will win points - as long as he doesn't move them to his side before she's finished reading.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 30, 2008 5:45:20 PM
Well, thus speaks a chap who has obviously screwed a lot of minds.
Lets be clear, all this is mere foreplay, before she moves on to the Really Serious Litterature: Your Bank Statement.
Posted by: aguy109 | Mar 30, 2008 6:14:23 PM
You are all very funny. So is the article.
Without going into my personal taste in literature, let me just say that I was married for 20 years to a person whose taste in literature was perfectly tuned to mine -- or was it the other way around? I have yet to meet another reader as deep or as alive to literature. Or as well read. So I know the full worth of this kind of bond between two people, and -- believe me -- as wonderful as it is, it's not enough.
If you are evaluating a potential mate, it's wiser not to be too concerned with what that person does in their down time. It's much better to pay attention to how they behave under stress. This is where, even in novels, character is displayed. You'll never flush out Gilbert Osmond by talking about Henry James. People who are scoping out each other for the long term need to carefully scrutinize actions that are telling. And listen to what the actions say.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 30, 2008 7:39:42 PM
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