{"id":37998,"date":"2012-08-31T15:30:28","date_gmt":"2012-08-31T19:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=37998"},"modified":"2012-08-31T16:28:41","modified_gmt":"2012-08-31T20:28:41","slug":"dear-paris-review-john-jeremiah-sullivan-answers-your-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/08\/31\/dear-paris-review-john-jeremiah-sullivan-answers-your-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"John Jeremiah Sullivan Answers Your Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This week, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, stepped in to address your queries.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear <\/em>Paris Review,<\/em><\/p>\n

I live in the deep south and was raised in a religious cult.<\/em><\/p>\n

Still with me?<\/em><\/p>\n

Okay. I\u2019m attempting to throw off the shackles of my religious upbringing and become an intelligent well-informed adult. My primary source of rebellion thus far has been movies. I would watch a Fellini movie and then feel suddenly superior to my friends and family because they only watched movies in their native tongue (trust me I know how pathetic this is). My main question involves my reading selections. Obviously, I have stumbled upon your publication and am aware of its status as the primary literary periodical in English. Also, I have a brand-new subscription to the <\/em>New York Review of Books, since it is apparently the intellectual center of the English-speaking universe. I am not in an M.F.A. program or living in Brooklyn working on the Great American Kindle Single, I\u2019m just a working-class guy trying to take part in the conversation that all the smart people are having. This brings me to my question: What books should I read? There are so many books out there worth reading, that I literally don\u2019t know where to start. To give you some background info: I was not raised as a reader and was not taught any literature in the Christian high school that I attended. What kinds of books do I like? My answer to that would be movies. I\u2019m desperate to start some kind of grand reading plan that will educate me about the world but don\u2019t know where to start. The classics? Which ones? Modern stuff? Should I alternate one classic with one recent book? How much should I read fiction? How much should I read nonfiction? I went to college but it was for nursing, so I have never been taught anything about reading by anybody.<\/em><\/p>\n

I realize this stuff may be outside of your comfort zone, as most of the advice questions seem to be from aspiring writers or college-educated people. Please believe me when I say that I am out of touch with the modern world because of a very specific religious cult. I want to be an educated, well-read, cultured, critically thinking person but need some stuff to read. Before I end this letter, I\u2019ll provide an example of just how out of touch I am: you know how “Ms.” is the non-sexist way to refer to a woman, and that “Mrs.” is sexist? Yeah, I just found out about that. I\u2019m twenty-five.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Help.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/em><\/p>\n

Down and Out in the Deep South<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear DODS,<\/p>\n

What kind of soulless freak could fail to answer your call? Your intelligence glows through your professed ignorance (as does the authenticity of \u201ca very specific religious cult\u201d). That sounds like an educationally less-than-ideal but, in other ways, fascinating childhood. My only piece of advice before recommending some titles would be: don\u2019t fall for the inferiority\/superiority racket. We\u2019re not on a ladder here. We\u2019re on a web. Right now you\u2019re experiencing a desire to become more aware of and sensitive to its other strands. That feeling you\u2019re having is<\/em> culture. Whatever feeds that, go with it. And never forget that well-educated people pretend to know on average at least two-thirds more books than they\u2019ve actually read.<\/p>\n

A place to start is with Guy Davenport\u2019s nonfiction collections, Every Force Evolves a Form<\/em>, The Geography of the Imagination<\/em>, and The Hunter Gracchus<\/em> (with more pieces in The Death of Picasso<\/em>). You\u2019ll learn an enormous amount from these essays and sketches, but almost without realizing, because they give off the pleasure of great stories. Read the title essay in The Hunter Gracchus<\/em> (about Kafka and the way symbols can take on a life of their own), and see if it isn\u2019t as stimulating and creepy as the last good movie you saw.<\/p>\n

Come up with a system of note-taking that you can use in your reading. It\u2019s okay if it evolves. You can write in the margins, or keep a reading notebook (my preference) where you transcribe passages you like, with your own observations, and mark down the names of other, unfamiliar writers, books you\u2019ve seen mentioned (Guy D. alone will give you a notebook full of these). Follow those notes to decide your next reading. That\u2019s how you\u2019ll create your own interior library. Now do that for the rest of your life and die knowing you\u2019re still massively ignorant. (I wouldn\u2019t trade it!)<\/p>\n

Read My \u00c1ntonia<\/em>, and then read everything else by Willa Cather. Inside her novels you\u2019ll find it impossible to doubt that high enjoyment and extreme depth can go together. The most difficult art.<\/p>\n

Read Isak Dinesen\u2019s Seven Gothic Tales<\/em>. I\u2019m saying that randomly, because it seems right, and to approve the spirit of randomness.<\/p>\n

If you get into a writer, go all the way and check out everything he\/she has written. This summer I fell into a Defoe hole. Started with the major stuff, the best novels and the good journalism, and then read everything down to the poems and the tedious political pamphlets, since by that point I was equally interested in him as a human being and wanted to have as accurate a map of the inside of his brain as possible. His is one of the minds that helped shape the modern world\u2014we\u2019re literally still telling his stories\u2014so there\u2019s a vital interest. I read Maximilian Novak\u2019s super-solid biography of him, Master of Fictions<\/em>. That sort of questy reading ends up enriching your experience of each individual book and piece, and it lends a sense of adventure to the whole business, which after all involves a lot of lying down or sitting on your ass.<\/p>\n

Borges and Denis Johnson\u2014anything by either. Edith Wharton\u2019s story \u201cThe Young Gentlemen.\u201d (Random, random.) Robert Penn Warren\u2019s All the King\u2019s Men<\/em>, and then his poems if you\u2019re feeling spry. Find on the Web and buy an old paperback copy of the Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine\u2013edited anthology Six Centuries of Great Poetry<\/em> (a book for life). Read the next two things I\u2019m going to read and then see how you like them: Grant\u2019s Memoirs<\/em> and Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle<\/em>. Read Nabokov\u2019s Speak, Memory<\/em> and Joan Didion\u2019s Slouching Towards Bethlehem<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Books that got me kick-started were the great modernist biographies, especially Hugh Kenner\u2019s The Pound Era<\/em> and Richard Ellmann\u2019s life of James Joyce. Read those two books and you\u2019ll have a decent-size grid on which to plot the rest of your reading. I\u2019m somehow moved to spurt out, Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s Will in the World<\/em>. People have been writing about Shakespeare for half a millennium, and the very best of it just happened.<\/p>\n

Ignore all of this and read the next cool-looking book you see lying around. It\u2019s not the where-you-start so much as the that-you-don\u2019t-stop. I was reading Phoenix Force<\/em> novels until I was like thirteen. These days a lot of people I know are into Murakami. I should have said more novels. If it\u2019s by a Russian, read it.<\/p>\n

Dear Sir,<\/em><\/p>\n

I was looking at your Web site today, I entered it but wasn\u2019t able to leave it. No matter what I did I couldn\u2019t leave it and get back to my other work. I couldn\u2019t go back, I couldn\u2019t go forward, I couldn\u2019t even turn off my computer to start over again! I felt like there was a force field surrounding me and my whole apartment building, too! I tried to relax a bit to see why I had been jailed here. I read some more, tried to change my attitude, even though I felt I was being pulled into some kind of dark vortex and I might never return! Only at sunset did the force release me, long enough to write this letter, maybe it didn’t release me??? But I have to write you and ask you what your power is and what you want, I have no more strength to resist your pull. What do you want??? <\/em><\/p>\n

Yours, Latitia<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Latitia,<\/p>\n

Those were interesting hours we shared. I was wondering if you would write. At first I didn’t think you’d let me very far in, but once we’d unlocked the main shame-circuit (the thing with Terry), we moved some pieces forward. The power was yours\u2014owning that is gonna be a biggie on your journey. I’m glad you dig the site.<\/p>\n

Have a question for the editors of <\/em>The Paris Review? E-mail<\/a> us.<\/em><\/p>\n

[tweetbutton]<\/p>\n

[facebook_ilike]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, stepped in to address your queries. Dear Paris Review, I live in the deep south and was raised in a religious cult. Still with me? Okay. I\u2019m attempting to throw off the shackles of my religious upbringing and become an intelligent well-informed adult. My primary source of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[57,4160,3776,2530,7005,3115,7278,2081,8552,1549,947,1362,1577,8542,8550,6773,6059,4039,8553,8551,967,7557,2295],"class_list":["post-37998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ask-the-paris-review","tag-advice","tag-borges","tag-daniel-defoe","tag-denis-johnson","tag-edith-wharton","tag-ezra-pound","tag-guy-davenport","tag-haruki-murakami","tag-high-kenner","tag-isak-dinesen","tag-james-joyce","tag-joan-didion","tag-john-jeremiah-sullivan","tag-karl-ove-knausgaard","tag-maximilian-novak","tag-my-antonia","tag-richard-ellmann","tag-robert-penn-warren","tag-stephen-greenblatt","tag-ulysses-s-grant","tag-vladimir-nabokov","tag-willa-cather","tag-william-shakespeare"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJohn Jeremiah Sullivan Answers Your Questions by John Jeremiah Sullivan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 31, 2012 \u2013 This week, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, stepped in to address your queries. 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