Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!
On Bellow's Tears, Shedding Straws, and Misreading
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11 May 2025 Responsible Readers Writing Back Reader, The job is huge, not the least because we ourselves fall so easily to contributing. The rhetorical "strategies" of communities seem determined towards simple division, scraped down and packaged into semi-coherent shouts of opposition packaged as shareable memes or barely-suppressed acts of rage. Medical wranglings, immigration policies, foreign affairs, the US Constitution, legal proceedings, and personal mores are whittled on demand: "Give us your answer, now, in simple and permanent language." And we will strip away context, cherry pick and hyperbolize and distract and name-call and every single other fallacious act we can think of after your answer. (If you won't answer, we'll still do it.) If you're reading my newsletter, I'm already fairly certain of our collective exasperation, anxiety, or even desperation. And I suspect you also understand that more solid thinking relies upon critical literacy, better reading. As we normalize a kind of "societal literalism," though, it's more difficult to imagine what we might do to move people to slow down; to read and research with healthy questions, skepticism; to think richly with nuance. I am reminded that Andrew Marvell did not publish almost any of his poetry, choosing instead to share it only with small circles of compatriots. His more public political speeches often got him in hot water (and nearly killed John Milton). There are dozens of reasons why Marvell might have kept his poetry to himself, but I can't help wondering if inevitable misreading was part of it. (Certainly he would have been correct: most of us have misread his stuff for centuries now.) But there's an inevitability to misreading, isn't there? It's in the nature of the written language, and too in the spoken word or video. I often taught the infamous "All reading is misreading" idea to my students, forwarded both by Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom, though for different reasons. It's part of the color of phenomenology, the personalizing and enculturating of an idea; it's part of the power of both literature and the ekphrastic response, also the next creative utterance. Will we be understood when we write? Not always, no. Will we be held accountable for these misreadings? Probably. Will we be held accountable when we don't write? Probably, yes. What defense do we have? To write back; to write again. Then will we be safe? Not certainly; but most of us will be more safe. Be grateful for your reading; and thank you for your writing.
Arendt Digs Into Antisemitic HistorySince Arendt equates antisemitism with a policy from imperialistic politics, her discussion of the history of it (a phenomenon of the modern era, in contrast to anti-Jew behavior which is different and long-lived) from the documents of its perpetrators is revealing. The next several weeks dig into this leading up to the red-flag-warning of the Dreyfus Affair. In the meantime, the Prefaces offer an overview for the entire work, and she offers some stark demands for our thinking: Join in on the reading! We're doing about 25 pages each week, but you can choose any speed! Find more here:
A Reader's ManifestoThe first draft of A Reader's Manifesto is up and ready for anyone to comment, question, revise, or challenge. I welcome any and all who follow Waywords to participate, with a goal of completing a more "public" living/open document by Sept. 2025. My hope is to capture several elements essential to a principled ethic of reading adaptable by any, with specific strategies and engagements to follow. This will also form an essential component to what I consider the Waywords Studio mission.
Literary Nomads: Saul Bellow Knows Us StillWe test carpe diem in the modernist world of business and "pretender souls" in Bellow's short novel Seize the Day (1956). And I find a trickster-level irony that perhaps flips the book's primary villain; and if he is a rescuer, where is the antagonist? Not far from where we might expect, though as we have normalized him. I also reflect on my many-year'ed experience with Michigan's infamous Amway Corporation (sound the fanfares!).
Up ahead:
Have you thought of a question for the podcast, yet?
We Start the Discussion Somewhere Somehow Middle May Moving up to US Memorial Day (aka "flower planting day" for those in the Midwest)! Some Recommendations Early Recommendation from My Reading: One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This (2025) by Omar El AkkadImmigrant journalist El Akkad has reporting on the American domestic scene for decades; here he argues that the West's promises for freedom and justice are a thin lie. Language, too forces the air from the lungs. . . . And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language--a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence. . . . It is the middle, the well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides.
"The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies" by Namwali SerpellIronic to the upcoming episode of Literary Nomads, this new article on film by Serpell in The Atlantic (May 8). I think something else is going on. The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable. Artists and audiences sometimes defend this legibility as democratic, a way to reach everyone. It is, in fact, condescending. Forget the degradation of art into content. Content has been demoted to concept. And concept has become a banner ad.
What, literally, do you want to say? What's holding you back? How can I help? Steve What's Ahead?
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Waywords Studio
Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!