{"id":14608,"date":"2021-07-27T09:18:32","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T13:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=14608"},"modified":"2021-07-27T11:55:40","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T15:55:40","slug":"episode-445-heather-cass-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-445-heather-cass-white","title":{"rendered":"Episode 445 – Heather Cass White"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 445:
\nHeather Cass White<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_445_-_Heather_Cass_White.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“I’m sure that my obsessive focus on reading, as much as it is anything else, is a sign of a wound, or a lack.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Author & professor Heather Cass White<\/a> joins the show to celebrate her wonderful new book. Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life<\/a> (FSG). We get into what reading does & doesn’t do for us, how we can lose ourselves & find ourselves in books, how this book gestated for decades while she was working on her scholarship of Marianne Moore<\/a>, how she snagged the title from a line by Milton, and how promiscuously we should read the word “promiscuously”. We also talk about her read-to-bits childhood copy of Anne of Green Gables<\/a>, the possibility of getting too much out of Henry James, the lessons she took from studying with Harold Bloom<\/a>, why you shouldn’t read as if you’re going to die (prompted by my recent health issues), the importance of keeping a patient attitude toward poetry, why she decided not to do more reading about reading once she started to write a book about reading, and more! Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read Books Promiscuously Read<\/a>!<\/p>\n

“My experience of reading is that it is a whole self experience. I can’t think of many part of myself that haven’t been engaged in some point in my life as a reader. So I liked that sense of ‘promiscuously’ as both unplanned, haphazard, random, but also as playful, contrarian and transgressive. I liked the word for every reason.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n