reading, or studying?

Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (2005)
Mark Dow, American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (2004)
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963)
Joseph Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation (2003)
Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, eds., Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor (2003)
Micahel Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750- 1850 (1978)

A friend, excited about books, recently asked me what I have plans to read over the holiday break. I replied, "I don't read books anymore."

Reading? No, not exactly. What I do with books is study them -- and I don't write that to gloat or with sass. I write it with a sense of loss.

I live with someone who reads and reads and reads books. Everything he can get his hands on. (He recently read the biography of Harpo Marx. Ask him about it. He absolutely loved it!) And when he says, "Wow, Chuck, you *really* need to read this book," I think "I would really like to" and then look at the stack of books I've chosen to study and teach for the next couple of months and know that it will not happen any time soon. That's what I mean by "reading," and that's what I mean by "loss." (Which of my classical-realist friends will comment that I *am* reading and the distinction is negligible?)

I know I should "make time" to read for pleasure whenever I can, but I feel obligated to my studies. The works I choose are often difficult, both conceptually and emotionally (see above list). I want to be able to master the material so that when I get into the classroom or sit down to write about it I can feel confident enough to be critical. Delving into prison studies means entering a world of terror, isolation, and helplessness, and I need to be strong enough to do this for the next several months. (And I wonder about the very formulation of these last sentences -- it isn't as if I am inside the prison. What does studying all of this *do* to the reader? I cannot "make time" but I am not "doing time," either. How is a sentence not unlike a "sentence?")

In addition to the theory and history above, I've also been studying Miguel Pinero's play Short Eyes (1975), John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers (1984), and the collected works in H. Bruce Franklin's Prison Writing in 20th-Century America (1998), which includes pieces by some of the most famous U.S. prison writers like George Jackson, Kathy Boudin, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Assata Shakur, and Iceberg Slim.

If you are a literary and cultural critic, immersed in your studies, you forget that most people will be surprised by what you actually do for a living. They think of professors as wealthy-looking, tweed-jacket-wearing, large-house-dwelling, married white men who mostly help young people realize the true meaning of life or that we are all different in our own special way. Thank you for that, Hollywood. A few years ago, I had a conversation with my mom about my work. It was probably the first time I fully and openly explained what she was reluctant to find out -- that I was doing research and writing on the subject of lynching. I was scouring the NAACP archives looking for materials on the lynching of black soldiers, still in uniform, during the Red Summer of 1919. It was exhausting, depressing work. After a moment she said to me, "Are you ever going to, you know, write about something happy?"

I think of the literary critic Elaine Scarry, who wrote the inimitable book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), which takes on the subjects of war and torture in devastating (and eye-opening) ways, and who, later in life, wrote a book called On Beauty and Being Just (1999), which, even if many critics thought it was silly, must have been so good for her to work on, for her own sake.

What keeps me going is that I know I am learning -- a lot. And I know I can write about this. The research on lynching led to two, important publications, which is the whole point, after all -- to make public what feels like, right now, is so private: me surrounded by a pile of books and notes, feeling a bit like a lunatic.