#if you'll let me be florid a minute: there's a real loneliness to this whole living thing that just is

[mystacoceti]

people want reading to be a social activity you partake of in between salon attendances. and not that I don't understand that feeling but how many books have people read and enjoyed that came out of some literary backwater, with hardly another boat in sight? The scan I did myself on my parents' printer of a college-owned copy of Max Raphael's The Demands of Art which I asked a friend to check out for me is, I think, the only digital copy of the English translation of that book in existence (jk the Max Raphael Project got the book up as of 2020), and I've assumed, more or less since elementary school, that kind of thing as one basic pole of reading as a social phenomenon. I've been reading a lot of essays from about 1960-'80 and the number of appealing books referenced that are unarchived, unavailable on libgen or out of stock on legal sites is always striking. and even if you can find it, what then? there's always the option of google searching through the blogs of the world, but that's hardly the fantasy people have in mind.

#for example: #I like Robbe-Grillet very much at least what I've read of him #and I tried to describe him to a friend who a) lives in France b) speaks French and c) likes much of the same literature I do #and he'd never heard of the author in his life #in part it's just that there is so much in any medium to take in. and while a bookclub or analogous thing would structure the social in+ #+a way that would prevent isolation- to some degree an individual's own interests will always lie outside those things somewhat #if you'll let me be florid a minute: there's a real loneliness to this whole living thing that just is #but that could be my own acclimation to the social setting I've been in for 6 years now