When I sat down to read Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue as assigned, which I did more then once, I didn’t know what I was getting into. In graduate school, I’ve gotten used to very structured, linear readings, dense texts that I can be outlined, notes taken, text underlined, and would eventually make some sense to me. Twelve Blue turned me upside-down. There was no step-by-step process of any kind. I had to say to myself over and over “trust the process”. Fragments, shifting paths, characters briefly showing-up. I had a lot of difficulty just letting the flow happen (if there was a flow).
I’ve had a complicated relationship with reading since I was a kid, diagnosed with a reading disability. Learning to read was hard for me, it was slow, frustrating, and something that never came naturally. Over the years, I’ve developed strategies and systems to get through school and graduate work, but they’ve always depended on texts having some kind of order, my ability to take notes and reread the text. Twelve Blue felt like it ignored all of that. I couldn’t rely on my usual tricks. Clicking from thread to thread left me uncertain, sometimes even overwhelmed, like I was breaking the story instead of following it.
This new process was frustrating. I found myself searching for logic, for some kind of thread, but the more I clicked, the more I had to admit there wasn’t one in any kind of traditional sense. The experience made me uneasy, because it highlighted just how much I depend on predictability in reading and how difficult it is when that safety net is gone. It was like being at my tutors all over again at the age of @8-9.
Still, as uncomfortable as it was, I started to notice something. Twelve Blue asked me not to “master” the story, but to experience it. To play with it like it was ‘gamining’/reading. That’s a completely new approach for me, and while I can’t say I enjoyed it completely, I can see how it stretched me as a reader and a grad
I cannot have an opinion about the writing, nor the pathways of uncertainty, but I did begin to get that I should concentrate on having fun and enjoying it and not look for meaning so carefully. Some of the descriptions were beautiful – once I let go of the need for order.
). I’ve always liked fiction since I was a kid. The first time I ever learned about “literature” was from my middle school teacher telling my class that ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ doesn’t count as such. That a book can only be literature if it influences society on a wide scale and a bunch of ‘experts’ say it is. I always thought that was baloney. I’ve read fanfictions that deserve to be next to Shrek in the Library of Congress.