Mind Reading
A quote from Nabokov and then a few words:
A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting … The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.(Good Readers and Good Writers, from Lectures on LIterature, 1980)
Sometimes I get the question: What’s there to like about flash fiction or compressed fiction? Many things and different things for every reader and writer, I suspect. One thing that I love about (very) tiny fiction is that it kicks me into the work of real reading as Nabokov describes it. It brings out the good reader in me. Compressed work, its re-readability, lends the reader an opportunity to practice good reading, to step outside of optic interference, to be a mindreader. That I have a tingling spine to read with is easy to forget. Compressed fiction reminds me, helps me to find it. I like that, for one.