Undisciplined Versions: Reading with Ozzie
On graduate student reading, reading as devotional practice, and the limits of critique
“Undisciplined Versions” will (hopefully) be the Tuesday posts of some of what I’m working on around the dissertation, and whatever other kind of research I’m doing that has to do with religion and race…gender, purity, etc. and other things. I’m hoping that this will 1) keep me accountable to making this work broadly accessible, meaningful and useful for understanding how to engage religion especially in people, places, and spaces that are unexpected. Because religion is everywhere! And it’s so interesting. When it’s not terrifying, I think.
“Undisciplined” comes from Frances Tran’s work to think with and beyond disciplinary borders and boundaries in order to imagine different ways of being and belonging in the world. I think, too, about how so much of this work is translation: a version of another version, and a conversation within a larger conversation. And, of course, I’m thinking unruly, rebellious, alternative.
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Happy new year (FYI: we’ll be saying it again soon to celebrate the Lunar New Year)! It doesn’t feel terribly “new,” we’re back to the normal grind, or I suppose it never actually let up completely, but here we are … a chance to intentionally take it one day at a time and one week at time…one homework assignment at a time.
I’m in the throes of reading and thinking through the final chapter to the dissertation. I’ll be reading DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and exploring religion, race, language, and coloniality, and I guess, war and trauma. There’s so much out there on Dictee, I get overwhelmed reading all the amazing articles on it. But I’m really trying to spend some time actually in and on both primary texts here, taking notes, and hoping they will guide me a little right now.
Even though it feels like I’m not reading as much these days, I think I actually am. I’ve got the library books I’ve recently read: Tastes Like War, Temple Folk, The End of Drum-Time, and working through the beautiful Everybody Come Alive. 10/10 for every single one. I just love them all. Marcie Alvis Walker’s work is just leveling me — her writing is seamless - the stories, the theology, the histories, the nuggets, all of it.
Like many parents, I try to read what the kids are reading these days for school. When the twins were in 6th grade, I volunteered for a Library/English Language Arts (ELA) program at their school - like a book club or something that met twice a month during ELA where they would gather in small groups led by non-teachers to talk about it. I led Anna’s group (Projekt 1065), but Desmond did not want me in his class, understandably. So I worked with a different class period (initially was supposed to read Ghost but ended up with The Wild Robot) but still read the book his group was reading (El Deafo). And then, I just read Hatchet because the librarians were raving about it and I saw that Anna had also read it. All great, and super fun. Highly recommend these books, and this practice of reading what the kids are reading in school.
For the last month I’ve been reading Blood on the River with Ozzie for his Reading assignment. To say that he is not the most enthralled would be an understatement.
He’s not into reading, although he appreciates Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and went through the Dog Man phase. For Christmas he asked and got The Last Ronin, a graphic novel series about one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles who went …rogue, I think. No spoilers here. But Blood on the River is great: a little historical fiction based on real events and people, including Captain John Smith, his page Samuel Collier, the Powhatan Chief, and his daughter Pocahontas—the story is told through the eyes of young Samuel according to the author’s website:
Samuel Collier came from nothing. A street urchin, an orphan, and even a thief, he seems headed for a life in the alleys of London. So when he becomes the page of Captain John Smith and boards the ship the Susan Constant, bound for the New World, he can't believe his good fortune. He's heard that gold washes ashore with every tide. But beginning with the stormy journey and his first contact with the native people, he realizes that the New World is nothing like he had ever imagined. The lush Virginia shore where they settle is both beautiful and forbidding, and it's hard to know who is friend or foe.
Based on the true story of the settlement of Jamestown, Blood on the River brings to life a significant time in American history.
What I love about reading with Ozzie is how it does so much work. There’s looking at sentence construction. Working on vocabulary. Practicing comprehension. Using our imagination and accessing other senses. Working on speech.
But, what has been particularly challenging for me is the actual act of reading with Ozzie: word for word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. We do quick summaries here and there to break it up and talk about the characters, what we like or dislike about them, we pick up all the little threads, and he usually has some kind of worksheet to do—multiple choice questions and some short answers. We take turns reading, and we come up with strategies for keeping the main story in front of us. Overall, it’s a bit of a struggle because we’re both fighting against a culture that has elevated different mediums other than text, as well as a culture that rewards speed and efficiency.
As a grad student for several years, like so many others, I had to learn how to read quickly—scanning, skimming, highlighting, taking notes. Whenever I get an academic book/monograph I begin by specifically look through the table of contents, reading the first and last sentence of paragraphs, spending more time on the introduction and conclusion, and then doing deep dives into sections and chapters that were the most interesting or relevant to my work. I dog ear a lot of pages, or if I only have a PDF, I take down page numbers in my notes or put notes in the margins.
But, I don’t want Ozzie to read that way right now. I want him to read slow. To read word for word. To pause and consider the settings, the characters, and everything sort of in-between, especially what’s beyond the page. And reading with him makes me do it, too. To listen to how things sound. To follow the music of punctuation marks.
So I’m looking at this time of reading with Ozzie as a kind of devotional practice. It makes me remember the time in Dr. J. Kameron Carter’s Black Religious Studies class: how we would not spend each seminar so much on summarizing or arguing or constructing but actually deep time within a text. He would read a paragraph or two to us—slowly, carefully, methodically—and this is where it was both powerful and inspiring: he would riff. He would parse, he would extrapolate, he would sermonize, he would exegete. And somehow it felt like we actually often got to the nugget, or one of the nuggets of the text through that close reading of a small piece of the whole. Instead of performing, we engaged, we listened, and became what I would called possessed by the text. Because in the end it isn’t just about critique.
What if reading isn’t just another chore and obligation or information gathering or something to go up against? To master?
“Reading slowly” is then a disavowal of the logics of mastery and domination/conquest, a practice of resistance against global and late stage capitalisms, and a mode of consumption, not in consumer terms, but one of eating and apprehending and seeing … of being nourished and encouraged specifically towards …and here’s the other revelatory thing for me: feeling. Maybe these books and stories have agency that we have elided in our attempts at mastery. Rather than emphasizing what we know, proving and performing what we know, intellectually, could this kind of reading practice towards feeling be not only liberative but full of possibility, and even, of hope and joy? Of course, in order to be food and not just capitalist good it has to shape our ethic, that is, our perspective and our posture towards one another.
I think in the end, yes, I want Ozzie to “learn things.” But I wonder if cultivating his (and our other kids’) imagination, and then compassion towards others—this is the goal. This is the good. For him. For me. These are the priorities.
Read slowly. To savor. To enjoy. To feel. To be challenged and awakened. To work for and towards building a better world.
Once more, happy new year, folks, and thank you for being here.
More on reading:
Public and Private Reading: I really feel like we should read aloud to each other more. I think I read somewhere that a professor based a whole “alternative” class one semester on reading to each other in class. That’s it. They’d show up to each class period on Wednesday night (or something) and read to each other. If someone knows what I’m talking about I’d love to get a link.
The of Art of Reading in the Middle Ages (I love this website). Did I read here or elsewhere that this was how people “learned,” especially in monasteries, they read to each other and this was their mode of learning.
“Reading Against Mastery,” a book chapter - introduction (in PDF here).
This was wonderful. Thank you. Speaks to me like Willie Jennings’s After Whiteness. I’ve been wondering for the past few years since reading that book what good words are to replace mastery--words that aren’t synonyms, that evoke a different ethic of care, humility, mutuality and reciprocity, but do speak in some way to that desire to go deep in some understanding or craft. Do you have a suggestion of alternative words that resonate for you?
Thanks for these thoughts on reading. I especially loved thinking about slow reading as an act of resistance against consumption. Might chat about that with my classes next week when they start up. And my very favorite thing to do is to read out loud to my kids (anyone really who will listen). I consider it one of my most cherished compliments when my kids told me I should record audiobooks.