Text/Book, the Toronto Standard‘s books column, is written by Emily M. Keeler and Chris Randle, plus occasional guests.

Julie Wilson’s new book Seen Reading is an exercise in (totally SFW, even for the TTC!) public pleasure. The book is an extension of her ongoing web project, where she collects sightings of readers in public and notes what they look like with a book in their hands. The flashes of microfiction she attaches to each reader sighting feel like the kind of daydreams or memories that can overtake you when the right stranger sets you off. I sat down with the authour for a couple of beers on a patio on Harbord on a sunshiny afternoon earlier this week. Our conversation was elliptical, and frequently punctuated by the sounds of the busy street and our own laughter.

There are a hundred sightings in the book, and hundreds more on the website. Where do you find all these readers?

Julie Wilson: I remember when I started it, it would take me maybe 40 minutes to commute to work in downtown Toronto. It was maybe one subway and a streetcar ride each way, and I’m only on one link of the subway, but by the end of the day without even trying I would see maybe 40 readers. And that’s just the readers that were in my sight line. I was never going to be able to keep up with all of them. But it didn’t seem to make sense that I would just blog once a day with one piece of information about some white guy on Spadina reading Fahrenheit 451. The end. It felt like I had to give the reader more substance. And then after that it’s just my impulse to want to narrate and I thought well, maybe I’ll just write a little ditty about the person. And y’know, five years into the project, after seven or eight hundred of these things, it’s a lot.

Do you yourself still read in public?

JW: Hardly ever. This woman the other day said to me, “Well it must really impede your own enjoyment of reading on transit,” and I’m like, whatever gave you the impression I was a reader?

I mean, I’ve always been a reader, but I’m the sort of person who if you give me just even a little bit of anything to focus on… The worst thing that ever happened was the DVD, or the VCR. Pause is the worst thing that could ever have happened to me, because I’ll just stop. So the idea of reading on transit, it’s not lost on me, but the same thing would happen. I’ll trip across a sentence and think “oh that’s awfully lovely” and then I would never get anywhere anyhow. So for me reading is a really private practice. It’s something that sort of requires a Zen state.

Do you think that the fact that you find reading such a private act is what makes it so interesting to see other people doing it?

JW: I think this is one of the reasons I’ve started referring to readers in public as exhibitionists. It makes me feel a bit better about watching people. Reading is a really interesting thing to do in public because you don’t know what you’re gonna read next. You just don’t know. The obvious example right now would be 50 Shades of Grey. I saw a young woman the other day who was reading it on the subway–it was my first official sighting for that book–and she was on page one, and I was like yeah, because you know what? You don’t know what book you just bought. You saw it on some list, or it was up at the front of some bookstore, and maybe it was like 30% off… But I really don’t think, honey, that you meant to get on the subway, sit down beside that nice boy beside you, and think “oh I’m just going to start to read this right now.’” I just watched her face, just sort of a rosacea rising! It was adorable. And when was the last time you saw someone actually laugh out loud when reading a book? We not only read these things in public having no idea what’s gonna happen next, we read these things in public knowing that the overwhelming majority of us are going to stifle any sort of emotional reaction we have to it. Which makes me think that maybe when you’re reading in public it’s a very different act than when you read in private.

A lot of the scenes that you’ve written don’t necessarily seem to reference the reader you describe.

JW: That disconnect comes from a couple of places. I didn’t know when I was doing this that it was going to be a book. I didn’t know that it was going to be five years later. It was just something that I was a doing. And I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t need a novel to have an impact, that I was using not having a novel as an excuse not to start writing in the first place. It was sort of like my Groundhog Day, in that every day I would start the process over again, but I had to finish. And I really like the form of microfiction. I’m not a poet, but this sort of form of poetic prose, working with found materials is sort of the closest I can get to that. I like the impact of it.

Lydia Davis has a collection of microfiction, and on the cover there’s a picture of a fly, and I can’t pass that book without trying to swipe the fly off the cover. And it’s the perfect point; something so teeny can be so bothersome, have so much impact. It’s not like it’s just tiny and functional writing, so it’s easy and it’s compact, and hey, you can read it on your iPhone. It’s that something very tiny and short can be all consuming, if you bother someone, if you disturb someone in the right way they’ll wanna stick with it a lot longer. Which is a long way to say that there’s a lot of confessional stuff in there. There’s a lot of stuff where I recognize that the tendency wasn’t to narrate the reader, or even the character. The tendency was to narrate myself.

The language that you use in the introduction to your book, and in this interview, is the language of the voyeur. Is there an erotic charge to this idea of public reading?

JW: I mean it’s not really quite the same as going past a high rise and seeing a couple naked and pressed up against the window. But again, transit in particular is set up in such a way that it invites the opportunity to sort of consider the people around you. Less so on street cars then on subways, and certainly here in Toronto with these new subways, I mean it’s just one long car. And you’re kind of contained with these people, and if you’re like me and the car starts gets stuck in a tunnel, the first think I do is look around the car and think, ‘Okay, if we were get stuck here for four weeks who would I end up having sex with?’ It’s like you’re not really mindful of the people around you in transit in a way that–it’s kind of like, what is it when you’re in an animal costume? A fur pile? Is that what it’s called?

[TS laughs]

You can look up the term yourself, but there’s a way that you sort of anonymously travel with this pack of people. You’re close to one another, you make very conscious choices about who you’re going to sit beside. We’re consciously negotiating one another and to say that issues of physicality and attraction don’t enter in to that. And it’s very public. So there’s a lot of opportunity to sort of get to know your fellow commuters. If you’re the sort of person who goes into that situation and, say, you’re deeply introverted–and I wouldn’t say that all readers are deeply introverted, but I think if you’re a practiced or recreational reader at least you have that tendency to be insular–what does it mean to walk onto a subway car and have no idea what is going o be asked of you? What sort of performance is going to be forced upon you? So that’s one side of it. From the voyeuristic end of things–just to be clear I don’t lurk or anything like that–

Well it’s in public, and what you do doesn’t seem invasive at all.

JW: It’s in public, yes. And I’m really good at it too. For the first couple of months I used to have a little pad on me and that was just because it was like working any other sort of muscle. I just needed to build confidence that I could remember the details. Like if I were to see you, I would almost take in an image, of your physicality, and just blank out everything and just hold onto a few key features, and if I could see the title of the book I might only remember one key word and maybe the last name of the author. That would be it. And then I would immediately jump on a computer or my phone and all of the pieces would fit in. I don’t know that I get an erotic charge out of it necessarily, but I like the idea that when I de-board a vehicle that I am walking away with the tools to rebuild a person into something that suits my needs. So what do you want to call that? The blow up doll of literature? A robotic playmate?

[TS laughs]

JW: No, it’s not, it’s really not. I don’t have a crush on all of the readers.

Just some of them, right?

JW: Just some of them.

_____

Emily Keeler lives in Toronto, Tumblrs for The Millions, and edits book stuff at The New Inquiry. Follow her on Twitter at @emilymkeeler if you please.

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