Ye Olde Motley Readers

Not Quite a Bang or a Whimper - The Sun Sets on Dubliners

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:33:23 -0700

The official period of the Motley Reading of Dubliners is over. I suspect there are quite a few more postcards and cards winging their way around that have yet to be shared... I hope that recipients find the time to share them since that was one of the more interesting aspects of the project for this snail mail devotee.

I consider Motley Read a qualified success, and I thank everyone who took part.

I learned a few things along the way:

-- I learned that an unstructured reading group (a book un-club, as someone put it) using the "small pieces loosely joined" idea, allowing those who wanted to take part to do so in the media and space(s) they felt most comfortable in, can work... and work well!

-- The speed at which participation in the reading took off surprised me (I was hoping to get 2-3 other people involved)... as did the precipitous nature of the decline over the last few weeks. I attribute most of this to characteristics common to ventures of this kind in any medium: the choice of reading material, participants' lack of time, and a practical reality about reading (for most people). In order:

Dubliners is a difficult book. There were times I felt I was enduring it as much as I was reading it. I found it adequately rewarding, but there was a pretty high cost in time and attention needed to get to that point. I finished the book (just as I remembered, "The Dead" was fantastic, but I haven't had time to write anything about it), but I also kind of feel that it nearly finished me.
Time is the enemy of activities like the Motley Reading. People just don't have enough of it. Not only that, but the quality of the time that is available often doesn't lend itself to the kind of intellectual effort needed to pay close attention to stories like those in Dubliners, in which that which can be easily summarized-- the plot and basic nature of the characters-- is relatively unimportant. To their immense credit, those who did find the time contributed in amazing ways. The quality of the reading-- the insight and observations-- was, frankly, astounding.
The idea of reading and the idea of participating in a discussion about that reading is often more attractive than the reality of those activities. The best intentions, etc., etc., etc.

-- I re-learned the power of both lightweight social networks and "old" stand-bys. Twitter played a major role in communicating the idea initially, but the mechanics of getting things rolling depended on good old-fashioned email.

-- As a platform for creating a participatory group, Posterous rocks. Dead simple, capable (enough), and stable. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, an application like Posterous-- which falls somewhere in between the highly-capable, highly-technical blogging platforms and the too-simple, too-lightweight mechanisms of micro-blogging and social network systems-- proves to be the worst of the various systems it borrows from. Posterous manages to find a rare sweet spot and I can't recommend it highly enough (warts and all).

-- The gardener/curator role I played in the reading (beyond the simple organizational activities) is key... the cost of distributed participation comes in the form of effort needed to keep people aware of each others' contributions. It's not difficult, but it is necessary.

I'd love to continue the Motley Reading. Perhaps after National Poetry Month is over I'll consider it... unless someone else would like to take over as gardener...

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