Anonymous

Dublin Core

Title

Anonymous

Description

The "marathon reading" commemorates the life that anthropos, the human being, has lived across the centuries with story. Before writing, there was story, of course; and before print and books such as novels, there were bards and minstrels and masters of narrative that had all the myths and all the cultural codes memorized. People came to hear those masters of story beguile the time and its hard realities. So there's nothing particularly newfangled about bingeing on narrative as we do in a "marathon reading." Keeping warm around the fire, we stare into it and watch its metamorphoses. We enter an almost hypnagogic state of loose attention and make figures in the embers we watch crush under their own weight and disperse into ash. In any case, a group of people lounging around on couches being held spellbound by the twists and turns of a story is surely one of the best ways humans ever devised for getting through winter. That's what a marathon reading is, really.