"There are some [slots] like 4 a.m. or whatever that are kind of hard to fill. Although if the London program, the off campus program is going, that's how we've done it in the past. And that's what happened this time too. So we had three or four of those slots were zoomed in from London where it was 10 o'clock in the morning or something. And so they read for that. And so that was kind of cool. We had this transatlantic connection."
- Michael Kowalewski
"I remember going and Steve Poskanzer, who's in the political science department now, but he was president then, he read early, like at 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning. And I went over to hear him, and he was just reading, you know, and . . . Sayles was basically empty. So you can hear his voice kind of echoing around, and you're looking out [at] all the snow is falling. And it was just a . . . really cool scene. So anybody that was in that marathon remembers the Shandy, we called it, the Shandy Snowstorm."
-Michael Kowaleski
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.
As we know, due to technological affordances, contemporary anthropoi (people) are now effectively swimming in "media," nearly all of it designed for sadly private consumption. Since the Earbud, the Sony Walkman, Edison's wax cylinders for recording sound, we've all been on a long slide that, if we're not careful, will surely end in human "life" and "experience" reduced to brains in a vat wired for stimulation.
The marathon reading, shall we say, taps the brakes on that larger "Netflix and chill" inevitability-- inviting contemporary anthropoi to come out of their media-soaked stupor and sit and to read a mid-19th century novel-- one written for the human voice-- together. As we saw in February with The Old Curiosity Shop reading, it's obviously retro and not at all everyone's cup of tea-- but it's also entirely radical. Like reading a novel at all, there's no world-altering reason to do it, and that space away from our quantifio-instrumental rationales for life may be its strongest suit. For the sheer seductive pleasures of the textual moment, for the gorgeous delights of inhabiting imagined other selves and other worlds, for the delicious sensualities of slowness, of imagination, and for the gradual accretion through humor, parody, and plot of moral sense-- for such things, there's nothing like a novel and nothing at all like reading it together, aloud, every word, all the way through, without stopping.
I have participated in the English Department's marathon readings since they restarted in the 2000s with works like David Copperfield, Middlemarch, and Tristram Shandy. Their example inspired Medieval and Renaissance Studies to host marathon readings of sources from its time period including Beowulf, Milton's Paradise Lost, Njal's Saga, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Cervantes' Don Quixote, and most recently J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.
