Last week, this article on "literary dealbreakers" was going around:
www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30...adio-t.html

Its basic premise was that for book lovers on the dating scene, shared literary taste was a strong indicator of compatibility, and described all the ways would-be couples judged and dismissed each other based on whether or not they approved of each other's literary interests. My initial response was that if I required potential friends and lovers to like the same books I do, I'd die alone, my bony pallid fingers clutching some obscure medieval Irish epic.

Pretty much nobody I know likes the same books I do. And yet, I am all made of language--shaped and patterned by all the stories: folktales, myths, fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, horror--I've read since I was old enough to hold a book. W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Peter S. Beagle, Tanith Lee, Kurt Vonnegut, Joanna Russ, Joan Vinge, Dianna Wynne Jones, Kathe Koja, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Walker Percy, Emma Bull, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem: these are my role models. These are the writers whose words I carry around in my head, bright little fragments of language. What I read patterns me, informing my worldview, but also shaping my own writing. I study the writers I love, constantly: unrelated concepts tensed together until they fuse into metaphor, mythological images that they've somehow torn from the knowing core of the world-soul, sentences phrased like lines of music.

Other writers, I have sort of a love/hate thing with: James Joyce, Samuel Delaney, Derrida, Freud, Karl Marx, Gertrude Stein. These I find intellectually mesmerizing and emotionally maddening, for the most part. But they live as brightly in my head as all the others. I've carried on arguments with all of them in my head for several decades.

When I spend time with other people, I reveal very little of myself. I spend most of my time reflecting people back to themselves. I've gotten good at it. It's my way of being near them. It's taken years of hard study for me to figure out the whole socialization thing, how people expect others around them to be, learn the gentle, empty little social phrases that people pass by way of casual connection. I like people. But I'm not sure I will ever be anything but alien--constantly visiting, but never entirely at home.

I think it has something to do with the way I live in language, my identity evolved within a very specific, self-chosen literary matrix. I'm a walking bundle of intertextuality, a constantly sliding signifier.

Sometimes though, I'll meet somebody and I will forget the whole vigilance thing and just talk without testing every word for intelligibility before I say it. It's that way, for the most part, when I meet other tribers in real life, because I know you all through language in the first place. It is easy for me to be my language-self here, and to translate that self to others already familiar with it.

This week, Nalo Hopkinson, one of the most innovative and groundbreaking writers of speculative fiction currently writing, visited our campus as a guest speaker. I love her work, and it baffles me. It's difficult in the best way, because it deliberately transgresses categories: literary genre, national identity, fantasy, sci-fi, gender, race, sexuality--all the ways we classify what we read, but also all the distinctions by which our notions of difference remain comfortable. She messes with my expectations. I started her novel _Midnight Robber_ for instance, expecting a retelling of Caribbean folk tales, only to be totally discombulated when _her_ Caribbean was actually a colony on another planet. Oh, the folk tales are there alright, but then they turn into something else, complex metaphors that are perfectly realized, yet never take the shape you expect them to.

But then, she's writing from life. You don't expect her to be Canadian, this dark brown woman with the chopped uneven dreadlocks, her island accent with its sea rhythms and British inflections. But she's lived most of her life in Toronto. You don't expect her to be hilarious, this serious and award-winning novelist whose work takes on issues of race, gender, class, sexual identity and injustice, in lively and complicated ways. But she is. You don't expect a writer to bring her characters right into the room with her voice when she reads aloud, or for her hand movements while lecturing to have the same sea-dance rhythm as her voice. But she does.

And I didn't expect to have any particular connection with her. Writers visit our campus all the time, and they're generally fun to talk to. But I don't spend all that much time getting into anything much. And I've met writers I've admired before. Generally they're at book signings and I get all tongue-tied and can't think of what to say.

But as it turns out, Nalo knows my cousin Tom--a damn good writer himself and incidentally one of the few people in my own family who shares with me the coded language of shared literary reference. And as it turns out, she and I have read a whole bunch of the same books.

We walked on the local beach, and collected beach glass. There's a whole bunch of it on this particular, somewhat unbeautiful margin of Lake Erie: matte white, aquamarine translucent, shimmering green shards, tiny beads colored cobalt and amber. The acidic water, the waves and the sand work the glass, turning it over and over until it becomes very nearly something else, soft and bubbly and shining with a strange soft lunar glow. Like her, like me, sea glass glitters in the margins, occupies multiple states, has been worked and polished and transformed by larger forces.

It was lovely to speak my internal literary shorthand with somebody I had never known, lazy conversation that somehow felt picked up from something left off easily a long time ago. Lovely to steal an afternoon and be that self who is not constantly vigilant, constantly assessing what others want of me, filtering all the weird poetry and random music in my head into acceptable, professional phrases. The world allows this wildness less and less, it seems. I take it when I can, and I'm glad of it.

Oh, and if you don't know Nalo's work, you really should. Her blog is here: www.nalohopkinson.com