A Filmmaker Explores His Addiction to Reading

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Monday, January 20, 2003
A Filmmaker Explores His Addiction to Reading
By JANET MASLIN

In 1972 $9.95 came between Mark Moskowitz and his
destiny. He was a freshman at the University of
Pennsylvania then, and he had a job in a bookstore.
Along came a well-reviewed doorstop of a novel by a
brand-new author, and this young clerk was intrigued.
But he would not buy it in hardcover. As Mr. Moskowitz
still remembers — and he remembers any book-related
factoid — the price was steep compared with the $6.95
for Eudora Welty's latest, "The Optimist's Daughter."

Then the paperback came along. Mr. Moskowitz bought
it. (About $1.50, he says.) He read 20-odd pages, then
put the book aside for 20-odd years, until he
rediscovered it in 1998. Then he read it, loved it,
fell hard. The book's pent-up main character really
spoke to him. An obsession was born.

"You know that book we're always having to look for?"
he heard one employee tell another at the Gotham Book
Mart recently, as he paid a visit to New York from his
home near Philadelphia. "This guy made a movie about
it." Mr. Moskowitz has indeed managed to put a wild
case of bibliophilia on film.

The book is "The Stones of Summer," a luxuriantly
long-winded coming-of-age story that roams from Iowa
to Mexico in language ripe with early-70's
eccentricity....

The author is Dow Mossman, who grew up in Cedar Rapids
and attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
And after making his grand, impassioned debut as a
novelist, Dow Mossman was not heard from again.

Thirty years ago reviewers compared his work to that
of Joyce, Twain, Salinger and Lowry.... Then what
happened? ....

Mr. Moskowitz's film, a documentary called "Stone
Reader, " that opens at the Film Forum next month, is
his effort to get to the bottom of Dow Mossman's
story. A prizewinner at last year's Slamdance Film
Festival, an alternative festival that coincides with
the Sundance Film Festival, "Stone Reader" is devoted
entirely to matters of publishing, criticism and
reading.

[...]

If Mr. Moskowitz makes the phantom author sound like
an old friend, no wonder. He thinks he has 20 or 30
friends of this kind. These are writers whom he reads
uncategorically: William Wharton, Martin Amis, W. G.
Sebald, Milan Kundera and Siri Hustvedt, among
them....

Since Mr. Moskowitz appears in his own film and makes
his reading habits part of its story, an inevitable
question arises: How did he get this way? By the time
he was a high school senior, he was spending most of
his time reading, even in the classroom, when his
attention was supposed to be elsewhere. Finally a
teacher called him aside and made a suggestion. 

She would give him a list of names, and he would
choose two authors from it. Then he would read
everything the two had written and deliver a term
paper about each author, in lieu of doing his
schoolwork. John Barth and Saul Bellow thus became the
first writers he read with what has now become a
characteristic intensity.

Years later he encountered the same teacher at a
friend's wedding. And she explained something about
the fateful list of writers. She had been certain, she
said, that Mr. Moskowitz was fastidious enough to
choose either the first two names on the list (hence
Barth and Bellow) or the first and last. To do him a
favor, she dropped Émile Zola and let the list end
with Kurt Vonnegut instead.

Mr. Moskowitz went on to read all the authors on the
list and then some....

[...]

What are the prospects for a film just over two hours
(once four hours) about favorite novels and
one-hit-wonder authors? He is hoping for something
unusual. "I don't think this film is as passive as
most films," he said. "People have told me it's the
closest they've come to reading a book in a movie
theater." ...

He has another goal as well, of course: to get "The
Stones of Summer" back into print.

Though anyone who sees the film is bound to be curious
about the book, it is long gone, so hard to find in
used bookstores that libraries are a better bet. With
that in mind, he has started a not-for-profit Lost
Books Club and said he hoped to republish several
titles eventually, including "The Furies" by Janet
Hobhouse. And as word of his project gets around, he
has received a couple of dozen other candidates for
reprinting. 

"Every single one was completely new to me," he says.
"But read other people's lost books? I hate to turn
what's been a great love into a piece of work."

Mr. Moskowitz has also been able to accomplish two
other things. He has thus far sustained some suspense
and mystery about Dow Mossman's post-1972 history,
although the film ultimately explains it.

He said that "Stone Reader" was akin to a literary
"Crying Game" (for secretiveness, not for
cross-dressing), and that the experience of watching
it would be spoiled if audiences know where it ended.

"We went out with a camera not knowing what we would
discover, and I'm hoping people will want to take that
journey along with me," he says. "It isn't journalism
in any way, shape or form. This film is not about
looking up the facts. It's about the reading culture."

 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/20/books/20STON.html


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