I had a brief chat the other evening with my friend (name withheld), one of many friends I don't see much because of geography. Although I suppose geography can't really be blamed, as much as physics, time, and economics, but let's skip over that rabbit hole, on our way to a few others.
We were talking about books, and (name withheld) was speaking with an air of childlike enthusiasm. I waffled internally for a while this morning about whether I should say that, as it could be interpreted as condescension. I decided to go ahead and take the risk, because in fact it's the core of my point. And to put things in perspective, (name withheld)'s arguably more adult than I am, since she's a mother of three and a former coroner. (I'm a father of one and I'll decline to mention what I have been formerly.)
(Name withheld) wasn't gushing about Twilight, or whatever the current drivel is; we were talking about Russian fiction. She's a big Nabokov fan, and I've only read a sliver of his excellent work. Gogol also came up, and I can't recall Gogol ever "coming up" before in any conversation I've had anywhere. To use Thomas Alderson's phrase, (name withheld) "allowed as how" she preferred Dostoyevsky to the more celebrated Tolstoy. Me too, as I've made it all the way through a few Dostoevsky books, and only a short piece or two of the Count's fine war writing.
Every once in a blue moon, I make a friend who likes to read. My usual m.o. is to immediately burn them out like a junkie's vein, until they're ducking my calls and taking jobs that require extensive travel. Even those friends, though, rarely talk the way (name withheld) does. Here on the pretentious east coast, when citizens talk about fiction, you hear a lot of critic words like "overrated" and "meta" being tossed around.
(Name withheld) lives in one of those flyover states we're always reading about in Vanity Fair and such, where people don't usually have time to read because they're perennially stuck behind a plow, or drinking corn likker at a square dance.
(Name withheld) also brought up David Foster Wallace, a now-tragic figure who is arguably both overrated and meta, but I won't be qualified to make that call until I plow through more of his work. I've only had the energy to put to bed a few of his essays, where I've encountered footnotes longer than my entire pieces. (Some people tell me my stuff is too long, but I think that's partly because they often see it first on Facebook, a "place" where people go to post memes and briefly crow about whomever they were smart enough not to vote for. When I occasionally post on Twitter, it's a still more dispiriting experience. I generally stay just long enough to get depressed about how many Americans can manage to fit in numerous misspellings and examples of clumsy grammar when 140 characters are all you're allowed. It's also no fun to discover joyless "witticisms" about boobs and vodka garnering more "likes" than six months worth of my blather. The rule is that you can get about 47 likes for each boob mentioned in your "joke," and if panties figure into it, you may require additional bandwidth to accommodate all the plaudits. Tweets that would shame Rod McKuen can get retweeted thousands of times, because apparently many young American women want you to know how moved they were when mamalovesbeernuts thumb-typed "Because when I'm at my worst, you kiss my neck and bring me chocolate. That's how come I know you're my spirit animal.")
Although she reads more than most big city dwellers, I suspect (name withheld) wouldn't describe herself as an intellectual. That's been a bit of a dirty word in our society since at least the Adlai Stevenson era, and I'll admit I'm generally reluctant to tar myself with it in spite of my proclivity for such intellectual activities as downloading Foreign Affairs and talking to myself while driving.
I'm going to spell it out, now, because I really need to get back to practicing fiddle.
Reading is supposed to be fun. Even David Foster Wallace and Dostoevsky are fun, once you get over the initial unpleasantness of having to use your brain a little while you're relaxing. It's not that Americans have completely rejected the role of words in entertainment; they've just become more and more addicted to the endless conveyor belt of slovenly verbal dreck that involves thumb muscles more than brain cells. That's bad news for me, as I love the sound of words the way many of my fellow citizens love the crack of a bat. And I'm not even sure the resultant surplus of idiocy and dearth of critical thinking are the worst whirlwinds we've reaped as we've gradually agreed to keep words and ideas out of the recycle pile, as if language is styrofoam rather than life-renewing mulch.
The worst thing, the very worst thing about it, to me, is the separating of "entertainment" and "intelligence" into two different cans. When a great storyteller is at work, whether it's Kafka or Neil Gaiman, words light up your brain like a pinball machine. You think you're following the characters around to see what scrapes they'll get into or out of next, but beneath all of that there are chemical forces surging through your bloodstream. The ideas are disguised as words, and the words are disguised as characters and adventures, and before you know it you've chowed down on one of the few things in this life that are both delicious and nutritious. And it's all there stored in your tissues for later use, when you need some joy or some sense of self worth to keep you grinding through the day in spite of the awfulness that's afoot across the land, as it's always been since humans first started seeing each other as probable threats rather than possible friends. Whether you listen to it or ignore it, there's a voice inside you crying out for verbal nutrition, and the louder voice yelling at you to fill your hole with the nicotine of "real housewives" and "hillbilly handfishing" is the real threat. We've let it into our American home, first through the doggy door, then through the people door, and now it's pretty much getting its mail at our address. It's established residency, and whether that becomes permanent at your house is up to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment