["Open Mike" is the occasional and occasionally far-afield Editorial page of TOP.]
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I had a really nice time last night—good company, and a glorious Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmin's, at the lakeside home of my neighbors Philip and Ilene Wexler. Their daughter Ava has just made the brave step of returning to America, after living in Israel for most of her life (she went there when her parents did, as I understand it, but stayed after they moved back). She was delightful, like her extraordinary mother. Another guest was a young carpenter Ilene met during the building of a new house nearby. He could expound at length on the tonal properties of Chinese language and how that worked in music lyrics, but when I complimented his erudition he didn't know what the word meant—but was not the least bit hesitant to admit that. Readiness to admit ignorance is a reliable indicator of intellectual courage. He and Ava are both right around the age of my son, who will turn thirty on his own first child's due date, this coming February. Which means 30-year-olds are now "charming young people" to me. Even the youth (the Jamaicans pronounce it "da yoot," which I love) keep getting older!
I've always thought that as a writer I would be best suited to be a columnist. As a freshman at Dartmouth I was briefly a columnist for The Daily D, at the time the only daily college newspaper in the U.S., or so we were told. I like commenting on the passing scene. And I'm interested in a lot of things. I'm like the clever corvid, who will pick up shiny baubles and carry them off, delighted. Whatever has happened recently is an event to me, and I'm alive to it.
My friend Jim Schley taught me that even a book can be an event, and should rightly be understood that way. How can that be? We make a mistake when thinking of books as merely their material embodiments. We conceive of them as solid objects reliably in stasis. A book is completely contained in itself, a carefully considered and orderly string of words that doesn't change, preserved in a stack of papers kept bound together in strict order. It can be counted on to sturdily stay the same old book over impressive stretches of time if protected. It just sits there, waiting patiently, hibernating. But when you read it, it comes alive. Making your way through it is like a voyage for you, and it occupies a prominent place in your life for the time it takes to read. Everything contained in its words intersects and interacts with everything you bring to the act of reading; and that's what makes it an event.
There's a strange alchemy to books. To find something that speaks to you and that you love, it has to be something that fits you in particular—dovetails with your current intellect, your opinions, whatever open-mindedness to new ideas you possess at a given time, your interests, your concerns, your psyche. It also often needs to fit your current stage of life and development. Every reader should read at least a few carefully chosen books at different times of life, just to see how that works. One of those for me is A Christmas Carol, which is the story of a spiritual awakening. (The first edition was published on December 19th, 1843, and had sold out by Christmas Eve. Remarkably, it has never been out of print.) At the very least, though, every reader has had the experience of finding a particular book to be particularly vivid and meaningful at one age and stage of life, but lacking that radiance at some other juncture; or enjoyable at first reading but not so much on the second. Derek Lundy's Godforsaken Sea totally captured my imagination on first reading—it made me feel like I was right there on the Southern Ocean. It was scary and dramatic. I loved every page; my imagination was all-in; reading that book had a physical effect I could feel in my body. But when I went to reread it years later, the spark didn't "catch." My imagination didn't engage. The book was limp and distant. This transformation alarmed me so much that I put it aside a third of the way through—I preferred to remember it for what it had been for me the first time. The same thing happened with the movie "Star Wars," which I found highly entertaining the first time I saw it but didn't enjoy at all the second time. Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" was unique for me—I was enthralled the first time I saw it, nothing but bored the second time, and deeply appreciative the third time. Criticism helped: between viewings two and three, I read the excellent critic Mark Crispin Miller's fine essay "Barry Lyndon Reconsidered," a paragon of movie criticism in my humble opinion. John Camp was the one who suggested to me that movies are the novels of today. That feels right. I no longer distinguish much between them—although some stories are better suited to one medium than the other. Groundhog Day and American Graffiti had to be movies; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and anything by Henry James have to be books. Popular phenomena like Harry Potter or To Kill a Mockingbird (recently chosen by readers of The New York Times as the best book of the past 125 years)—and A Christmas Carol, for that matter—get to be both.
I think some books dovetail not just with individuals but with whole segments of cultures or particular historical periods. James Whitcomb Riley, whose sarcophagus was given pride of place at the crown of the hill in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, was a huge celebrity in his lifetime, well known to the public, but I doubt many people have heard of him today, much less read his work. Although many may have heard of his most famous creation, Little Orphan Annie. In 1980–81 I went to Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, for a year, and was somehow put in charge of their Rare Book Room. One of the college's possessions was a collection of the number-one bestsellers going back decades. This made a neat list, and I caught the obvious idea from it: that I would read them all. Well, I started in, and read, I don't know, a dozen or 15 of the hundreds of books lined up in their custom-built case—from the 1940s, when the collection began. Most of the books just astonished me. Not only did I like nary a one of them, I also could not for the life of me figure out why they had been popular in their time. The author who put the nail in my project was a certain James Gould Cozzens. His number one was Guard of Honor, an incredibly turgid and way, way overlong account, in excruciating detail and without discernible organization, of three successive days on an American Air Force base, stateside, during WWII—three days in which nothing happens. Or, at least, in which nothing had happened by the time I put the book down. I doubt a single American finishes Guard of Honor now in any given year. If one does, I'll bet he has a great deal of trouble finding someone to discuss it with. In searching for Cozzens' name on the Internet—I didn't recall at first—a light bulb turned on, and I realized that most lists of literature of various types we see now are comprised only of authors people still read. The forgotten are left out, no matter how popular they were in their own time. Cozzens' book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949, which only goes to show that somebody liked it once. Well, all those people who liked it, they're dead now, so we can no longer ask them why in the world they felt that way. My point is merely that books that speak to one generation in one cultural context might not keep their magic intact for the next.
Every reader has also experienced that feeling of something gone missing from their lives after finishing a good book. My boyhood friend Jim Holt, perhaps trying to stave off the inevitable, much preferred to read very long books. A good book for him was 800 to 1,200 pages long, the longer the better. Finishing a good book is like the departure of a companion. Its feeling-tone lingers for days and maybe weeks, and you miss its company. We've all heard stories of readers who consume the main part of a book voraciously, only to screech to a halt when they realize that soon it must end; then they slow way down to mete out the last pages stingily, hoping to make it last.
GQ magazine recently had an interesting idea—they made a list of 21 great books you have their permission to not read. They suggest you not read The Catcher in the Rye (which does seem for some odd reason to have been an inspiration to a rogues' gallery of the weak-minded, including John Lennon's killer; not getting anything much at all out of The Catcher in the Rye might be an indicator of good mental health. Or maybe I just say that because that book was a dud for me). Others you're allowed to not read include Huckleberry Finn, Gravity's Rainbow, The Lord of the Rings, and Life by Keith Richards. Then they nominate books they think you should read instead. Although not everyone will agree with all of their choices either way, it's an inspired idea, and I've put several of their nominations on my reading list, or ordered paperbacks from eBay.
The huge majority of books are ones we'll never read. No human in one lifetime can read all the books the publishing industry churns out in a given month, or a better taste of the classics than you can get of a ham by licking it. The great advantage of the Bible for several hundred years was simply that so many people knew it. Or had heard snippets and bits of it at least, or stories from it. (I've read it twice.) The average self-published book today sells five copies, and the average print book (Americans, at least, still prefer to buy printed paper books) sells 200 copies on publication and 1,000 over its lifetime. It has seven months to sell, if that much, before it goes out of print and is banished from bookstores, surviving only on Amazon. So someone like our friend John Camp (pen name: John Sandford), who can sell 900,000 or so copies of one title, is really beating the odds with a cudgel. Book publishing, like everything else, photography included, has become a tsunami; books get lost now mainly amid surfeit, getting overwhelmed by all the other books. Lost in the shuffle, I think the expression is.
The thing that I most regret is that there is so little shared experience now. What book have most Americans read? Or most Brits, or most French people? Or most boys or girls or Black people or Mexicans or athletes or college students? The best-selling trade book of all time is Don Quixote, from 1604—how many Americans alive now have read that? Not as many as have seen Avatar, I'll wager. Popular movies probably stand the best chance to be familiar to the largest number of people in the same culture. We've all seen Star Wars, even me, although I only saw the first one. I saw the first Harry Potter movie too. Books are teetering on the perilous edge of no longer being shared experiences, culturally speaking.
But they can still be events in our own lives, and I guess that's enough. I'm currently on the hunt for my next good book!
Mike
ADDENDUM:
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Little Orphant Annie
(known to most Americans in the closing years of the
1800s and the opening years of the 1900s)
by James Whitcomb Riley
Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ’at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gits you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!
Featured Comments from:
Alan Whiting: " I tutor (mostly) High School kids in (mostly) math and science, students from a variety of national and ethnic backgrounds. I'm no longer surprised that they just don't have a lot of the cultural material you and I take for granted. It was a shock, however, when a third-year Spanish student of European descent had never heard of Don Quixote. But think: how many Americans had actually read it, even in translation? Very few. It was just sort of in the air, so 'tilting at windmills' was understood somehow. You could say the same about the 1001 Nights, and many other things. I wonder what has taken their place. (I have read Don Quijote in the original, and can confirm it is a masterpiece. But not a task for everyone.)"
vinck: "What book have most French people read? One of the classics taught in school—isn't it the same everywhere? By the time they are out of high school, most French people are acquainted with works by Molière, Racine, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus. Proust if particularly unlucky (though this one was stuffed down my throat later on, while on a math and physics curriculum!). I would place my bet on Molière being the most widely read, but there are several titles competing for first place. I don't doubt these books have literary value, but frankly they all feel a bit stale. Sure, now there's Youtube, video games, and countless TV channels, but I'd say the school system has its part in how few people read books nowadays. They teach you how to read, but certainly not to appreciate the activity of reading books. The Three Musketeers would be our own Don Quixote: epic story, we all know the characters, the references, but few have read it. But the book that holds the most universal appeal throughout the country is probably Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry."
Mike replies: That last one is popular here too.
RubyT: "I hated The Catcher in the Rye and have never tried again. I loved both Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov [Susan Sontag's favorite book —Ed.] in college; enjoyed both less (in different translations than in college) in my 50s. The Brothers K in particular seemed overfull of long-winded philosophical musings that served only to interrupt the story.
"I have been making a point the last two years to regain my reading skills with a minimum goal every day. Some days are easy, I read and read, other days I am lucky to read a few pages, particularly if something stressful happens, like running over a screw and having to call AAA. I am also making a point to revisit old favorites, because there is only so much time. Movies get almost none of that time. I only very rarely watch movies, perhaps one or two a year. I am sure I am missing some great work, but so often I can just see where it's going and I lose interest.
"This post really resonated and I look forward to reading the comments as they come in."
Geoff Wittig: "Back in the Reagan years, E.D. Hirsch made a cottage industry and a bunch of money from his adroit concept of 'cultural literacy.' By this he meant a shared knowledge base, at least a dim awareness of concepts like Don Quixote and Ebeneezer Scrooge, Appomattox and the sinking of the Lusitania, that permitted individuals in a culture to understand each other on some level.
"Of course, Hirsch's list was very heavy with dead white males, and defined a notion of culture that was breathtakingly narrow in our increasingly diverse civil society. But he was really on to something.
"Nowadays the Tsunami of increasingly segmented and granular published and on-line information, not to mention ever deeper political silos, threaten to Balkanize our culture into isolated pockets. It reminds me of a possibly apocryphal factoid about the five (or six) Native American tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. Their languages are similar but vary geographically, so that neighboring Onondaga and Oneida could easily understand each other, but the Western Seneca and Eastern Mohawk might struggle to communicate. The further our culture atomizes, the fewer tropes and concepts we hold in common, the fewer books we have all at least skimmed, the harder it is to understand each other."
Mike replies: Very true, and that goes for generations as well I think. Because of the cultural Balkanization you speak of, I suspect each generation is less familiar now with the shared experiences and tropes and concepts of other generations. YouTube feeds me some very generational-specific stuff, and then I watch it because it's being presented to me, leading to me getting more of it. I feel fairly safe in guessing that its algorithms are assuming I wouldn't be interested in the things that fascinate and entice other generations, even though I would be.
