Archives for the 'Books' Category

An Apology for Idlers

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Untitled, Florian Maier-Aichen

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. - Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

Most people regard The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde like Frankenstein: a genius concept but a bother to actually read (21 adaptations are listed on IMDB, including the new TV series.) And that’s a shame. Robert Louis Stevenson’s proto-Cronenbergian dark obsessions and tight prose defied 19th century trends. He deserves a cult audience if not a wider one (I am especially fond of The Suicide Club.)

Going back to Mikita Brottman’s argument for a broader definition of literacy, finding and replacing “Internet” for “Books” gives his essay An Apology for Idlers a very modern relevance. Stevenson goes so far as to say, “suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy’s preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse…the services of no single individual are indispensable”

twocyp.jpgTwo Cypresses, Louisiana, Josef Hoflehner

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.

Why do we say we are busy as if it were an accomplishment? Limited free time signifies poor time management and at a great cost — most of us would pay for more time off. Step away from the Internet this weekend, and save those emails for another day. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend!

Previously:

Why Read at All?

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Posted by Joanne on May 23, 2008 | Link

Why Read at All?

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Kyle Bean’s “The Future of the Book.”

Recently, I toured a building full of studios awarded rent-free to artists. It was four floors and three blocks long, maybe 300 studios total, but I didn’t see more than several artists I felt contributed anything memorable, let alone worthy of state-assisted housing. I suspect these residents are excellent essayists and know how to sell themselves in grant applications, because never in history have we had a shortage of starving artists.

Mikita Brottman, literature professor at Maryland Institute College of Art explains why it is some artists succeed, even if their actual visual work is underwhelming. “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks,” she tells the Boston Phoenix.

Brottman’s new book The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, sounds much more antagonizing than it actually is. She is arguing against literacy as the only way to measure true intelligence, and that novels are a less relevant way to communicate language now that we deal with words all day online and in text messages.

When I first read about this book, I thought it was an actual treatise against reading and was reminded of the character in Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan” who never reads novels only literary criticisms, “You don’t have to read a book to have an opinion.”. But, Brottman isn’t validating the blowhard bluffers who have opinions on titles they’ve only encountered, she’s investigating the striving desire to board the frigate at the expense of other things.

“I read all the time, [but] there were some things that reading did for me that were not positive … It alienated me from my family, and my country. It gave me an idealized picture of romance and what the world was like. And it made me socially dysfunctional…I would be a better, more well-rounded individual if I had not spent so much time locked in my room reading when I was a child,” she explains in another interview.

Why do I read anyway? Books that are “impossible to put down” are very hard to come by, especially when there is so much more in life to get done –or enjoy. It’s a holiday and lovely out and I might be picnicking with friends rather than whittling away at the three shopping bags full of books I just purchased at MIT Press’s annual loading dock sale. Reading is a self-imprisoning vice, when it isn’t paired with social or physical experiences. Take Jessa Crispin’s advice to a reader asking why he or she has “suddenly come to hate books”:

My guess is that maybe you’ve been neglecting the right half of your brain. It needs love, too, and reading is a seriously left brain activity. The right brain might be sabotaging you until you entertain it for a while. It loves flirting, and Bourne movies, and the Art Institute. Try baking a cheesecake, or sit on your floor with a box of crayons for a day. Then try again, but maybe something a little less intense than Herodotus. When I’m sick I always regress back to Christopher Pike books, so get back to that level. After a week or two of zombie teachers and man-eating cheerleaders (in a literal sense, not, you know) you’ll be back to Graham Greene.

I think you learn a lot more about a person based on what they won’t read than what they haven’t yet. Life is too short for Jonathan Safran Foer or any other thirty-something Brooklyn novelist. While, I generally like anyone who enjoys JG Ballard books, I also tend to like people who think they would like JG Ballard, but haven’t gotten around to reading his books yet. I haven’t read any Will Self, but I imagine I’d like him, from what I’ve read about him.

But when I do read Will Self, why will I? Why else but for that blissful experience of thinking new things and what Emerson says of regaining discarded thoughts — a passage, which upon a second reading seems to reinforce Brottman’s thesis:

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Those eureka moments are somewhere between chocolate and sex in terms of pleasure, but what besides those three things guarantee joy in this world?

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Posted by Joanne on Apr 21, 2008 | Link

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