The New Yorker, April 2

Alright, I received my April 2 New Yorker issue in the mail three days ago and I decided enough was enough. I am drowning in New Yorkers. I’ve been trying so hard to get through the books I’m reading that I simply haven’t had time to finish a single New Yorker since the end of February. This week’s New Yorker, which arrived a full five days earlier than it usually does, was the last straw. I am proud to say that, four days later, I have finally finished a complete New Yorker.

I decided to do something a bit different this week. Instead of reading the magazine front to back, which is what I usually do, I decided to read the articles in order of interest. So, I started with John Updike’s review of Walter Isaacson’s Einstein. In his own Picked Up Pieces, a collection of assorted prose, Updike lays out his own rules for writing reviews. One of those rules was:

Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants' revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

It’s a good thing that Updike admits to breaking his own rules because plot summary is exactly what he did with this review of Isaacson’s biography. Albert Einstein is such an iconic figure that it’s unlikely that the new biography is fraught with suspense and “surpiseful narrative.” Only those who have read the book (I haven’t) would know whether Isaacson sheads new and shocking light on Einstein’s life and if Updike knows it, maybe he’s following his own advice and not telling us. But if it’s unknown whether Isaacson has anything new to say about Einstein’s life, it’s certainly clear that Updike doesn’t.

I don’t see how this article could classify as anything other than an elegant summary. Updike neither provides a new theory or way of looking at the man, nor does he provide any illuminating comments on the biography itself outside of calling it “thorough, comprehensive, [and] affectionate.” One wonders if, for all of its elegance, this article would have even been accepted by the New Yorker if it hadn’t come with John Updike’s byline.

Criticism of the Critics

I posted this on my other blog and I just simply had to post it here as well. WARNING: Angry rant ahead.

In the April issue of Harper's magazine, Cynthia Ozick quotes an essay titled "Defeating the Poem" written by Denis Donoghue, a literary scholar and a professor of thirty years. In his essay, Donoghue reports:

"Those students who think of themselves as writers and take classes in 'creative writing' to define themselves as poets or fiction writers evidently write more than they read, and regard reading as a gross expenditure of time and energy. They are not open to the idea that one learns to write by reading good writers."

Oh, ye Gods of literature, say it ain't so. Have we sunk so low that even writers don't want to read? Or as Oznick puts it, "So is that where the readers of the next generation are going: to the perdition of egotism and moralizing politicized self-righteousness?"

I always get a bit defensive when writers lament and cry out in letters, "The readers have all gone! Where have all the readers gone?" I wish to say, "Here I am. I'm right here. Don't I count?" I know, of course, that that's not what they mean. What they mean is that there simply aren't as many readers like myself out there as there used to be. But, doesn't it seem just a bit self-defeating to write articles about people who don't read because, obviously, anyone who reads the article is, by definition, a reader? So, it begs the question, who is the intended audience for these articles anyway? Fellow writers, literary critics, readers, or all three? No ones seems to disagree with the fact that readership is declining in America (and in Britain, apparently) so what is the point of all these articles really?

The fact that libraries are getting rid of their Shakespeare and their Dickens because young readers find them too boring and too difficult to read is outrageous, indeed. But what's being done about it? Outrage without action is annoying, boring, and frankly, pointless. Writers, however, seem content to do what writers do - write - and leave the action for someone else. In the past, that may have all been fine and dandy. But to those writers who want the readers of yesteryear back, I'd tell them the same thing I'd tell a child crying, "Mommy! Mommy! He stole my candy." Go get it back. Getting readers to return to reading doesn't require beating, cheating, or stealing (especially if, as Oznick writes, people are already "Googling obsessively (hours and hours)" and "blogging and emailing and text messaging" which all requires reading for "hours and hours").

No, what getting readers back requires is ingenuity and creativity, two things which writers have in sufficient supply. But, most importantly, what it requires is action. Action not through words but through deeds. Large scale reading programs and fairs, and English teachers skilled enough to educate and impart to their students a sense of their own passion for reading. I always tell people who tell me they don't like to read that they simply just haven't read the right book. Where are the programs to help people find their inner reader in the same way that writers are encouraged and taught to find their inner voice?

Call me naive but I truly and honestly believe that there is a reader in everyone. Anyone will read if you place the right book in front of them. This is especially the case with children and younger students, which is where it should all begin, before they've convinced themselves that their time is better spent with television, the internet, and video games. But so often, we speak of these things as if it has to be either/or. Either you read or you watch television; either you play video games or you read. This simply isn't the case. I spend plenty of time surfing the internet - checking email, Googling, blogging (obviously) and all. I also take time out of my day to watch my favorite television shows. And yet somehow, miracle of miracles, I read. A lot.

This isn't - it shouldn't be - a battle of the internet versus reading. This should be a battle for reading, period. When adults who have trouble learning how to check their email and speak of not knowing a thing about computers as if they consider it a badge of honor, champion reading books they, in effect, make reading seem old, stale, and out of date, much in the same way that young people consider cassette tapes and records a thing of the past. But reading isn't something of the past. Even if we couldn't claim that books written years ago could tell universal truths transcendent of time, books are still a thing of the present simply by their virtue of being printed everyday. If books are thing of the present, so too then must be reading.

Internet, television, and video games aren't the problem. Inaction is the problem. There seems to be this idea that marketing reading and literature is sordid and beneath the pure act of reading, especially if one is going to read literature. But if you are above marketing the sacred past-time then you must also be above complaining about the declining readership. To get readers to come back to reading today requires the kind of work that wasn't required fifty years ago and, so what? If you want your place in the hearts and minds of the public and the larger culture, you must be willing to work for it. Some of us, like myself, don't require that kind of work but, as I've said before, obviously this isn't about me or other book lovers like me. This is about the poor people out there whose lives are sadly un-enriched by the mind-blowing, thought-provoking power of books.

If we, none of us, wish to see books relegated to the "deafening silence of irrelevance" then we must take our noses out of our books, our fingers from the keyboards, and demand reading's place in the heart and mind of our community and culture. The place is there; it hasn't gone anywhere. It's simply gotten smaller. If we want to make it larger we must take a break from our philosophizing and our agonizing over the declining numbers and do something, because time is getting short. If Donoghue is to be believed, then we are already fast approaching the day when even our writers won't read. When that happens, the time for arguing and debating will be over, because there won't be anyone to debate with.

To the Library and Beyond

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine remarked that, for someone who reads as much as I do, I don’t go to the library very often. I told him what I tell everyone who asks: I don’t go to libraries because they always want their books back. I’m possessive about my books, especially books I like, and I don’t like having to give them back. It’s selfish I know, but after having accumulated $30 dollar fines on a number of occasions, I’d decided that everyone would be better served – my pocketbook and honest library patrons alike – if I got my books from the bookstore where, for a set price, my books could languish on my shelves as long as I liked.

My pocketbook, however, has of late been rather bare so this past weekend I bit the bullet, promised to be a good library patron, and applied for a new library card. I’d forgotten how much going to the library is like being a kid in a candy store with license to get whatever and however much I liked. Oh, the bounty I escaped with:

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
Tokyo: Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta
Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz
Heat by Bill Buford
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
And a bunch of plays by Shakespeare that I haven’t read in a while or ever (King Lear, As You Like It, and the Henry VI plays to name a few).


Habitually, I read the first chapter of any new book I acquire. It satisfies my curiosity and allows me to finish books I’ve already committed to reading. So I spent a very pleasurable afternoon dipping my toe into a new book before flitting off to a another pool. Here’s a sampling of the first sentence from a few of the books:

“One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.” –- Assassination Vacation

“Not so long ago, in one of those small, carefree lands that used to be so common but which now, alas, are hardly to be found, there was a prince whose name was Ibrahim.” -- Tokyo: Cancelled (Alright, this isn’t exactly the first sentence in the book. Tokyo: Cancelled is modeled after The Canterbury Tales. This is the first sentence in the first story “The Tailor.”)

“There was a woman who had seven sons and she was happy. Then she had a daughter.” -- from “Where We Come From” in Nice Big American Baby. I’m not going to give away the story but someone please tell me: is it even possible for a woman to carry a baby inside for her for four years and not – I don’t know – die?

"Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture." -- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marraige

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards.” – Quoted by George Orwell, from The Road to Wigan Pier as preface to Heat

Will in the World, Final

If you’ve read my last post on Shakespeare (“Shakespeare Everywhere!”), you’d know I’ve found myself unexpectedly surrounded by the legendary playwright for the past month. He’s been popping up in the strangest places like a hidden element in a “Where’s a Waldo!” picture (“Where’s Will!”). Today, not only is he gracing the cover of my April 2007 Harper’s Magazine (“The Mirror of Life: How Shakespeare Conquered the World” by Jonathan Bate) but he’s also making a surprise appearance - ok, not so much a surprise considering the forum - in my April/May “Bookforum.” In its ‘Pub Dates’ section, “Bookforum” informs readers that Abrams Books is releasing Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet and Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet in April. Manga Shakespeare...uh, no comment. Actually, I think it might be kind of cool but, alright, no further comment.

I will, however, say that I have finally completed the reason for my recent Shakespeare inundation, Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. Will in the World is a massive achievement, not least of all because it is a compelling biography of a man whose known facts of life, according to John Mitchell, “can be written down on one side of a sheet of notepaper." Thus, the nearly four hundred page Will in the World is basically, in the words of Greenblatt himself, “an exercise in speculation,” but it is engrossing speculation nonetheless. Greenblatt uses the only true records left of Shakespeare’s inner life, his plays, to breathe life into not only the man but also the plays (although, conspicuously, Greenblatt fails to mention that authorship of many of the plays he uses to recreate Shakespeare’s life have been called into question by several Bard scholars).

Greenblatt is less concerned with literary conspiracy theories than he is with the life of the man on whom the book is based. He’s more concerned with showing readers how Shakespeare could have lived and developed as a playwright if only we, the audience, are willing to approach the history of Shakespeare in exactly the same way the playwright demanded of his sixteenth century audiences - with suspended belief and the power of our imagination. What we get in return is entertainment of the highest value and, if we are paying attention, an education on and illumination of all those dark, secret places.

I spent three months in a course on Shakespeare and never learned as much as I have in reading Greenblatt’s elegant biography. Granted, there are some glaring omissions of explanation (i.e. just how did an untraveled man with no university training manage to read untranslated Italian plays?), but those holes in his biography only serve to make the playwright more intriguing. Was he bisexual or wasn’t he? Did he hate his wife or didn’t he? Was he a recusant Catholic or wasn’t he? Perhaps we’ll never know and, in the end, none of it really matters because after it’s all said and done “what matters most are the works.” Shakespeare made poetry of the English language and, in his biography of the poet, so does Greenblatt.

Quote of the Day:

Books are the main source of our knowledge, our resevoir of faith, memory, wisdom, morality, poetry, philosophy, history, and science. Daniel Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress

Word of the Day:

blazon: the ecstatic inventory of a beloved's features.

Example: Stephen Greenblatt writes, "If a mare could write a love poem to a stallion...she might write this:

Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong;
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide."

(Shakespeare sonnet lines 295-98)