Twentymiglia
As if you didn’t already know…
The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.
from The Atlantic
This infographic from New York Magazine made the top page of Reddit today. Turns out, you really can judge a book by its cover. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, the Twilight style cover sold 68,000 copies since 2009. That beats my copy of the Norton Critical Edition which has only sold 1000 copies since 2000. (Really, what are professors assigning?). Well, at least it beats this terrible idea.
Here’s a great comment that made it to the front page of Reddit on the uses of literature.
The universe is huge. Time is impossibly vast. Trillions of creatures crawl and swim and fly through our planet. Billions of people live, billions came before us, and billions will come after. We cannot count, cannot even properly imagine, the number of perspectives and variety of experiences offered by existence.
We sip all of this richness through the very narrowest of straws: one lifetime, one consciousness, one perspective, one set of experiences. Of all the universe has, has had, and will have to offer, we can know only the tiniest fraction. We are alone and minuscule and our lives are over in a blink.
As a child, I rarely saw a prison except on television. Now, I see them more often and in the most populous of areas—beside a strip mall or industrial park or along the highway. The modern prison is not the gothic stone façade projecting doom and despair. Now they are bland, dull buildings with a modicum of razor wire and very thin, unbreakable windows. They blend into the background of the surrounding communities like schools and the DMV. Still, I shudder at the sight of them, not so much because I fear escapees, but rather because I fear the bureaucracy of the prison system itself.
Every age has its predilections and ours is skeptic. Ideas, theories, intentions, facts, nothing is beyond the shadow of our doubt. Perhaps this is a byproduct of capitalism, the effect of a world in which it is assumed that everyone is selling something. Perhaps the program of liberation implemented in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s worked too well; critical consciousnesses evolved to epistemological crisis. In an age where people doubt the moon landing and John F.Kennedy can be seen speaking to Tom Hanks in a film, who can blame people for their uncertainty?
A few years ago, a momentous discovery was made: the 1967 Charles W. Norton lectures of Jorge Luis Borges at Harvard University. These lectures are a delight, especially “A Poet’s Creed.” To listen to Borges is to feel for a brief moment what it is like to be someone who is possessed by a timeless and immortal memory. What makes a great scholar a wonder—and here I think about someone like Erich Auerbach or Carlo Ginsberg—is the fact that they seem to experience the past as if it were an eternal present. But listening to the final lecture, it occurred to me how aware Borges was of his memory and the predicament of modern literature.
Men’s fashion presents an exciting mixture of both the political and the aesthetic; aesthetic because the way all fashion excites the senses; political in the sense that Mary Louise Pratt means it: the body is a contact zone, a social space in which culture meets and grapples with itself.
Looking at sites like MaleFashionAdvice or shows like Queer Eye makes me think that now more than ever men are liberated to openly embrace fashion—or more precisely—liberated to now speak of the conscientious fashioning of their appearance. It wasn’t so long ago that GQ was an industry magazine meant for the wholesaler and haute couture was the language of the privileged class. In some ways we have see the democratization of exclusiveness, if for no other reason than it is better for the bottom line.
Conventional wisdom says there’s no accounting for taste, though a great deal of money has certainly been invested in trying to do exactly that. Whether it be Amazon’s array of “Customers who viewed this also viewed” predictors or the more dramatic approach that Netflix took in offering a million dollar prize, such projects often end poorly. There is little correlation in people’s hedonism. Pleasure—genuine, soul-quenching pleasure—is ineffable.
A recent article in the New Yorker entitled “Working Titles” by Leslie Chang sets out to describe the phenomenon of “workplace novel” in China. These novels are intended to be a guide to the newly materializing rat-race that is State Capitalist China. Complete with sub-genres like “the Financial Novel” and the “Commercial Warfare Novel” these are stories that give concrete instruction to what is often an abstract and complicated affair, social climbing. I wondered what an American iteration of the genre would look like, if we would allow ourselves a fiction that doubles as how-to. Surely, many people watched the film Wall Street as a guide instead of a morality tale. So too The Savage Detectives teaches us how a poet behaves. Fiction does have the ability to teach. No one has ever doubted that. But could we accept bald didacticism?
One way of appreciating the style of a writer is to consider what they have not written. Just as we may judge a scene for its content, we may also judge a scene for what has been omitted and the power that comes from the absence of information. For this I have to think of chapter five of The Great Gatsby in which the narrator Nick Carraway hosts the first meeting in five years between Daisy and Jay Gatsby.
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