Fair warning, this blog post today is not a scholarly treatise. It is a semi-focused bibliophile’s rant, railing against yet another assault on the sacred preserve of reading, especially the reading habits of children. I originally composed this in December, before I moved back up to the greater DFW Metroplex area to start my new library job. (more on that later).
During most Decembers growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, family vacations to visit the grandparents, aunts and uncles still living in Missouri were a regular occurrence.
My first 9 years of life I grew up in and around Columbia, South Carolina, and we trekked to Oran, Missouri, home of my maternal grandmother. It was never cold enough to snow (that nearly always came to Missouri AFTER Christmas, to my perennial childhood disappointment), but it did sometimes rain and sleet, and if we were really lucky, we got the Faux-White Christmas of lots of frost on the rolling hills of farmland up around Caledonia, Missouri near my paternal grandmother’s place. If you squinted and used your imagination you could BS yourself into believing it was snow. I think I experienced a genuine white Christmas, with actual snow on the ground that accumulated, maybe ONCE my entire childhood.
When I visited my maternal grandmother, I at least had cousins my own age to play with. But at my paternal grandparents, no such luck. Mostly a lot of adults having boring conversations that, as a kid, I couldn’t stand. I would sneak off to my guest room in the attic and curl up with a good book. I remember I once read one of Tom Clancy’s books…one of the ones not long after The Hunt For Red October…from cover to cover the whole night through, just could not put it down. My elbows ached from propping up in bed reading. So I’d switch positions until I got uncomfortable again.
I read so much on family vacations…in later years, as a grad student on winter break, I read more mature stuff like a book on the Vienna of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s day, or a biography of Arthur Schopenhauer.
We’d always start our trips in the wee hours of the morning, before sunrise, “to beat the traffic”, my dad always said. Usually I’d drift off back to sleep in the back seat. Then I’d awaken with the morning sun streaming in the car’s windows. Before long we’d stop for breakfast and when I came of age, had to do my own fair share of the driving before turning the car back over to mom and dad after lunch.
On those stretches of road where I was passenger rather than driver, my head was usually buried in a book. I read the whole Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series that way, much to the annoyance of my parents, who couldn’t understand why I was erupting into irrepressible belly laughter every few miles or so. They learned to dread buying me FAR SIDE comic book compilations for the same reason, too. My mom was one of those people who could just never “get” Gary Larson’s FAR SIDE; Her funny bone just wasn’t in tune with Larson’s bizarre thought patterns the way mine was and still is.
Sometimes I’d listen to music when driving, sometimes as a passenger in the front seat, sometimes there would be a good NPR program on that was worth listening to, but mostly unless I was behind the wheel, I’d read.
I look around me today, though, at contemporary children sitting in their parent’s SUVs, their eyes glued to smallish TV monitors built into the back of their parent’s front row car seats, watching the latest Disney animated epic, or playing video games or what have you. Sure, in my day, sometimes played hand-held digital football and digital baseball, even digital space-invaders, but these seldom held my attention for very long and I was usually back reading a book again before too long. But kids today don’t have a chance. Even if they wanted to, the lure of the screen is probably too much. Their attention span is shot, even shorter than in my day, and like their parents themselves, they’re deathly afraid of boredom—and without the joy of reading, or productive yet rewarding physical labor, or physical play, boredom can loom as a palpable threat.
A typical child today can ride with mommy and daddy from Texas to California and not once crack a book, I’ll bet. I can only hope that maybe the charm wears off, that one can only watch the Lion King and the rest of the Disney favorites on DVD only SO many times, one can win the hardest Call of Duty missions or Fantasy Superbowls only so often, before boredom creeps back in and the attractive cover of a book beckons. But this is way stiffer competition for books than the admittedly crappy handheld digital football & baseball old school electronic games of my day.
I just marvel at how much of my childhood, adolescent and young adult reading got done on the open road, or during the lulls in family get-togethers, either in Missouri or at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where one summer at a family reunion I finished a used copy of Journalist Hendrick Smith’s non-fiction personal narrative titled THE RUSSIANS, about the Russian people and his reflections as a journalist assigned to Moscow during the Soviet era. It was a tad out of date (his sequel, dealing with the Yeltsin era, THE NEW RUSSIANS, had already been published), but still an important piece of living history to read.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken one (of many) of Neil Postman’s cautions to heart, namely that eventually it becomes just as important to decide what NOT to read, what one can duly ignore without detriment, as it does to decide what one will take time to read. The bibliographic universe, just like the physical universe it exists in, is so mind-bogglingly huge it really is quite difficult to appreciate at first just how large it is, what its contours are, etc. It eventually teaches the folly of thinking one can read everything there is on a given subject; That may have been possible for the 18th Century scholarly gentleman, but it is no longer the case in our time. Reading and the production of professional texts has become too massive in scale to ever make it possible to read every last jot and tittle on a particular subject. You do what you can. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over-examined life is not lived. And what value is reading after a certain point if one doesn’t share what one reads, discuss what one read and what one got out of the experience? On the one hand the act of reading is a profoundly anti-social activity and yet can foster the deepest communities of interest, etc.
In relationships, it doesn’t matter if your partner also loves to read or not; that’s irrelevant, so not the point. The point is, are they able to keep themselves sufficiently entertained without resentment while you indulge your reading addiction. They may love books as much or more than you…but if they’re emotionally needy, none of that will matter and you will raise their ire immediately if you put a book in front of your nose and between your nose and theirs. They will never want to read when you do, however much you may encourage that. No, mutual love of books is wholly insufficient to keep a reading life going while in relationship. I hope I never finish another book in the same way that I finished Peter Sack’s Standardized Minds, namely cramming in a page here, a page there when my then wife went to the ladies room or took a shower without me (which was rare in itself), covertly putting the book away when she’d come back into the bedroom. It was crazy, no way to nurture a reading life. More of a measure of desperation, sort of keeping one’s reading life on crucial life support to keep it from dying out altogether, hoping someday it shall awaken once more from the coma it inadvertently slipped into. I did finish the book, though, and felt some smug satisfaction at having done so. It was one among a number of twisted little passive-aggressive emotional wargames we played with each other until the marriage broke up.
These days, people will examine my casual reading and ask “is that for a class?”, as if reading has instrumental value only; But this question is still better than one I have actually received… “Why are you reading?” Not, “What are you reading”, no, but “why”. I usually ignore the question, since anyone dumb enough to ask it is usually someone I want nothing further to do with.
I'm fortunate to have found work with a slightly larger academic library than TAMUG's, actually, as I'm able to continue my refined reading habits, most of which are seldom satisfied by the average public library fare. I can learn to make due, but much of what I like to read is of scholarly interest and too narrowly focus to fit within the collection development plans of the typical public library. Luckily one of the perks of my job is that I now have borrowing privileges again, and for the entire semester to boot, unlike at Rice U, where I had a mere month as a Friend of the Fondren Library. Since I no longer live in Houston, I've let my membership expire in that particular Library Friends' organization.
I've managed to finish a couple of new books and may or may not post a review soon. One of them was Joe Bageant's
Deer Hunting with Jesus, which was a very good book, somewhat reminiscent of
What's the Matter with Kansas, but told in first person, by Joe, moving back to the native rural Virginia of his youth after a full and colorful adult life lived elsewhere. The book is an attempt to come to terms with the contrasting working class consciousness's of Bageant himself and those of his neighbors and classmates who stayed behind in Virginia while Joe saw the world and got enlightened. Like I said, good book, but thoroughly and relentlessly depressing. The Empire has plenty of ripe fodder; fascism depends on the incurious who don't want to be bothered to think for themselves, prefer patriotic pieties to reasoned discourse, etc.
Bageant ties so much of this to the Scots-Irish (Ulster Scots, Borderers as they are otherwise called) immigrant heritage of America. Back in Ulster, their ancestors were the Bulwark of Empire then, too. Warlike, deeply religious, heavy drinkers, those who treat personal subjective political opinion as some kind of inviolate political high truth, as long as it "sounds right", and they're utterly resistant to any egg-headed investigation into the facts that might move them from "sounding right" to actually being more certain. Doesn't matter. I don't know how true this is, but Bageant's thesis is certainly provocative. Makes me glad, moreover, to be straight Scots (with some German intermarriage), and not Scots-Irish. I am a native Southerner, but through reading and education and life experiences have come to repudiate so much of unreconstructed White, Southern heritage and worldview.
At least I'm living close to a old friend who hails from California (UC Berkeley alumnus), we agree on nearly everything except guns (I am a TEXAN, after all).
