I’ve written on this blog before about this need to read and collect books as if trophies. Specifically, on many blogs there are “challenges,” which means, I gather, to read as many books as possible over a week-end, or a year. The challenges can be focused: mysteries, or an author, thematic tasks. One blogger lists the amount of pages he has read in a year. I flashback to a graduate course in English in which the instructor told us that it took him at least an hour to go through a story or a chapter by Henry Adams, underlining, commenting to himself on the margins. The implication was that such a craftsman needed time and consideration in order to value his prose or the strength of his ideas. Perhaps there is a direct line between this kind of reading and the kind of “reviews” that are generated. Apparently the amount counts or is an important status to be garnered, how many franks you can put away in a Coney Island contest. No one says or alludes to the possiblity that all this reading does not lead to anything or any viable learning(s) for the reader. It is conspicuous consumption by the nouveaux riche dilettante. It is peacock time, look at how many books I’ve read, a schoolyard tease that I am smarter than you are. What I want to say to these literary thugs is that books are dead matter. One learns, if one learns how to do this, that books do not give wisdom. Life gives wisdom. (Given all the books written about and against war in all the libraries across the world, we still have not learned to kill one another!) And, of course, we don’t teach our young to learn from daily life — we codify them, we moralize them, we imbue them with guilt. We root them in past experience so that daily living, intensely, is literally unthought of. There is no awakening of intelligence. Ironically, I say to you to buy a copy of Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things and read his first chapter on the significance of education. Next to Walden I give copies of this book to young people to help them on their way. To read all these books aimlessly and to display the “erudition” in reading them is folly, a very good and old word. Bloggers are often virtual lint.
Satiety, glut and gluttony are the order of the day across this culture. Many bloggers preen their books so as to be admired. I will not hem or haw about blogging being this or that. In general, there is an obsession with the “me” and the “more.” Few make the connection to what happened to the mind of Don Quixote. Bloggers hoard the reading of books as if they will be rewarded. A Russian master penned a short story in which a man has to pay off a debt. He is “sentenced” to a room which is a library, containing thousands of books. After many years he walks out of the room earlier than he should have, therefore forefeiting the debt and, if I remember this correctly, he harbors no resentment or anger to his captors. What is being telegaphed is that his having read all these books over the years tempered him, instructed him, brought him to awareness. I don’t buy it, although artfully expressed. Books can condition you, they can fill you up, for good or bad, sandpaper your rough points, move you into fantasy and worlds unknown, and on and on. They are not life and will never be. The above fable is sweet and conventional and naive. I read books to nudge me, not to teach or condition me. Books, for me, are diving boards, no more, no less. To amass books as if to say you are learned is to be a horse’s ass and many bloggers are, indeed, addled and confused about reading and literature. Show and tell is what these blogs are about. And what an inane school exercise that was. Reflective thinking, I think not. Sternberg: “Pinlight on Miss Dietrich, Please.”
I have also observed what I have observed about human nature in general, that we are often outer-directed rather than inner-directed, that we are more often true believers than not, that we are lemmings rushing to the cliffs ahead, that we are hordes, that we are followers, the list is endless. Blogs reflect much of this. Nothing unusual about it. Bloggers who kiss one another’s asses. Bloggers who cow and fawn before other bloggers. Bloggers who are virtual ignoramuses. And there are bloggers who do not review books but review the author — lovely. Bereft of knowledgeable backgrounds, claiming that they are not reviewers but go ahead and attempt to review in any case, disclaimer or no disclaimer, often the author is merged with what he has written as if Melville himself rode a whale or Kafka lived in a penal colony. Well, yes, in a literary and imaginative way, they do all that. However, some bloggers confuse reality with art. I remember a witty rejoinder by a woman writer in the 60s who said she would refuse to shake Philip Roth’s hand after reading Portnoy’s Complaint. Because I was a psychotherapist and this is cited on my bookcover, often my stories are dismissed or criticized because of their analytic salt and pepper. What if I reveal that more than half of them were written before I had ever entertained being a therapist. What if I proffer that I read Freud but did not consciously set out to lubricate my stories with his learnings. It is fascinating to observe how often the preface to my book and the blurbs are metabolized into “prose” so that the blogger can knock off another book “read.” Granted, reviewers have time pressures and pr materials are cannibalized for that beginning paragraph or so. However, I have had brilliant reviews and some not so brilliant. The ones that are insightful reflect a mind at thought and not a collector looking for a place on his shelf. In short, it is a very imperfect world and I am getting dirtied in the sandlot. So, what is to be done? I just try to find bloggers who can write a decent review and have read decent books and appear to be decent human beings.I grind my teeth when I come across a blogger who spends so little time with my book so that he or she can get on with another; all this can be detected in the review itself. So, I catch myself, maintain few expectations and teach these bad people to behave by writing another story. It is in my art that I define me. To write is to hide or defend oneself against the world. I like that. I will keep at that. And there is no stopping me.
Adieu.
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