Writes the novelist Will Self at Literary Hub.
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March 2, 2018
"Nowadays, millions of people—at least notionally—are educated to graduate levels, and one would’ve expected this to inculcate them with a positive zest for challenging prose..."
"... but this doesn’t seem to be the case. When I get going in this vein, my 16-year-old son says: 'Face it, Dad, you’re just an old man shaking your fist at the cloud.'* Yet I don’t regard myself as opposed to the new media technologies in any way at all—nor do I view them as 'bad,' let alone as cultural panopathogens.** I’ve no doubt that human intelligence will continue to be pretty much the same as it has heretofore—but the particular form of intelligence associated with book-learning (and all that this entails) is undoubtedly on the wane, with the 'extended mind' of the smart phone increasingly replacing our own memories, and the hive-mindedness of the web usurping our notions of the canonical.... [T]he most salient features of the contemporary world are its relentlessness and its atemporality—the web bundles up everything into a permanent Now... Modish neuroscientists do such things as put people in brain-scanners while they’re actually reading—then marvel (as we should too), at how many areas of the cortex are involved in turning those enigmatic black marks into the stuff of our imagination and experience. But some texts are clearly going to be a better jungle gym for the mind than others—and just as you never put on much muscle mass with a limp-wristed workout, so no one ever got smart by reading… Dan Brown."
Writes the novelist Will Self at Literary Hub.
_________________________
* The boy knows his memes. See Know Your Meme. Requisite image:
** New word alert.
Writes the novelist Will Self at Literary Hub.
_________________________
* The boy knows his memes. See Know Your Meme. Requisite image:
** New word alert.
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59 comments:
Work on Derrida.
I've read about 5 shelf feet of him.
2/01/2002 James Ostrowski
"What is the source of these pathogens? The government or state, if you will. Government is bad for your health! It is a virtual panopathogen."
with the 'extended mind' of the smart phone increasingly replacing our own memories,
A couple of weeks ago I read Plato, (IIRC, or some equivalent B.C. guy), complaining that writing would replace memory.
and just as you never put on much muscle mass with a limp-wristed workout, so no one ever got smart by reading
The plaintive cry of a blank-slatist.
Read Plato's Pharmakon, in Derrida's Dissemination. Writing is a drug.
Panopathogens. I like it.
This essay makes him sound like a goofball though.
Nowadays, millions of people—at least notionally—are educated to graduate levels, and one would’ve expected this to inculcate them with a positive zest for challenging prose...but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
That's because most people who are educated to graduate levels are so educated for one of two reasons:
1) They need the graduate level knowledge to succeed in their careers. These are usually business or technology people. They have a zest for challenging ideas, but want the ideas explained as clearly and concisely as possible.
2) They need the graduate level certification to succeed in their careers. They are often government employees. They may or may not care about the content, as long as they can get the degree.
In recent years a find myself reading fewer regular books (novels, biographies, and the like) but reading far more in general. Daily I read a crazy amount of news articles and blogs. I also read loads of stuff on Wikipedia. I even regularly attempt reading stuff on arXiv.org.
I don't think foregoing books in favor of stuff on the internet is making me less knowledgeable or offering me insufficient challenges. I mean, a read plenty of challenging stuff I think. I don't feel like I'm somehow missing out on something.
Plato and So-crates:
"[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
Nonapod said...
I even regularly attempt reading stuff on arXiv.org.
I got a free(!) copy of Feynman's "QED" at the library and it's just been sitting there for months. 40 years ago they'd have had to pry me away from it.
And here I am reading a pop-culture blog. Sigh.
Package tracking novelty
Carrier Delay - Airplane Mechanical
Us, US US
This essay makes him sound like a goofball though
...who likes to show off with big words. I'm reminded of PhDs who have that fact added on in their .sig files. Insecure much?
Sincerely,
MadisonMan, PhD
Seeing more and more typos and grammatical errors in web articles. Ugh.
FleetUSA said...
Seeing more and more typos and grammatical errors in web articles. Ugh.
Somebody needs a Linguo.
No one ever got smart by reading Will Self either. I would bet a lot of money that 'challenging prose' means author used thesaurus to make his banal observations sound more learned than they are. Unless I am misreading, Self is fan of book learning which is worst way to learn new knowledge.
"Nowadays, millions of people—at least notionally—are educated to graduate levels..."
Do you know how much gas it takes to prepare a 737 for a long flight? If you put that much gas in your car, would it then be able to fly?
Books were once revered and sought after. Today there is so much junk competing for time and brain space that young people don't seem interested in reading. Sad.
"The News" seems to be a huge complicated TV drama which at intervals we can intervene in, which we can change or affect at election time and also possibly by Twitter campaigns or by boycotts. In some way it is related to changes going on in the world so that by watching it we gain an understanding of changing times. We learn the new words, the new state of countries like Germany and China, and we are learning slowly about plots and conspiracies in the past which we ourselves were unaware of, which we ourselves were deceived by. The central decisive action was the election of Trump and the central plot is the effort to overthrow that election and countering efforts to sustain Trump and carry out the mandate of the election. Everything gets drawn in to that central battle - at least for people in this country. Not only is it more interesting than many books it is a unique historical event and as such it affects the way we read other history - yet it isn't over so we can't exactly read other history with this event in mind. For instance, the American Revolution gave us democratic government and a Bill of Rights. But will we lose them over the next few years? That would completely alter how we read about the past. And almost this entire struggle is being carried out through new digital media and their consequences and because of new digital media. This online TV drama "The News", how social media enter history, whatever that comes to mean. Anyhow this is how it all affects me.
But I don't think this means the end of books. Certain books such as An Inconvenient Truth or Orientalism or The Ultimate Resource or the Road to Serfdom or Rules for Radicals or Humanae Vitae or by Derrida almost completely predict what the either side will say on any given issue. Events are just seen as examples of what so-and-so was talking about. New books just update these foundational books. And people are "remembering" these books when they check facts on Google to where the facts fit in. The number of these books is not huge. And if universities taught these books, showed their foundations and consequences, and linked them with the past - the Bible, Marx, the Constitution - the humanities would not seem so irrelevant. And I believe this will happen - we are just living in exciting times and building new foundations. We are working out a new connection with the Constitution and history will tell others what we did, what we are doing right now, knowing and not knowing what it is we are doing. And Trump will not fall but rather the left will. That's why they are furious - they feel their grip sliding on their existing dominant position achieved by lies and corruption and not delivering on its promises.
"Books were once revered and sought after. Today there is so much junk competing for time and brain space that young people don't seem interested in reading. Sad."
I was just thinking to myself last night about the throngs of people that crowded the five story (four upper levels and a basement) Barnes and Noble at 66th St. and Broadway in NYC on late Friday nights! I would walk up there after my Friday evening drawing class at the Art Students League (on West 57th St.). Class let out at 9:30 and I would get to B & N about 9:45 or so and I would often browse for up to 90 minutes. (The store was open to midnight).
This was Friday night in Manhattan, and the book store was packed with people on every floor!
How quickly this has changed with the advent of iPhones, iPads, the Nook, the Kindle, and the like.
That Barnes and Noble is now a Century 21 department store--alas! The remaining B & Ns in Manhattan are never as crowded at any time of day as they were those late Friday nights, and the one in Tribeca, near where I work, is always more empty than not.
Such a tragedy.
(At least multi-story Strand Bookstore at 12th and Broadway is always packed!)
At my age, I care not about being an old man shaking my fist at the clouds, nor do I care about what form of intelligence exists for humans in the future. I am focused on being happy now, with the health I have and the love I share.
I will annoy my children because that is fun, but for society as a whole, it can live in its own detritus.
I love difficult novels, however, I am under no delusion that either of my kids will ever read one. I don’t even bother shaking my fist at a cloud.
No one ever got smart by reading Will Self either. I would bet a lot of money that ‘challenging prose' means author used thesaurus to make his banal observations sound more learned than they are.
LOL! Sure. I have never read Will Self, and this doesn’t seem like a good hook to start, but you know what? Some people who have read a lot of books in the past, for pleasure and study, know a lot of words without using a thesaurus. A lot of times these words express ideas with an astonishing economy.
"Nowadays, millions of people—at least notionally—are educated to graduate levels, and one would’ve expected this to inculcate them with a positive zest for challenging prose..."
""Nowadays, millions of people—at least notionally—are credentialed to graduate levels,..."
As Ben Rhodes said about all the White House Press Corps, they are young, stupid and don't know anything. But every one of them has an "advanced" "journalism" degree from an "elite" institution.
Get Smart was written by Mel Brooks, not Dan Brown. I am reading The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne, the Eighteenth Century incarnation of Mel Brooks.
I am reading The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
LOVE that book! Uncle Toby is one of my all-time favorite characters.
"Uncle Toby is one of my all-time favorite characters." You ain't just whistling Dixie.
Actually, that idea of difficult-to-read books as a workout to develop your brain is utterly banal. The comparison to muscles worked out at the gym is about the most obvious analogy, and it's not seriously bolstered by a passing reference to scientific research. Also, Self makes it clear that he's hot to sell his books, so his opinion is openly larded with self-interest -- or, in his case, Self-interest, if I may annoy you with the most obvious word play I've groped for all year.
Fiction should be extremely rewarding to the reader or there's no point putting up with it at all.
If you want to develop the muscle of your brain – muscle-headed used to be an insult — you can take on any of a great number of challenges. For example, at night, when I feel like I might read something serious, I often do an old Friday or Saturday crossword puzzle from the NYT archive. I think that's better for my brain than getting involved in a fictional story about characters who always have to be given problems (you have to care about them, and then they must be tortured across a story arc).
"I would bet a lot of money that ‘challenging prose' means author used thesaurus to make his banal observations sound more learned than they are." Why would you bet a lot of money on that? Have you read Mr. Self?
" I would bet a lot of money that ‘challenging prose' means author used thesaurus to make his banal observations sound more learned than they are." Why do you think that? Have you read Mr. Self?
My youngest daughter is 21. She grew up reading very few books outside of school. she's very bright--a bio chem major and honors student. But her vocabulary has suffered from growing up on Facebook and text messages. I, on the other hand, have a good vocabulary, even though i didn't read highbrow books when i was growing up; more like the Hardy Boys and comic books. but i notice that my vocabulary is orders of magnitude better than my daughter's (hope she doesn't read this blog)
...no one ever got smart by reading… Dan Brown
I will have to start reading Will Self novels.
I think that’s better for my brain than getting involved in a fictional story about characters who always have to be given problems (you have to care about them, and then they must be tortured across a story arc).
That is very true. It’s the stuff that goes on while the story holds your attention that is often the best part of a novel. Still, creating situations in order to comment on them, hmmm...
Tristam Shandy
Tried to read it once. Eesh. (Mom had it -- she was an English Major back when that was a pre-Mrs degree)
Best part about Tristam Shandy: It's the book Harriet Vane is reading when she falls asleep on the beach, after lunching, in Have his Carcase. One surmises that Dorothy L. Sayers was also unenthused about the book.
Studying Anglo-Saxon literature was a standard requirement in 19th Century American universites, often for all students. Students were
often required to take an entire course in Anglo-Saxon. The main rationale was that the brain need to be exercised like a muscle. It was
supposedly like lifting weights with your brain.
Imagine modern students dealing with such a requirement.
In 19th Century American universities, students were often required to complete a whole course in Anglo-Saxon language and literature.
The rationale for this was that it would provide exercise for the brain which was likened to a muscle. It would be like lifting weights with the brain.
Imagine modern students dealing with such a requirement.
If I want to give my brain a workout, I might memorize a poem. But only one that I enjoy. "Whan that Aprille with his showres soote..." Fiction is for wit, not wisdom.
Blogger rhhardin said...
"Work on Derrida.
I've read about 5 shelf feet of him."
I tried to crack Grammatology but couldn't get very far. It reminded me of, and looked like it might have been written on acid. On the other hand I've read five and a half feet of Updike, some of them twice, and enjoyed (most of them) very much.
"Tristam Shandy"
Tristram Shandy
Tristram Shandy
Yes.
If you want to develop the muscle of your brain, you don't have to read: https://goo.gl/416HA4 Still, it helps to be young and to have a good memory. I would have killed for stuff like that when I growing up.
I'm amazed at, and depressed by, the number of highly intelligent young Ivy grads today, many with iq's and verbal aptitudes much higher than mine, who think Lord of the Rings is great literature. In another generation not only War and Peace but Bob Dylan will be largely forgotten.
Fiction is entertainment. Some people are entertained by convoluted prose (I have a fondness for Lovecraft myself), and some people aren't. And that's fine. I do think there are works of great literary genius, the sort of works that make up a sort of middlebrow "high" culture we can teach to students and that ordinary people can study as a means of improving themselves. You know -- Shakespeare, Tennyson, that sort of thing. But I don't think that self-consciously literary works -- or self-consciously "difficult" works -- ought to have much standing in that canon. Dickens gets those leather-bound volumes from the Book of the Month Club today, and he wrote weekly serials. Soap operas for the masses.
Tennyson was popular. And accessible.
We memorized "Charge of the Light Brigade" in the third grade.
True re Dickens - he was indeed popular. He got wealthy writing serials, and bestsellers for the middlebrow market. At a later time he would have been in the drug store book racks, had the public capacity remained at the same level.
I asked about whether Dickens was on the menu, when my daughter was entering an "advanced" high school program. No dice. Too hard.
Imagine that, what passed for pop lit in the day.
@Robert Cook -- I make that mistake all the time, so be prepared when this book comes up again :)
If I say it, I leave out the second 'r' too -- much easier.
Dickens was most certainly on the menu when I was in high school--maybe even junior high. We read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. I read the rest on my own.
Blogger Robert Cook said...
(At least multi-story Strand Bookstore at 12th and Broadway is always packed!)
Yeah, wasn't that a store!
I was in NYC for a tradeshow in 1990 and went down there one evening just because I'd heard so much about it. I didn't plan on buying anything in particular but probably would have bought a book or two.
Then I found a complete, uniformly bound, set of Nevil Shute. 23 novels and his autobiography. Some ridiculous price, maybe $4-5 each. Used of course.
I immediately bought all of them.
Then had to to get them back to my hotel at Columbus Circle on the subway. It was a struggle but worth it. (Nevil Shute is one of my 2-3 favorite authors)
Will Self would probably not consider him "challenging" but Will Self can go fuck himself. Life is too short to read uninteresting books just to show off to highbrows.
OTOH, on someone here's recommendation I do have Bayard cued up in my Kindle reading pile so I can at least pretend I've read these "challenging" authors without actually having to waste time doing so. (I was tempted to go all meta and pretend I had read Bayard already but after reflection, no.)
John Henry
Blogger mockturtle said...
Dickens was most certainly on the menu when I was in high school--maybe even junior high. We read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. I read the rest on my own.
I was a voracious reader before and through HS and continue today. But HS ruined many authors for me. We read Heart of Darkness and English class just sucked all the life out of it. About 15 years later I discovered him by accident and have read most of his sea tales over and over again. I have a collected works on my phone that I dip into frequently. Never cared much for his writing on land though. OK, but doesn't move me.
Ditto Dickens. School killed him for me, found him later and have read a lot of him, much more than once. I've even read Bleak House. Twice!
Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 never did much for me but I found him later and found that he wrote a lot of other and better stuff. Another author I read over and over and over.
Ditto Shute. On the Beach was OK but I thought that was all he wrote. Then I discovered A Town Like Alice. I bet I've read that 25 times at least. Multiple times on most of his other books as well. Not only a great author but a fascinating engineer and entrepreneur.
I still don't understand how anyone could read Willie the Shake, though I do like seeing his plays performed.
High schools should be forbidden from teaching literature.
John Henry
Blogger Luke Lea said...
In another generation not only War and Peace but Bob Dylan will be largely forgotten.
I got traumatized by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in HS and college. I would never have thought of reading War and Peace. Then last year I read a history of Napolean's invasion of Russia. That led me to watch the 1970's BBC miniseries of War and Peace. 20 parts, available on YouTube. Excellent. Anthony Hopkins as Bezhukov.
That led me to wonder what the book would be like so I downloaded it to my Kindle. It is remarkably readable. About 75% is anyway. I keep running into 40-50 page stretches that are like trudging through a desert. Barefoot. With no food and water. I got about halfway through and keep meaning to get back to it. I will finish it one day. Really.
John Henry
Nabakov's essay, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense", should be read by people who want a reason to take literature seriously. Nabakov was the DFW of the 1950s and 1960s.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/24008084/The-Art-of-Literature-and-Commonsense
with the 'extended mind' of the smart phone increasingly replacing our own memories,
I was in my second semester of freshman year at college when our dorm first got a high speed connection.
I can distinctly remember the debates/disagreements my roommate and I had changing, qualitatively, when we could easily look up information/facts.
It would be foolish to say that qualitative change is entirely bad (we can all "know" so much more, instantly, now) but it is different.
Anyway it's not a mathematical equation where more facts = better judgement, nor more info magically yields wisdom. You still have to THINK! Rational thought and empiricism as concepts are out of favor, of course, but since we all have wikipedia we should consider ourselves super smart. It doesn't exactly work like that.
Actually, that idea of difficult-to-read books as a workout to develop your brain is utterly banal.
Maybe they are just entertaining. Like when DFW has his punter character in Infinite Jest refer to his teammates as “10 factota” dedicated to protecting him. I laughed out loud. I laughed out loud a lot when I read Catch-22 in HS too, in study halls. It wasn’t assigned. Still, I think Cervantes pretty well covered the subject of the folly of taking literature too seriously and structuring your life around it.
One nice thing about smartphones is that they open up old literature which is heavily larded with now obscure classical references. I might even attempt The Iliad again.
Maybe the whole notion of higher liberal arts education for the masses should be questioned. In addition to the GI Bill for WWII veterans, the real growth of higher education was fueled by private companies that dropped in-house training for new employees in the 1960s. The companies feared an inability to prove their in-house programs were not racially biased. So they out-sourced credentialing to the universities. Those who got that education, the Baby Boomers and those after them, were perfectly comfortable trashing the prior traditions in teaching the liberal arts. Everything had to be "relevant". Those masses destroyed liberal arts education, along with the help of educators who wanted higher enrollments, higher salaries, etc.
Anyway it's not a mathematical equation where more facts = better judgement, nor more info magically yields wisdom. You still have to THINK!
Literature is chock full of hypotheticals to think about and discuss. Yes it’s a workout. Plus it’s a good way to study the techniques of manipulation that are the writer’s stock and trade, but which political types use on us all the time.
no one ever got smart by reading… Dan Brown
That cracks me up because Brown was a guy whose claim to fame was that his book, The Da Vinci Code, was based on factual truth. It's all true! It's all true! And yet he did so little research he somehow missed that the painter's actual name was Leonardo. That's why he signed his paintings "Leonardo." Da Vinci was the region he was from. So to screw up your art history so badly that your title alone is enough to tell people that you have no idea what you're talking about is kind of remarkable. I mean, the kids reading about the teenage mutant ninja turtles know more truth about Leonardo that readers of Dan Brown.
Knowledge is acquired. Intelligence is inborn.
@AA, he should call his biggest fans the Self-Interested. -willie
Ditto Dickens. School killed him for me, found him later and have read a lot of him, much more than once. I've even read Bleak House. Twice!"
I've only read two by Dickens: GREAT EXPECTATIONS and HARD TIMES.
GE was good, but HT is a masterpiece! Thomas Gradgrind was a neo-liberal before the term existed.
"Some people are entertained by convoluted prose (I have a fondness for Lovecraft myself), and some people aren't."
I enjoy Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian writer. His prose is always challenging, but hypnotic once one gets into it.
Cookie: His best is probably David Copperfield. The characters Mr. Micawber and Uriah Heep, alone, make it a worthwhile read.
Saint Croix,
Yes. Leonardo da Vinci has "da Vinci" as a surname the way Lawrence of Arabia has "of Arabia" as a surname. "The Of Arabia Code"? I think not.
Though, OK, we musicologists can be just as bad. "Palestrina" is Pierluigi da Palestrina, but no one actually calls him Pierluigi.
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