OLEAN -- Time for another book review, masquerading as a column. Actually, reviews of three books -- albeit two of them by the same author -- and just in time for Christmas giving, too.
I'm recommending books for giving this holiday season because my college students have taught me one immutable thing in my rookie semester: Television will turn your brain to blubber, just as sure as sunrise. You know that public service TV advertisement that shows an egg frying sunny side up? And the tagline reads "This Is Your Brain on Drugs"? Well, the lesson caption should read "This Is Your Brain on TV." Even the Internet isn't as bad. At least you can capture a thought and hold it on your computer screen for awhile when you're surfing the Web. Not TV. Something of interest flashes before your eyes, and before you can even decide if you want to retain it or not, the ephemera is gone, unrecoverable from that Vast Wasteland in the beyond where factoids go to die.
This is not a screed about execrable TV content, mind you. That's fit subject for another column, or book. If I see one more network promotion telling me one more unfunny moron blurting one more unfunny line to an unfunny sitcom partner -- to the accompaniment of deafening fake laughter and whooping soundtrack hilarity -- is "Must-See TV," then I will barf until my ankle bones come up. Hey, must see diiiisscchh! -- as they say in Manhattan. Modern television is mostly moldy mind candy, and the more you consume, the fatter your head grows.
OK, OK, so this WAS a screed about programming. Back to business and the beauty of books. The dual strengths of books -- both as entertainment and as learning device -- are their portability and fragmentary permanence. That is to say, once you seize a thought or bit of information, no matter how tiny or peripheral, you can go back to it with a book -- as many times as you want, and for as long as you want. That's the way most of us memorize things. You see something in your reading that piques your interest, something that amazes you or that you want to retain. Maybe it's funny. Maybe it's profound. Maybe it's usable in your profession or personal life. You go back and read it over again. Could that really be? I must tell so-and-so. You memorize it.
Not so with TV. Student addiction to TV is one reason why you see so many history professors making money reprinting the ludicrous essay mistakes and malapropisms of their test-takers. It's one reason you see so many college dumbos telling Jay Leno in his late night comic bits that World War II came before World War I. It didn't take me long to notice in my first semester teaching: Students who read books regularly are better students.
That doesn't mean automatically that they'll be more successful in life -- but they've got a better shot at it. Pretty soon they're retaining a high percentage of things they read. Sure, some brains are more impressed with visual images, but for most students, only after repeated viewings not easy to access again. With a book or magazine -- the printed word -- the material is at hand for repeated hammering into the head. Pretty soon the brain tracks are laid down.
It happened to me just last week. Reading a magazine, "The New Yorker," I learned that Oklahoma City bomber and regional native Timothy McVeigh could quote from memory various writings of acrimonious 20th-century journalist and critic H.L. Mencken. You may think that disproves my point -- a mass murderer who read books? Irrelevant.
No, my point is, had I seen that on television, I'd be more likely to think I dreamed it, or overheard an erroneous quote, or an irretrievable figment of someone's mistaken anecdote. I went back to the magazine. There it was.
So let's use that as segue into the book suggestions. The McVeigh tidbit was in a cogent review of the first recommended work: "The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken," by Terry Teachout (Harper Collins, $29.95). Mencken did most of his writing in the first half of the last century. His appeal to McVeigh may explain a lot about the latter's actions. Mencken, a German-American who thought highly of Kaiser Wilhelm, was tremendously influential, notably anti-Semitic, and a bit fascistic in his approach to American thought and American behavior, but oh, could he write. He took on everybody.
Here he is on lightweight President Warren G. Harding's questionable and unimaginative use of the English language: "It reminds me of a string of wet sponges. It reminds me of tattered washing on the line. It reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh."
Teachout, in readable detail, describes Mencken's low opinion of the American tendency to follow almost any charismatic rabble-rouser as long as the volume is loud enough and the message repetitive. Mencken called this societal stratus "Boobus americanus" and agitated it endlessly. His definition of puritanical thought, which he hated, has lived beyond him: "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Some think Mencken invented modern criticism. Ask a college student today who he was. Blank stares.
Another great gift for the student on your list: "Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds," by Harold Bloom (Warner Books, $35.95). Bloom, a Yale University professor and probably the best modern literary critic, should have included himself in this work. He is fearless and enlightening. I quoted him last fall in this space as providing a useful phrase in dealing with dangerous intransigence and obstinacy of thought.
Bloom calls those who display such stubbornness -- especially in academe -- "a rabblement of lemmings." In this thick tome (814 pages), Bloom explains in gorgeous, lucid rhetoric why poetry and literature are so vital to us -- not only in preserving the best elements of culture, but in pumping a continual flow of knowledge and wisdom through society: "Time, which destroys us, reduces what is not genius to rubbish." See if you can come up with profundity like that by watching someone gobble river leeches on "Survivor."
Shakespeare, writes Bloom, "at the least changed our ways of presenting human nature." John Milton, the genius blind poet who produced "Paradise Lost," wrote -- believes Bloom -- "an epic of baroque splendor" that is best read by the beginner "as gorgeous science fiction," despite its publication in 1667.
Freud, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Proust, Swift, Melville, Hemingway, Twain, Whitman -- all are in here. Bloom resurrects some who are less known. For instance, he writes of fading-from-memory and "most unfashionable" poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. Bloom thinks the anti-religious 19th-century Englishman, who possessed a "genius of audacity," might possibly come back to popularity "as we enter more deeply into the twenty-first century, an era in which the wars of religion seem fated to return."
Bloom on Hemingway: "A minor novelist with a major style, whose lyric intensity can replace drama."
On Walt Whitman: "The genius of the shores of North America, the dispossessed found a voice in him."
You get the picture. This prodigious work, if your gift recipient actually reads it cover to cover, is worth a semester's Ivy League tuition in knowledge.
The third recommendation is also by Harold Bloom: "How to Read and Why," (Simon & Schuster, $10.50 in paperback). This slim volume tells you, in language far better than the meager column's, why diving into the written word is so necessary for modern intellectual survival: "It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves."
We must read, asserts Bloom, "in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests."
Bloom stresses the joy of reading, and he has, in here, a nice shot at academia: "The way we read now partly depends upon our distance, inner or outer, from the universities, where reading is scarcely taught as a pleasure, in any of the deeper senses of the aesthetics of pleasure." And, he warns, do not read just to impress others: "The mind should be kept at home until its primal ignorance has been purged."
Today's universities, writes Bloom, "disdain to fulfill" a yearning by those seeking knowledge for study of literature. Don't despair, he advises young people: "You need not fear that the freedom of your development as a reader is selfish, because if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors as a reader will confirm your illumination to others."
Hot damn. I'm going to write all this stuff on the blackboard, soon as I get back in the classroom.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 10 2002 |