It Depends
John Weiss’s piece suggesting reading fiction is superior to nonfiction produced this blog’s title. With such broad categories as biography and history falling in the latter category, I might take issue, though I’ll concede his point that recognizing literature in any form is leagues advanced beyond the desserts of the vacuous babble and preening rage found on social media (or you can reverse those adjectives).
Though it’s hard to criticize a man whose self caricatures are complete with floppy socks and a cup of store-bought jo by his favorite reading chair—smiling with book in hand and nary an iPod in sight.
I’ll agree with Weiss that watching videos of cats on YouTube is a total waste of time and electrons. To be sure, dog videos are an entirely appropriate way to spend time. Deeply moving. Heartwarming even.
So I can get behind Weiss’s larger point about reading. There may come a time when my eyes won’t let me continue what has been a prime directive, taking hold of a book and sliding into its world. Audio books hold faint temptation, and for all the claims that books are passé, I can’t see what replaces them. Imitates, emulates, shadows even, but outright replaces?
Jonathan Franzen offered the opinion that movies and TV have usurped the storytelling role of novels. Only in a manner similar to traditional theater, I say in a huff. Reading is such a singular process, this eye to brain affair with written words as the conveying medium.
First, our stone age ancestors created language out of animal grunts, then, delighted in how it amplified expression when trying out pickup lines on girls, concocted a method, albeit awkward in some instances, to memorialize it in two dimensional space, evidence they had skills at a level higher than the present day. We just use what they invented, and some persons of waning intelligence believe it better to limit things to 240 syllables.
As Henry Morgan, as Colonel Potter, oft would say, “cow pies and buffalo chips!”
Language matters, as do the words, and how they sound in your head—they aren’t some shortcut to a momentary tickle like a Twitter feed but an essential ingredient in the experience.
Weiss sells the benefit of reading fiction by referring to Christine Seifert’s article, The Case for Reading Fiction in the Harvard Business Review—whose main point about reading fiction is that it helps one advance in business—helping even Harvard Business School grads become more humane. Undoubtedly why that standard bearer of all things capitalist accepted her article for publication. To help struggling employees become better at their jobs? That’s it? Seems at best a side benefit. As Heinlein might say, I can’t grok that.
“Summary. When it comes to reading, we may be assuming that reading for knowledge is the best reason to pick up a book. Research, however, suggests that reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction. For example, reading fiction predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations. Reading nonfiction might certainly be valuable for collecting knowledge, it does little to develop EQ, a far more elusive goal.”
From The Case for Reading Fiction by Christine Seifert
Insert Henry Morgan expletive here.
Grasping a better understanding of being planted on the damn planet might could be the larger benefit, though those thick-headed scholars in Cambridge perhaps need the encouragement.
I’ve read only one of Sally Rooney’s novels and forced to read another might turn violent. If Normal People “predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations,” it’s for damn sure I won’t be moving to Ireland. I had no idea such whiny little self-absorbed cretins had overpopulated my family’s homeland.
Rather late in life, in my 40s to be precise, I found myself falling back on a reading syllabus I might have followed in college. Instead, I had spent my days—and nights—in design studio attempting to suss out translating images in my head into drawings for a career in architecture. As Mel Straus used to declare, passing my office, “You think it’s easy?” Thus the long hours. It was a tortoise and hare kind of story.
In many ways, I was better equipped to pursue a doctorate in English lit, or some equally esoteric vagary, but I needed a proper job to feed myself after college. The joke—on me—was how I shied from journalism to make real money. Henley and Frey’s ditty, Frail Grasp on the Big Picture claims “that’s not what’s going on. journalism dead and gone.” So perhaps I dodged one there. My high school guidance counselor promised me architecture was a path to living well. What did she know? Coming from a poor school system in the Old South, I suppose everything is relative.
But through that six and half year college slog, I succeeded at what I’d set out to accomplish, coming away with a Masters of Architecture from one of the country’s top architectural programs at Yale. And it could be argued, if I’d been more ambitious to make money versus becoming the wunderkind designer, my subsequent career might have carried me in a more profitable direction. Wisdom descended not like lightning bolts, but more like fits and starts.
What I didn’t realize at the time was the same kind of absorption grasping all things architectural—take for example the seventeen ‘wallpaper’ symmetries I key-punched [1]in Fortran IV—was leading to where I might have gone—were I to have studied literature. Like ollowing Alice down the rabbit hole.
[1] Key-punching: wherein one used an ugly machine resembling an electric typewriter without the back-space key and no way to correct mistakes while cutting little rectangles into 2 x 6 punch cards. AutoCAD still lay years in the future.
…
After a mediocre shuffle through high school, I found I was more interested in academics than I had once thought. Yet teaching in second-rate schools—where most English majors land—instinctively seemed like a personal dead end. Teaching abstractions to youngsters likely wouldn’t have helped students or teacher. Reading Richard Russo’s Straight Man confirmed all I needed to know about academia.
Coming across Rayner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, reading sections several times because it was heavy on theory, allowed me to better place Modernism in context as one more revival story. The reading I’d begun for entertainment led to a useful tool in grasping the lighter weight Post-Modern style so popular in the 70s and 80s.
My architectural history prof, Dr. Coolege, stopped his lectures at Art Deco, insisting it was too soon to hold a clear opinion on anything more modern, and one never argued with a man who received his first degree in mathematics, then a Masters in chemistry and meandered over to art history for his doctorate.
In college, what time I found for reading entertainment was absorbed by fantasy and science fiction. It was my sister’s fault—she’d packaged and mailed the paperback copy of Lord of the Rings and I barely made it through high school English on account of reading it in class.
At Clemson, the chaplain Father Fisher’s warning, “Don’t let your coursework interfere with your college education” didn’t totally stick. However it wasn’t like my head stayed six inches from the drafting board for the duration; I did find time enough to read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy.
Mostly what I was reading then was fantasy and science fiction—great fiction when you count Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny (an early influence on my writing style), Ursula Le Guin (who Harold Bloom, the literary critic, placed in his Cannon of western literature), J.R.R. Tolkien (who started me on a first novel) and a dozen more. Meant as examples only, not a best of list.
The Strange Friendships of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” is Harold Bloom’s New Yorker article marking Le Guin’s death. Years after I was out in the world helping develop an architectural firm and making a living in the 90s, Bloom became a primary source leading me back to Literature. Being an 80 hour a week workaholic, was I even able to step back into writing? Dunno, as the class clown said.
“The burden of Left Hand is whether Genly Ai can persuade the king of Karhide on the planet Gethen… to join the Ekumen… union of many planets in exchanges of trade and culture. Genly Ai speaks much of the book, but frequently Le Guin moves into third-person narration. Though Ai is a man of good will and adequate intelligence, he can never quite understand the consciousness of the androgynes whom he seeks to win over. Here Le Guin is admirably subtle. She tended to distrust Freud, since her heart and mind were with the Tao, and yet she shows what he meant in observing that, for almost all of us, thought could not be liberated from its sexual past.”
from The Strange Friendships of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Harold Bloom, published 2020 in the New Yorker magazine.
But notice the distinction: I was reading the deepest kind of nonfiction in Bloom’s careful dissection of literature. Simultaneously to reading W.B Yeats, I was reading Bloom on Yeats, while scribbling verse like a mad man—and working at architecture. Bloom’s The Western Cannon became the years-long survey course I regretted never taking in college—even if reluctant to crawl into that small space where, when looking up from whatever I might be doing, I found a world no longer recognizable, a well-known hazard in academia.
To return to the start of this piece, good writing is wherever you might encounter it. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, history, even literary criticism, what matters is how well it’s written, whether an author can persuade with their argument so you feel it worthwhile donating sufficient time to argue about them. Sometimes, it’s just you in bed after midnight, listening to a singular voice offer an image, finding words to light it up, smiling at being so intimate with their world. Le Guin could always convince me.
For weeks recently, I read one essay per night from Christopher Hitchens’s last collection of essays, Arguably Essays. Hitchens came across in person as an arrogant man, imperious in his intellect. His writing, perhaps is as unforgiving, yet it comes with humor and grace and lets me nod off with a smile, occasionally aspiring to slap an emphatic thought of my own on the table.
Essays, like blog pieces, become set in amber in time, yet one hopes they will span over the momentary cracks. In his essay, An Anglosphere Future, Hitchens stumbles over two hopes, one, he believed England had tied itself permanently to Europe and the U.S. and two, that India was a shining example of a multiethnic state. Soothsaying has always been a toss of the coin.
So here’s what I do know: life runs only so long, and getting it down fast on paper—whether a building design or an essay—is a suitably complicated way to pass the remaining days.
“If you haven’t read novels in a while, take your time and don’t be frustrated by poor concentration. That’s just a reflection of all those mindless YouTube videos that degraded your focus.”
from Your Personal Growth Secret Weapon for the New Year by John Weiss
With the exception of YouTube videos about dogs. Now them there are some true works of art.