The drawback to the quasi-blogging-break I’ve been on this past month (which is almost over — for real this time!) is that I’m still thinking about things to post about, even when I’m not actually posting about them. So some of the topics I’ve been mulling are probably going to sound a tad stale when I finally do get around to sitting down and writing about them. But I figure that people don’t come here for up-to-the-moment news and commentary so much as for postacademic angst, occasional music commentary, random poems, and pirate costume ideas. So, onward to the by now slightly old topic I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks. Or backward. Or something like that.
I’d heard about the NEA’s much-commented-on "Reading at Risk" study, which claims that "literary reading" is on the decline in America — "literary" referring to fiction, poetry, and plays but not nonfiction. Bibliophile though I am, this news didn’t exactly make me race out of the house shouting "Get ready! Get rrready! The end of the world is coming!" like James Thurber’s Get-Ready Man. For one thing, part of me wonders when there hasn’t been a strong anti-reading undercurrent in American culture. When I was growing up, well-meaning adults would tell me that it was a terrible shame I wanted to sit inside reading books when I could be outside playing in the sun. (Fortunately my very bookish family backed me up.) So the news of a sudden decline in serious reading seems, to my eyes, a little bit overhyped.
But what got my attention was when Michael Dirda of the Washington Post wrote a rather handwringing editorial, placing the blame for the perceived decline in literary reading partly on publishers and partly on electronic media (here portrayed as a big monolithic entity, in which the internet is no different from your TV):
Why persist with Plutarch or George Eliot or Beckett or William Gaddis when you can drop into a chat room or gaze at digitized lovelies or go to still another movie? Instead of reading Toqueville or Henry Adams, we just check out the latest blogs. We turn toward the bright and shiny, the meretricious tinsel, the strings of eye-catching beads for which we exchange our intellectual birthright as for a mess of pottage.
Well, that’s a depressing indictment of our national lack of literacy. Or at least it would be if Dirda weren’t operating under the assumption that "the Web [is] largely an invention of the devil."
I love print media as much as anyone. But who says that reading on the web is incompatible with print-media reading? Why posit blogs as antithetical to reading? What about blogs like Bookslut? What about the formidably literate people at Crooked Timber, where Henry Farrell posted a reply to Dirda’s editorial, making a lot of the same points I would make — particularly the point that "thanks to the Internet, there has never been a better time to find good conversation about books." Some of the most technologically-savvy people I know read tons of stuff online and, at the same time, devour hefty eighteenth-century novels, classical Roman poetry, and serious nonfiction (a category that the NEA’s report doesn’t deem "literary" — which, as some have pointed out, is kind of odd when you think about it).
Moreover (and this is really my point, I think), who says that what we do when we look at what’s on the web isn’t reading? Why do people assume that "digital media" cancels out "reading"? While I was thinking about all this, I started reading an article by Peter Stallybrass of the University of Pennsylvania on early book navigation and the differences between reading a scroll and reading a codex. This is how it begins:
Contemporary pronouncements about the death of the book are puzzling, for in many ways, it is the book form — the combination of the ability to scroll with the capacity for random access, enabling you to leap from place to place — that has provided the model which these other cultural technologies now seek to emulate. … If cultural pessimists claim that no one reads anymore, perhaps they mean that it’s becoming rarer for people to submit themselves to the scroll function of books. Surfing on TV works against the unwinding of a film scroll and hypertext works against a continuous reading of the Canterbury Tales. But that has nothing to do with the death of the book. (Peter Stallybrass, "Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible," in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002], 42.)
Exactly. I don’t really agree with the part about computers emulating books, but I still want to flourish that paragraph in the face of anyone who thinks that the web is antithetical to the act of reading. And now I have to close this post and go pack; I’m off to Bryn Mawr, PA, this weekend for the beginning of a two-week long seminar for all the CLIR postdoctoral fellows. If I have any spare time, I’m going to do two things: catch up on blogging and finally read Moby-Dick.* Make of that what you will, prophets of doom.
* Which I’m reading (speaking of sources of good conversation about books) at the recommendation of a fellow blogger months and months ago — thanks, Mike!
