Don't Read

Audible.com has been running these ads, lately, that read "Don't Read," right next to similarly innane spots for American Apparel and TreeHugger. They implore you to stop that horrifically visual process of looking at words and instead lace up the headphones and listen to your classic works of literature. I can't say it's an ingenious ad campaign, but its certainly the most attention i've given audiobooks since my drive across the country to BurningMan a few years ago, back when Joseph Campbell was a (demi)God. And to be honest, i'm thinking about coopting the phrase as the new headline for my blog; owing to a recent speckling of personalized criticism (emailed and uncommented) directed at many of my posts here, i'd sooner some of my readers take Audible's advice and go get their pseudoaesthetic content from a KCRW podcast.

Not that personal criticism is without its laurels or socioaesthetic history. Everybody who puts crap ideas into the collective mind gets reamed, but perhaps American literature's most notorious example of familial rejection might be Thomas Wolfe, Mr. "You Can't Go Home Again" himself. Critical reception of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel was initially quite strong, both in the north and south. John Earl Bassett wrote in the NYTimes on the event of Wolfe's early death that "four favorable articles in important New York newspapers were instrumental to the success that Look Homeward, Angel did have."

Yet, when he returned to the hometown Asheville that the novel was based upon, reaction to the book was mixed. The Wolfe family accepted the book as a necessary acheivement, yet the townsfolk were less kind, holding a grudge for nearly 7 years against their native son. The characters in the novel are based on real people with the names changed and often times the portraits painted are not flattering. Many in Asheville took the book literally. So much so that for six years the Pack Memorial Library did not have a copy of the book. Not until F. Scott Fitzgerald, after being told the Library did not have a copy, went out and bought two and brought them there himself.

But i'm no Thomas Wolfe, and this is no piece of literature. Blogs are, i suppose, the most humble (and pathetic) version of the paradigm. Despite the vast randomness of the web, the percentage of people likely to read your writing who would be personally offended is at its highest, perhaps even moreso than the highschool literary magazine in which you placed thinly-veiled breakup poems about dragons and maidens. (Not really, so don't ask me for them) The length and breadth of the typical post is usually greater than friends are willing to endure. Best of all, the current form of a blog is a discussion that is at once singular and multiple; the tone is conversational while the form is a monologue. And there is also something to be said for pretty pictures and the trappings of technology enriching your less-than-complete arguments. After all, i can't hyperlink my words in a simple coffeeshop debate.

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"And it was this that awed him--the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time." --Look Homeward, Angel