The Long View

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“Don’t be such an old poop!” Ethel Thayer to Norman Thayer in Mark Rydell’s film, On Golden Pond, based on Ernest Thompson’s play (screenplay by Ernest Thompson).

Well I have become an old poop, perhaps, but the loons are not very welcoming. It is the prerogative of people in mid-life to lament the declension of younger generations (my professors no doubt did the same about us in the early 70s), so I will claim my droit de seniority.

In the continuing debate about the state of reading in the po-mo world (visit my Rescuing Reading Web site), today’s New York Times reports (front page!) “Literacy Debate: Online R U Really Reading?”

It’s an interesting and valuable debate; I’m not enough of an old poop either to blame entirely the digital media for the decline in reading and reading skill (though the National Endowment for the Arts seems inclined to do so) nor to dismiss the value of digital media and the interesting new literary forms, like blogs, that it presents. However, I also know from experience how little complex reading actually occurs with the software device that we call, for good reason, a Web “browser” and how ill-equipped are students (and others ) to read Web sites critically (just send them to the MartinLutherKing.org Web site to see if they can figure it out).

However, this caught my eye. The article begins:

Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Like most journalism today, you’ve got to snag the reader with a human interest hook. Ponderous assertions, oracular prophecies, and survey data won’t cut it. So we follow the fortunes of young, educationally dilatory Nadia and her diligent mother (who, we learn later in the article, has worked quite hard at encouraging and subsidizing her daughter’s reading). Then later in the article, we come to this:

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.

Oh. My. God.

Nadia, it seems wants to be a writer without wanting to read in order to become one.

Sad. Thompson’s play about intergenerational conflict and aging was written when he was in his late twenties; it is witty and wise and literate. It gives evidence of being written by a well-read writer. It satirizes shallowness and callowness.

Now, I know that many young people fantasize careers without understanding what is entailed in preparing for them. Eons ago I had a beach vacation fling with a college student named Ira who was studying semiotics at Brown University. He admitted he didn’t know what semiotics was but thought it had something to do with movies. I was reading Umberto Eco at the time, but I didn’t attempt to educate Ira since I was more interested in other slippery signifiers.

Digital media are not the problem. A culture of distraction and banality is the problem. Elsewhere in this issue of the Times (in Book Review, Farhad Manjoo’s review of Rob Walker’s new book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are–yes, one newspaper of record still produces a weekly book magazine), there appears an article on “murketing,” the subtle indirect marketing by corporate America to “hip” audiences who reject slick overt “marketing.” Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, it seems, has discovered that they could boost their disastrously declining sales (as a cheap, tasteless, working-class beer) by sponsoring “outsider” events (like adult skateboard exhibitions–and what kind of an “adult” skateboards?) without pushing their marketing logo. PBR spends millions on this venture without appearing to spend millions (which would look like they were trying too hard and therefore not “hip”), so hipsters think they’re cool and buy the beer. As a result, PBR has stopped making beer (they license the production of beer under their label to Miller, who apparently still makes something that they call “beer”), focusing entirely instead on marketing (that doesn’t look like marketing). Like little Nadia, they want to sell it without going to the trouble of making it.

And on the last page of the New York Times Education Life section, Adam Van Doren describes discovering the grade rosters of his grandfather, Columbia University literature prof and poet, Mark Van Doren, among whose students were the real hipsters like Jack Kerouac (an A student), Thomas Merton, and Allen Ginsberg. They read books.

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