My literary kung fu has grown weak and undisciplined. Just five years ago, I looked at each new book as a beautiful girl dying to be taken home. Books were to be read straight through. As a matter of personal pride, I read the foreword, the introduction, the text, and the footnotes. I swallowed each singular work whole and let the knowledge digest as a whole cheese pizza digests. The process carried all of the rewards of doing it the hard way.
My training began to lose structure when I stopped reading from a worn xeroxed bibliography known colloquially as "the Canon." The reading got lighter after that. I took in a little contemporary punditry. I read a few histories. I dabbled in biography. And then, I took a nosedive. I discovered technical manuals.
If reading the Canon is like pumping black iron in a brick-walled gym, then reading technical manuals is like walking briskly along the beach with three-pound weights on your ankles. The sense of accomplishment diminishes, but it never disappears. You have to hand it to yourself. The quantity of knowledge absorbed skyrockets. With such an immense inventory of knowledge to peruse, does it really make sense to question the quality of any individual fact? Quantity beguiles ever more as quality fades from the scene.
The next thing you know, you're reading art books. If there is anything more indecent than a literary bibliophile staring a gawk at a miraculous one hundred and fifty line screen image on glorious twelve point semi-gloss topkote, I don't know what it is. As the eye delights in the proportionality and composition of the layout, the mind sips on painting titles and clever critique. It is filthy and wonderful. And the true measure of absorbed information? Art books are read perennially or as the occasion arises. The exhibitionist in the crowd may even open the book for others to ogle.
After such a debauch, no vigor remains. Great author's names become difficult to recall. The great card catalog of the mind starts to suffer a certain spottiness. Titles can be remembered even as their authors are forgotten. Characters from one great novel find their way into new novels and then change their names. Expressions are replaced by impressions. One day, you find yourself struggling to paraphrase the notion so well expressed by the guy who wrote that bull book. And it gets worse.
Your power to discern quality having thus atrophied, you take up life-style periodicals. Don't deny it. You pick them out of a line-up in the check out line and stare at the laser in the Universal Product Code reader to avoid eye contact with the check out girl. You then brown bag it out of the store. At home, the processes of some popular software product make way for the cost, maker, and distributor of an absolutely divine reading chair. You research the competition across multiple issues and read with interest the thoughts of the editor about how classic or enduring some designs seem to be. Needless to say, you buy the reading chair. You also commend yourself for committing scarce financial resources to the pursuit of so erudite a pastime.
From there on in, reading is a distraction from the affairs of everyday life. Perhaps you read the New York Times online or the odd novel. If the story is rentable, the novel sits on the shelf.
Of course, I have conspicuously omitted the most scandalous thief of dedicated reader's souls. It was not an accident. I have more to say and could not, in good conscience, condemn the media through which I reach you today.
These days, I read in parallel. I am currently reading Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism, T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle, Claris Software's Filemaker Pro 6, and a new book I have on Joseph Stella. Between my first day with the Manifesto of Surrealism and today, I have completed a book called The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium, Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company, and the essays and chronology from Surrealist USA. Confusion results.
I can state with certainty that I liked an artist named EPSO from the graffiti book. Steve Martin didn't write a very funny third book, but he did have me worried about the possibility of latent autism showing up in my life. The Surrealist USA essays were mercifully short. "Soluble Fish" in Manifesto of Surrealism was inappropriately arduous for a chapter two.
I can imagine myself arguing that unusual connections might be grasped by reading such an eclectic mix about twenty pages at a time. Well, don't you believe it. When serious books are read straight through, your literary kung fu becomes very powerful. When light reading is undertaken in the intermediary moments of day-to-day life, you find yourself . . . at a loss for words about what to say next.