MAGISTERIAL
Glib even has a regular spot on the Times op-ed page in the persona of Maureen Dowd. If you don't subscribe to Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and People, and watch the E-channel at least six hours a day with occasional clicks over to CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and MTV, and go see three new movies every week, and have six gigabytes of MP3 files on your hard-disk, it's impossible to make sense of Dowd's torrent of supposedly hip media references, metaphors, and similes (smirks by any other name...). Even your present media friend, yes, Magellan's Log is guilty of this kind of writing. Give us a short, timely topic and if we don't wring the last drop of irony out of it, we'll do a penance of 10 Lettermans and 5 Bill Mahers. Performed well, there's nothing wrong with glib. It's smooth, slick, and goes down easy, like a perfect morsel of sushi. Fast words for an age of fast food. Disposable writing for an age of disposable careers. Is it possible that we're missing something, that our skillful, mildly funny glibness is like haute couture? You wear it once, then it goes into a museum, where a hundred years from now people will marvel at the quaint irrelevance of it all? How can it be bad for us, or wrong, or detrimental? We're surrounded by it: print, movies, TV, radio, music, advertising. Everywhere we go, there it is: MESSAGE, followed by
nudge-nudge, wink-wink, Is this, as someone said, all there is, word-wise? Hint: Go to your nearest library (you remember libraries? the buildings with lots of books that aren't for sale, not even on-line?). Check out any book by Saul Bellow. Take it home. Read it (yes, it is possible to read non-pixel words; it's like you never forget how to ride a bicycle; just try and it'll come back to you). Quaint, you say, now you're really talking quaint. Saul Bellow? In a book? Old guy. Old medium. Old story. Why bother? Because, my friend, I did that last week, I who am as immersed in glib as any editor. Checked out Herzog. Read it. My first thought, on page 1? "How easily we forget..." Forget what? you say. That there are writers, and there are writers. Lesser writers, and magisterial writers. That words have power, lesser, smirky power in the keyboards and mouths of lesser smirky performers, magisterial power in the keyboards of magisterial writers. With words, Bellow is magisterial. There are are of course others. Those people you slept through or avoided altogether in college. Writers who (forgive me, but the truth, in an age of glib, comes out sounding absurdly melodramatic) paid a very high price in suffering, loneliness, and doubt to get certain words on paper in a certain order. You want quaint? Try these for "quaint": Emily Dickinson. Poe. Not quaint enough? How about J. Austen? H. Fielding? Oh, you say, I get it, he's talking about "great" books. Jeez. Seeing the movie version of Gone with the Wind was boring enough. Now he wants me to read it. Nope. I personally don't care what you read (though, as editor, I of course hope you continue to read Magellan's Log-- yes, we've done our share of glib, but we've tried to do a fair amount of non-glib as well; check the "Literature" and "Religion" indexes in our Site Map). I'm just here to remind you that there's more to the life of the mind, to the life of YOUR mind than MTV, WWF, WB, and the shallow, stagnant tidal pools that fill the Times best-seller list, and the comic book pictures that move on the screens of your local cineplex. Big words, magisterial words with the power. To. Move. Your. Soul. They're not going away. They're ready for you when (if ever) you're ready for them. End of sermonette. 2 Weeks Later: Full Disclosure And I stopped reading. Stepping into Bellow's magically evoked mid-century world was like walking into a familiar hurricane: America in the 1940s and 1950s was America at the end of its European tether. America the cultural adolescent still unable to break free of its parent. I stopped reading because I started getting depressed by the powerful memories of that repressed and repressive era. Eisenhower. McCarthy. CinemaScope. Hydramatic. Colgate. Betty Furness. Bennett Cerf. Feeling guilt, I rushed to the bookstore. Quick, get another Bellow: Humboldt's Gift. Read, read, read. Depressed, depressed, depressed. Beware the power of words. Though they are rare, great and grand story-tellers we shall always have with us. Their job is not just to remember but to remember with conviction. The best, from Homer on, do it so well that they can suck you right into their lost worlds. The final moral of the sermonette then is: When you finally tire of trivial words, choose masterpieces but always remember that the people behind the words are powerful magicians. When you pick up one of their books, whether it is Bellow or Dickens or Austen, you are selecting a spell. Caution is advised. END Click on the title to to get more info from amazon.com:
|
