Chapter 2
Feed your head
It wasn’t that long ago that only a handful of people could read, let alone had access to books. Indeed, if an early American family owned a book, it was either a copy of the Bible or Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. Possessing a library – and the ability to read it - marked you as special.
No longer. Today, not only can nearly everyone read, but we all have access to millions of books, magazines and newspapers, thanks to public libraries and the Internet. You can live in Peoria, Illinois and read Beijing's China Youth Daily, if you’re fluent in Chinese.
Even the poorest of our poor have access to infinite knowledge. Visit any inner city public library and you'll find it jammed at midday with the homeless reading newspapers and cruising the Internet.
Riding on top of this tsunami of information is a new age, but it’s hardly one of enlightenment. It’s a time that would make even Alice wonder. Like her famous looking glass mirror, everything seems to work in reverse.
Consider:
Few people bother to read more than their email yet everyone wants to write. And write they do. Written material – books, magazines, Web sites, blogs email and spam - swamps the world. Never mind that much of it goes unread. Thirty-five percent of all blogs, by some calculations, have no subscribers.
While the number of college applicants rises ever higher, their qualifications – despite all the SAT prepping – wanes. College admission officers say that, if they considered just the quality of personal essays, they’d have to slash admissions in half. “No one knows better than us the appalling state of writing by young people,” says one top admission official at Emory University.
Don’t be fooled by the lower acceptance rates championed by colleges. Except for a handful of elite schools, admission standards at many places are actually falling apace with applicant qualifications. A growing number of community and for-profit colleges are accepting students without high school diplomas.
Says one such community college student, “high school was too hard so I decided to skip it and just go to college.”
Is it any wonder, then, that a dwindling number of college graduates are well educated?
Only a third of them can read a challenging book. More graduates can name the three stooges than the three branches of American government. Many think gerunds are some kind of hamster.
In fact, if recent research is to be believed, college today can even make you dumber.
No less an august establishment figure than former Harvard President Derek Bok laments that students are graduating less able to reason, argue and write.
“Too many Americans just aren’t getting the education that they need,” concludes a recent report by the U.S. Education Dept.'s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
“There are disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing and thinking skills we expect of college graduates.”
Such students represent a new fraternity on campus. Its members read Monarch Notes, not original texts. They value libraries, all right, but as comfortable places to crash after a night of hard drinking. To them Mogadishu is Starbucks newest latte.
Rather than do homework they work their parents, persuading them to browbeat teachers into granting the As and Bs necessary to win college acceptance. Members of this fraternity can regurgitate every lie Teen People and Entertainment Tonight has fed them about Tom Cruise, but they know nothing about Tom Paine.
These are students who choose ignorance over learning. They are the willfully uninformed; they have what Bob Dylan calls a “passion for dumbness.”
The willfully uninformed is one fraternity you don't want to join. Not if you want to become a writer. For writers, ignorance is death.
You can’t write well unless you read a lot and are well read. Reading a lot involves more than devouring every popular thriller, romance and fantasy novel. There’s nothing wrong with such escapist entertainment – unless that’s all you read. For writing is about immersing yourself in life, not running away from it.
Writers are intellectual billy goats. There’s little they won’t read: Twain and Wharton, Voltaire and De Tocqueville, Thucydides and Plato, Confucius and Lao-tzu.
They read graphic novels such as “Ghost World” and the short stories of Woody Allen. If liberal they’ll read the Weekly Standard; the Nation if conservative. Every point of view interests writers, especially ones they disagree with.
Writers read the menu of an authentic Bengali restaurant and the ingredients on the box of their morning cereal.
Reading all of the above and more is what it means to be well read.
Why bother, as Dylan once sang, to fill your head with all this seemingly "pointless and useless" knowledge?
Foremost, reading is a sharpening stone for the mind. That's especially true if you read work that challenges you to consider: What does it mean to be alive; what does it mean to be young; who do I want to become? Struggling with such questions is like weight training for the soul. And anyone who writes well is soulful.
Reading isn’t just metaphysical. It’s practicum, too. A writer reads the way a musician practices scales. Twain and Orwell train the ear. Your mind soaks in vocabulary, style and technique the way a sponge soaks up the spill of a fine wine.
There's no better - nor pleasurable - way to learn grammar than through reading. Read a lot and you'll find commas come as naturally to you as breathing.
All art is derivative. One idea sprouts another, the way an acorn becomes an oak. That’s why there’s no shame in mimicking others, especially if they’re good.
In folk music, there’s a long tradition of putting new lyrics to old melodies. Writers do the equivalent, harnessing old themes to produce new work. Kafka learned from Voltaire; Voltaire from Cervantes and Cervantes from Shakespeare. And everyone has copied Homer. Thomas Jefferson lifted his famous line in the Declaration of Independence "We find these truths to be self-evident" straight from the writing of Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid.
Remember the Hollywood movie "Clueless?" It's screenwriters cribbed from the plot of Jane Austin's "Emma." Neil Simon modeled the characters of his "Odd Couple" on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
Writers are more than bookworms. They visit art galleries, play in recitals and fling themselves onto the upraised arms of fellow attendees at Pearl Jam concerts. They hike along the Continental Divide, cycle across Europe and go on safari in Kenya.
If in Beijing, writers will learn at least a little Mandarin and wander the winding hutongs behind the American-style high-rises that dominate the skyline. They’ll try chicken feet and jellyfish salad, anything to experience what it's like to be Chinese.
There's a long tradition here. Mark Twain worked on the riverboat steamers plying the Mississippi in the early 1800s. Ernest Hemingway fought in the Spanish Civil War. Not only did Cervantes fight in a pivotal battle that turned back the Turks from Europe. He also was captured by Barbary pirates and held prisoner for five years.
This is not to suggest that you should get yourself captured by pirates. But a little life experience goes a long way for a writer. “Experience,” American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton said, “is the Oracle of truth.”
As they’re out there mucking about, writers are listening in, eavesdropping on the human condition. A writer tunes into a group of teenage boys at Starbucks as they trade tips on how to master the online game Guildwars. He listens as girls compare Manolo Blanik sandals at Neiman Marcus.
Conversation is only part of what a writer is listening to. He’s also paying attention to vocabulary, idiom and cadence - anything that would enable him to authentically capture in words how people sound in real life.
A writer looks as well as listens, noting the woman with the tattoos of black cats on her triceps. Nor does he miss the boy who trips on the cuffs of the jeans drooping below his derrière.
Why muddy your Jimmy Choos in the grit of life? Because experience goes hand in hand with reading. Each enriches the other, like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Together, reading and writing provide an encyclopedic grasp of the world. The pair also affords a trustworthy reality check, enabling you to ensure that your work has the ring of authenticity.
The imagination is a hungry furnace, requiring constant tending. You need a steady supply of fresh material to keep it well stoked. But if well tended, your imagination will reward you with a steady stream of the metaphors, analogies and similes that enrich any well-written material. Why Hank Williams’ voice is like a beautiful thorn; why working as an attorney is like writing with a box over your head.
Knowledge also sharpens your vision. It enables you to see the threads that bind things, to discern connections between the seemingly disconnected, to make sense of the seemingly senseless. It's this ability, to serve as an intellectual Jedi, to see what others cannot, that makes a writer's work meaningful and lasting.
So, as Grace Slick once sang, “Feed your head.”
Copyright© 2006 by Nec Aspera Terrent
All rights reserved.
Barking Dogwood Press, Atlanta, GA
