Evolution of a literary distraction

by Louis Borgenicht

Since the advent of the Internet my reading habits have dramatically changed.

Truth to tell I never learned the proper lessons from childhood: my mother was a voracious reader consuming several books in a day. As a youth I recall wallowing in Nancy Drew mysteries and the historical novels of Geoffrey Trease and would actually sit for lengths of time in bed before falling asleep.

Trease was a British writer of 113 books; the Nancy Drew mysteries were written by a variety of authors under the pseudonym of Carolyn Keene, a fact I recently learned from  Wikipedia. But the lessons learned in childhood did not last long; I rarely read for extended periods of time.

Readers of this blog have learned about my New Yorker angst, long ago making my peace with being behind.

Similarly, I have had problems with the Sunday New York Times. The drive to read it on the day it is tossed unceremoniously onto my snowless driveway is just not there. Years ago, when I lived in New York City, I would make a special effort to read the news of the week in Review immediately feeling I had to get the heady stuff out of the way first. If I waited until the end of the week to read it I would likely not.

Now I have become more lackadaisical. I glance at the front section, peruse the Arts section mainly to see if some spectacular television offering is coming up, and then relegate the business, sports, and travel section (unless there is an article on some destination we hope to visit) to the recycle bin. Living in SLC there is no urgency in getting through the Times at one sitting; years ago living in NYC there was a hip pleasure buying the Sunday Times on Saturday night along with fresh real bagels,
going to bed shortly after midnight, and awakening leisurely on Sunday morning knowing I had everything I needed.

The Internet has exacerbated my tendency to literary distraction. Emails were the first step. There are decisional issues: you read an email and have to decide whether to erase it immediately or retain it for future reference. This is particularly true if a friend sends you something with the subject “FYI or I thought you might like this.” You can open the attachment, give it a quick glance and file it somewhere for future reference.

That is the problem: future reference. It feeds into possibility and hope. Will I read it? If so when? Where will I find it if I finally decide to read it?

Unless you are incredibly disciplined you will forget about it, discovering days or months later when you accidentally open a file you did not know existed. The moment of truth arrives as your guilt wells: read it or delete it sight unseen.

This short-order reading has affected my dealing with real books. I rarely take the time to sit down for upwards of half an hour in a comfortable chair and just read. It would be lovely to do so, meditative even. But my brain has been programmed for distraction.

Even at night I am only able to read for five minutes before falling asleep. It is clearly the fault of the computer. I have often thought that Apple should give every new customer a prescription of Ritalin with each new computer to minimize attention deficit.

Only then might I get back to the good old days of my youth.

Reading What’s Banned

Editor’s note: As part of our recognition and celebration of Banned Books Week, September 24 – October 1, we present a guest post by author Dorothee Kocks. Kocks will appear at The King’s English, Saturday, October 1 at 4 p.m. Visit the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression website HERE and check out the Virtual Read-Out dedicated Youtube channel HERE.

By Dorothee E. Kocks

My novel, The Glass Harmonica, features an early 19th century bookseller who sells obscene books, and this surprised me. I come from a liberal family but a sexually modest one. What was I doing with a character who roamed the early American countryside, hawking risqué literature from the back of his carriage, including what would become the most banned book in U.S. history, Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure?

It’s a question particularly poignant this week, as librarians and booksellers celebrate Banned Books Week. A “virtual read-out” pushes the boundaries on YouTube of what is considered appropriate reading.

I got my answer from a reader recently. She wrote that the experience of immodesty, that brazen state of a woman’s rebellion against the prescribed life, was lost to her. But last year, “for the briefest few hours,” she got it back. When she did, she wrote, “I dazzled and was electrified. And then I was shamed, and shattered, and shuffled out of the room.”

There is something good about trying out what we’re told is wrong. Something brave. At the time of my book, the generation following the Revolution, people were figuring out what freedom meant. And one thing it meant was reading what your betters commanded that you avoid.

Henry Garland, a rebel son of Puritans, sells the top two bestsellers from his carriage: The Bible, and Noah Webster’s The Book of Spelling, a dry-sounding title that was a how-to manual for teaching yourself to read. The next hot-selling book seems to have
been a tie.

The Coquette, sometimes called the first American novel, told the story of a woman torn between an upright but boring preacher and a handsome Southern rake. She ends up pregnant, shunned, but sympathetically so – and the book swiftly is banned from the new public libraries.

Aristotle’s Masterpiece, despite the lofty title, concealed a ‘granny book’ or midwife’s manual –with illustrations, and explicit instructions on how to make a woman ready to conceive.

And then there was Fanny Hill. Now a classic of erotic literature, it follows an orphaned girl into the English urban sex trade – where she has a lot of fun. It could be called that generation’s The Joy of Sex.

Not all of these books were formally banned because the government hadn’t yet taken on that role – but they were certainly forbidden. From the pulpits, in the self-censorship of the newspapers which advertised Fanny Hill obliquely as “Memoirs of –”, people got the message: Don’t go there.

So they went. What is it about the forbidden that actually can drive us to be better people, even better citizens? Sometimes the content itself is liberating. But even more, it’s the experience of navigating that border territory where right and wrong are unclear. There, you find out what you yourself feel is right. Our forebears overthrew monarchies. They did not live as they were told to do. They invented a better way. And sometimes the first step is to do what is banned. Forbidden.

Freedom requires moral courage. And moral courage often arises out of the ashes of moral failure – out of shuffling shamefacedly out of the room, as happens to my characters. You have to be lost to be found.

Dorothee E. Kocks, PhD, is the author of BewareTheTimidLife.com and The Glass Harmonica, A Sensualist’s Tale (Rosa Mira Books, 2011). She welcomes invitations to book clubs via Skype (or via other technological wonders of our age).

New Yorkers Redux

By Louis Borgenicht

So several months ago I wrote a piece about New Yorker angst for the this blog. Several readers commented that I had hit the proverbial nail on the head. Nothing satisfies a writer more than hearing that.

But since then I have have come to realize that my relationship with The New Yorker is unrequited. The Webster’s definition of “unrequited” does not really fill the bill: not reciprocated or returned in kind. But it turns out I expect something in turn from The New Yorker. It is not a rational thought.

For whatever reason I expect that if I manage to read the magazine and “get it out of the way” I will be rewarded; I will assuredly be ahead of the game. But the next week there was another one in my mailbox.

There was a time when I thought it important to read New Yorkers in chronological sequence, a vestige of my Type A New York childhood. Now I have a vertical file stash of unread magazines (including The Atlantic and Vanity Fair) in my study and I simply grab one at random on my way out of the house curious to see what I have chosen for the day.

I feel naked without a magazine. You never know when you are going to have a spare minute while waiting for an oil change, in the checkout line at Whole Foods, before a meeting, even going golfing (the magazine fits neatly into a side pocket of my golf bag), if you arrive early for a lunch date. Just having an issue of The New Yorker on the passenger seat is eminently reassuring.

I finally got up the courage to publicly admit my dilemma with a post on Facebook today: I am sitting on 8 unread issues of The New Yorker.

Here are some of the responses:

“I bring them to my clinic and put them in the waiting room. I think it says something awful about a clinic when people in the waiting room have time to read an article in The New Yorker.”

“Usually use a telephone book. Can you reach the table? The magazines aren’t very thick these days. ”

“It is really hard to read them with your a%*!!!”

A partial solution to my dilemma is to grab a New Yorker, peruse the cartoons, scan the index, and read nothing in sequence. This approach takes the pressure off.

One intriguing take on the issue is to Google “unread New Yorkers.” I did it and discovered no one with my unique angst.

Hardly reassuring.

TKE Takes 5 with Rae Meadows

by Lynn Kilpatrick

Rae Meadows is the author of Mothers and Daughters, published this May by Henry Holt. She has written two previous novels, No One Tells Everything (2008) and Calling Out (2006). I had the privilege of getting to know Rae when we were both students at the University of Utah, studying creative writing and getting together occasionally to whack around a tennis ball. After I read Mothers and Daughters this spring, I had some questions for Rae. She took time out of her busy schedule touring to promote her book, and as the mother of two daughters herself, to answer some of my questions.

The King’s English (Lynn Kilpatrick): One of the first things I noticed as I was reading Mothers and Daughters was the relationship between your book, Virginia Woolf, and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. I really liked the way you used the three-part/three-character structure, and, like The Hours, there were direct references to Woolf. How would you characterize your book’s relationship to these other works?

Rae Meadows: I was definitely inspired and influenced by The Hours, particularly Cunningham’s use of a three-part structure with characters who don’t overlap in real time. I liked how this functioned to collapse time and memory. I was also appreciative of the book’s spareness and quiet drama. I was a little worried about directly referencing Virginia Woolf (Is it allowed? Is it like sampling in a song? Is it frowned upon?) but it seemed right for the character of Iris. I really did set out to write a novel about women and I kept coming back to To the Lighthouse.

TKE: Can you talk about your decision to write the book from three different points of view? This seemed like a departure from your other books, which each focus on one main character.

RM: Admittedly part of this decision came from becoming a mother and having to figure out some way to approach a novel in short bursts of time. For me it seemed more manageable to break it down into multiple points of view. I actually wrote each of the character’s sections separately because I couldn’t yet conceive of the whole. As you know, the entirety of a novel is such a scary behemoth to consider.

TKE: How did your book become a best seller in the Netherlands?

RM: Your guess is as good as mine! It’s such a funny thing. I liked the cover—they used a vintage photograph of a woman holding a little girl’s hand, seen from behind. There is something subtly ominous about it, which appealed to me, at least. (Or maybe the Dutch just have good taste?)

TKE: How do you finish a draft? Many writers begin projects, but have a hard time getting to the end of a finished draft and then there’s revision! How do you do it?

RM: I have no idea how to write a novel! I’m looking into the abyss these days, unable to get started on something new. For Mothers and Daughters, I slogged out two pages a day until a messy first draft was completed, and I tried not to think too far down the road. I have to commit to those kind of modest but unwavering goals for myself or I’d never write at all.

TKE: What kind of historical research did you do for Mothers and Daughters?

RM: I loved researching for this book. It kind of felt like cheating. I read books about the orphan trains, both first-hand accounts of riders and histories of social welfare, which gave me more context. For turn-of-the-century New York City flavor, I found my best tools to be period accounts of church women who would go into poor neighborhoods and report what they had seen. And there are some incredible things you can find online, of course, particularly photographs, which kick-started scenes for me. For my next novel, I’m doing historical research again—this time on the Dust Bowl—and it’s a great way to procrastinate. Sure I’ll get writing, I just have to read one more book first…

You can keep up with Rae, and see pictures of the Dutch posters for Mothers and Daughters on her blog.

TKE Takes 5 with Matt Richtel

by Paula Longhurst

Matt Richtel’s first novel, Hooked was published in 2007, since then he’s been busy authoring a syndicated comic strip (under the pen-name Theron Heir), winning a Putlizer prize for a New York Times series he wrote on distracted driving and working on his second just-published novel Devil’s Plaything which made KUER’s recent summer must-read list.

Matt took time out from his hectic promotional schedule to give The King’s English (TKE) an interview.

TKE: How long have you been working on Devil’s Plaything and did technology have to catch up to make the story work?

Matt Richtel: Three years. I had a sophomore slump in the sense that Hooked, my first book, poured out of me in five months. A very efficient muse, that one. And, to your point, technology absolutely evolved in the course of writing Devil, to my advantage. My conspiracy floats on the edge of reality and the more technology advanced, the more the conspiracy in this book neared reality. I hope that makes it chilling.

TKE: You’ve said in interviews that Nat’s character shares some of your DNA. How about the feisty character of Lane? Did she come from your imagination or is she based on a real person?

MR: My paternal grandmother, Annie, while not feisty, is a zealous liver of life. She’s also a grammar hound, much like my fictional grandmother Lane. And Annie is a great friend of mine. But Grandma Annie, far from suffering dementia, is entirely in her right mind. At 94! She’ll kick your rear at online scrabble, honest.

TKE: When asked to describe the role technology plays in your life you’ve been quoted as saying ‘balanced, with borderline troubling tendencies.’ Have you scaled back on the multi-tasking as a result of writing Devil’s Plaything?

MR: Yes and no. My writing of Devil’s Plaything dovetailed with lots of research I’ve done into the topic of heavy multi-tasking for the New York Times. It also dovetailed with me having two kids (my wife did most of the work). That research for the Times both informed the book and informed how I live my life vis-à-vis technology. I try to be more focused on a given task and, in particular, on my kids. I TRY to keep the device at arm’s length. But I can’t believe how often I sometimes check it, sneaking a peek while my kids are well within eye-shot, mid-playtime with them. Not good, daddy. Not good.

TKE: Researchers are always quoting that we only use one tenth of our brain’s storage capacity.  Do you think it’s possible that in a few generations time the human brain will have evolved to process multiple streams of information without needing any downtime?

MR: I do not. Evolution happens over many, many generations. Our brains, for sure, ADAPT to various circumstances and we’re certainly adapting now, emphasizing some skills over others. But the basic question you ask is a great one because we’re really demanding that our brains do something they’re not built to do: multi-task. The rubber is hitting the road (no distracted driving word play intended).

TKE: With all the convenience our high-tech gadgets bring, are we in danger of becoming reliant on a push-button world? Bearing in mind that the average user has no idea exactly how their mobile devices work or what information they are collecting about us.

MR: I hear parents talk about how their kids can’t do math but can use calculators like nobody’s business. Witness the McDonald’s clerk, pushing buttons of pictures rather than making change in his/her head. Much of this can be fairly justified by convenience. But I think that knowing underlying skills remains essential. This is a slightly different question than the one you ask about whether our data is being collected. That too is a development journalists and public policy folks and everyday citizens are rightly following closely. On the face of it, it’s scary. But it’s also nuanced. People are sharing lots of information about themselves – whether on Facebook or whatever – and they’re doing it willingly and with enthusiasm. Clearly, this is a problem when this info is used in a way that the discloser didn’t intend or was told it would be used. But that line feels murky today.

TKE: Your Pulitzer-winning New York Times series “Driven to Distraction” got the term ‘distracted driving’ into Webster’s. What do you make of Utah’s drivers?

MR:  I can’t comment on that. I don’t have enough data to be journalistically sound.

TKE: After the events of Hooked, do you still write in coffee shops?

MR:  I’m writing in one now. Hey, a woman’s putting a folded note on my table. GOTTA GO!