Alan Jacobs

Where I lose Krieder, however, is in his suggested speed-bump for our “endless frenetic hustle.” Instead of offering realistic solutions like, say, the institution of a Spanish-style siesta for everyone into the workday afternoon, he glibly praises his ability to beg off work for an entire day dedicated to “chilled pink minty cocktails” or, better yet, to decamp completely to an “undisclosed location” (according to an author bio, a country house somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay), as if these were steps we all could take if only we were brave enough to do so.

While both sound like lovely ways to relax and focus on writing, respectively, the likelihood that most readers will be able to join Krieder in his charmed indolence is low; so low, in fact, that his waxing romantic about the spontaneously chill life smacks of a kind of obnoxious classism which unfortunately undermines an otherwise provocative point.

As Krieder himself admits, his own “resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue,” even if he did “make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money.” Regardless of Krieder’s own personal financial situation (which I know nothing of), the pleasantly open schedule that he advocates is almost never possible without a healthy stack of family money or generous institutional grant.

As Richard King, author of How Soon is Now?, a history of UK independent music, has said, it’s a surprise that remix culture has yet to enter the literary world. The cult of the author remains strong, but is under continual attack. As a result, it cannot be long until the question is not “Have you read…?”, but “Whose edit did you read?” I would read a Jonathan Lethem edit of Balzac, or China Miéville’s version of Moby-Dick. I like the original, but I prefer the remix.

The church also has to use new media in ways that highlight the local, the particular, and the personal. For example, on a recent trip across Tennessee, my family and I found ourselves aiming for dinner in Memphis. So we posted a question online—where does one eat with one meal in a great barbeque town? The answer came back—Rendezvous downtown. Now, we could have found it with a Google search—as a famous tourist establishment, Rendezvous would have turned up high on any search engine. But so could a tourist trap with advertising dollars. Instead, I got a word from a friend who pilgrimages to Memphis annually for the music. As a bonus, it turned out we were there on a night when the local minor league baseball team was in town. An unplanned vacation in a great American city culminated with a beautiful night in a stadium nestled into a downtown recommended by a friend on the fly.

On the way home we found ourselves aiming for Knoxville for dinner and a similar query yielded the counsel to eat at Calhoun’s on the Tennessee River. It’s a beautiful spot near the University of Tennessee and opposite the river from a haunting, abandoned hospital. Local, particular, quirky, and glorious. This is the opposite of how to eat in the suburban age, where proximity to the highway and faceless chain restaurants rule. We paid a little more, took more time, but saw two great cities in their glory and ate well.

By contrast, I recently heard a presentation at a conference from a seminary I admire. This man was present in the flesh, but not in relationship. He parachuted in to trumpet the great endeavors of his school, with no knowledge of the graduates of said school sitting right in front of him. To be fair, he’s new. But his presentation could have been done for a group in North Dakota or Afghanistan or Swaziland for all its attention to the local and particular and quirky. The meeting was embodied in one way (we were all in the room together), but abstract and impersonal in every way that mattered.

When I first began to take antidepressants, I understood that doing so meant I had a chemical imbalance in my brain. I knew that, arguably, I should find that comforting—it meant that what I was going through wasn’t my fault—but instead it made me feel out of control. I wanted my feelings to mean something. The idea that my deepest emotions were actually random emanations from my malfunctioning brain didn’t uplift me; it just further demoralized me.

In my 20s, I sought out talk therapy, partly to deal with the questions that using antidepressants raised for me and partly because the effects of the drugs, spectacular in the short term, had waned over time, leaving plenty of real-world problems in their wake. Only then did I begin to notice just how nonrandom my feelings were and how predictably they followed some simple rules of cause and effect.

Looking back, it seems remarkable that I had to work so hard to absorb an elementary lesson: Some things make me feel happy, other things make me feel sad. But for a long time antidepressants were giving me the opposite lesson. If I was suffering because of a glitch in my brain, it didn’t make much difference what I did. For me, antidepressants had promoted a kind of emotional illiteracy. They had prevented me from noticing the reasons that I felt bad when I did and from appreciating the effects of my own choices.

In the past, maples were tapped from Virginia to Northern Canada, though currently only a few US states, Ontario, and Quebec produce meaningful amounts. Maple trees grow the world over in abundance, so why does only North America produce syrup? The traditional response is that the conditions for sap production only exist in North America — cold spring nights with warmer days cause the trees to produce sap, which then rises up the trunk as it warms. Because where in the rest of the world is it colder at night than it is during the day? The truth, as you may have guessed, is somewhat more complicated and politically fraught.

Along with the decision to reinstate slavery in France’s oversea colonies, the institutionalized plunder of art museums across Europe, the deaths of millions of Europeans during 17 years of war, and the renaming of the mille-feuille (a deliciously ancient dessert), Europe’s failure to crack the secret of maple syrup was Napoleon’s fault.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

Part of finding your own voice as a writer is finding your own grammar. Don’t spend your career lost in a sea of copycats when you can establish your own set of rules. If everyone’s putting periods at the end of their sentences, put yours in the middle of words. Will it be incredibly difficult to read? Yes it will. Will it set you on the path to becoming a literary pioneer? Tough to say, but you’re kind of out of options at this point.

There’s always an evil person. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s evil. Most governments, even autocratic governments, can be embarrassed.

So, then. Is literature the serious stuff you have to read in college, and after that you read for pleasure, which is guilty?

Mr Krystal doesn’t say this directly. But he says nothing about the non-guilty pleasure that both literary and genre novels can afford. And what he says about genre fiction all fits into the familiar modernist mishmash of Puritanism and reverse snobbery.

I don’t want to join the group still huddled together in a corner of a twentieth-century lunchroom smirking over a copy of Amazing Wonder Tales because it’s “bad,” and flipping off the stuffy teacher who wants us to read A Tale of Two Cities because it’s “good.” I don’t want to be there any more.

— Le Guin’s Hypothesis | Book View Cafe Blog. Ursula LeGuin has been the smartest person in the world on these issues for about forty years now. So when are self-proclaimed “literary” people going to start giving her the deference, or at least the attention, she so obviously deserves?

First, I’m disappointed that “The Art of Video Games” seems to focus on video games as a phenomenon of the home console or PC to the exclusion of public play. This ignores both the fact that home consoles have historically often served to run low-powered imitations of games designed for public arcades, and the current proliferation of online play. This is especially frustrating when the failure to include some version or acknowledgement of the arcade in the exhibit’s play room seems like such a missed opportunity.

Second, I can’t help coming away with the feeling that an art museum is the wrong venue for an exhibition on video games. Video games have always been so much more than the sum of their hardware and code, and putting them in a museum devoted to the visual arts must necessarily nudge games into occupying the position of being a thing to look at. While, say, a book or a chess set could well merit inclusion in an art museum as an object of physical beauty and artistic design, putting either on a wall or behind glass excludes some fundamental aspect of their artfulness. A book that cannot be read is not literature, and a chess board that is not in use cannot convey the history or beauty of the game of chess at play.

Books have libraries. Chess has clubs, tournaments, and tables set up in parks and other public places all over the world. If we want to get games to be taken more seriously as an art, maybe we need to make our play more visible and accessible, and create spaces where that can happen.