IN DEFENSE OF AN IMPERILED ART

A Scene from Reading Rainbow

Another kind question from our communidad: Robert Hoekman Jr asks: (W)hy do we keep pushing books? Why are we not embracing that the internet produces more text by the minute than we can ever consume & look to new forms for engaging our would-be readers that meet the times & stop clinging to a form that is clearly failing its public?

Thank you, Robert, for your forthright query.

No question: there are a lot of smart, interesting people doing smart, interesting work on the internet.

Also true: much of what’s on the webs is, to put it charitably, lacking. Or to put it uncharitably: straight poisonous.

But whether the internet and and what it produces be trash or treasure, it sure as hell ain’t suffering from the lack of support from book obsessives like me — this colossus is doing fine all on its own.

Globally, people average 6 hours and 40 minutes of screen time per day.

Daily screen time has increased by over 30 minutes per day since 2013.

The average American spends 7 hours and 3 minutes looking at a screen each day.

Almost half (49%) of 0 to 2-year-olds interact with smartphones.

Gen Z averages around 9 hours of screen time per day¹.

And from everything we’re seeing, screen life ain’t slowing down any time soon.

If only the same could be said for reading. Reading, as I’ve noted in previous stacks, is catching it hot — how could it not given the competition...

...and yet one could also argue reading is doing far better than it should, given the competition’s impossible grip.

If people want to push what the screen can do — if folks want to embrace what is rising — more power to them. But me, I’m going to stay boosting books, even if the odds ain’t looking so hot.

Please understand: just because books are on the downhill side doesn’t mean they’re any less valuable. Being on the losing side of this particular civilizational moment is hardly proof of one’s unworthiness — often quite the opposite. A crude example: our natural world is also catching it nine ways of Tuesday, in worse shape than our book-o-sphere, but it doesn’t mean it ain’t precious or that many of us aren’t still about the Earth the way fools like me are still about books and reading.

We are about our natural world and about reading because we love these endangered fragile irreplaceables; we are about them because we hope that our about-it-ness — our love — will kindle in others a collateral love that might prove salvific.

Or at least that’s the hope.

Better minds have said it before, but I don’t mind repeating it less well again and again: Reading, like the natural world, is good for people (though clearly at a very different level). Pace Levis-Strauss — books are good to think and books are good to be. Books have unique affordances — do things that other media cannot do as well, or at all. Reading books exercises our imaginations (which we will need to break the mind-shackles our overlords are fitting us for); reading books offers us opportunities to expand our ability to connect; reading books encourages the trickster force within, which is play.

Right now there’s a whole museum-movement built around staring at a painting for ten minutes, excellent in and of itself, but books hear this and they're like, Ten minutes?! Hold my Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster! Books command our attention for hours, days, weeks, months, years — sometimes for whole lives. Reading books regenerates our ability to focus, to stay mindful.

Screens do certain things very well, but collectively what they do best is naturalizing the hysterical reactive lizard logic of our capitalist vampire-squid hegemons. They convince us that to be alive is to capitalist vampire-squid all day, all night.

Reading is the zafa for that particularly unbearable fukú. Reading leads us away from the Sunken Place of neoliberal capital, back to the Slow Zone of human thought and human feeling. The Slow Zone where all that truly matters for prospering — deliberation, moderation, imagination, compassion, resilience — is possible. Books are a Slow Zone oasis that can reawaken and sustain us through this age of digital decimation.

Reading can be a mixed bag depending on what you’re reading, but in sum and en fin, reading reconstitutes us, which in a society intent on frakking every atom of our being is no small thing.

Perhaps I am so double-plus on reading, despite all our losses, because I know that even a little reading goes a long way, and because I feel like I have already survived the anti-book future that many of us see coming. I have lived The Days of Future Past, except for books not mutants. I, in fact, come from that future, a nerdy Dominican version of Kyle Reese. I grew up in 70s Dominican Republic where the overwhelming majority did not, could not read — survived an 80s and 90s Dominican diaspora in New Jersey where book culture was nearly non-existent. And yet, despite that lexic wasteland, books and reading survived and a reader like me was born. What was my past may be our future, but if I survived, if I prospered in such deprivations, others in worse conditions might also survive and prosper.

Because that’s the thing about reading / books. For all their vulnerabilities and lack of pull relative to screens, reading / books has proven resilient as fuck. I don’t think I’m speaking only of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey when I say that reading / books has survived illiteracy and an absence of bookstores and libraries; they survived dictators, immigration, coloniality, death squads, dirty wars, the American military, the local military, tanks, bombs, guerillas, cartels, burning borders, and every kind of charlatan, clown and intoxicant imaginable².

Part of the reason reading stays alive is because unlike the environment or, say, democracy, book culture can regenerate quickly, spring up almost anywhere under the most inhospitable conditions (see Frederick Douglass).

Another reason reading books survives is because reading does not fail us. Our political leaders, our religious leaders, our business leaders, our non-profit chariteers, our friends, our family members, fail us all the time.

A single book or poem may fail us but not books, not reading.

They do not fail for all the reasons I explored above and here and here.

The librarium — the sum total of what reading represents and does — is strong.

Read with any consistency and you will be succored, you will be reconstituted and, if you hang tough enough, you will eventually be transformed.

Without fucking fail.

Reading, like the Lord, is not slack with its promises.

But all these rousing enthusiasms cannot obscure the hard reality that the reading of books is in a precarious state. I recognize this fact, and yet I still am not ready to proleptically mourn book culture yet — not ready to despair. To quote Gandalf for the thousandth time: Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.

But even if it turns out that reading books is on the downhill side permanently and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop that extinction, I find nothing wrong with fighting the good fight all the way to the bitter end. Nothing wrong with fighting for a dying arts without quarter or surrender. Sort of like fighting for a dying planet to the bitter end. To speak only of books, it’s not a fight that hurts anyone, and it is one I seem built for — to sing the song of reading never tires or demoralizes me, no matter how poorly the battle goes.

My love of reading, I guess, holds me to the task. And my optimism born of the fact that I belong to a community that never should have survived enslavement, and if we survived against all odds — not only survived but prospered — what else might be possible in this rapidly tilting world?

Who knows what good might be done, what hearts succored and lives bolstered by the last emanations from a once-great craft? Unlike almost everything else in our lives the reading of books doesn’t need to win to be victorious. Reading books is like Middlemarch’s Dorothea in that way.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

As with Dorothea, as with reading books.

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1. Fabio Duarte for Exploding Topics: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats

2. I borrowed the structure of this line and phrases like “burning borders” from Jachym Topol’s ''Sestra'