Reading, Noise, Labor

The NEA reports that reading as a leisure activity has continued its decline, and the statistics in the newly released report are alarming (http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf).  No doubt many will interpret this as evidence of failure within our nation’s schools, while others will cast a wider net and proclaim that Americans are becoming dumber by the day.  I don’t think that either of these conclusions is so.  As a teacher of English who has worked at 4 year universities and community colleges over the last 10 years, I can say that students today are just as able to manipulate and interpret language now as they were a decade ago.  What we’re losing, I think, is the ability to forego our favorite national pastime, which is no pastime at all: work.

Americans work long hours.  Reading, on the other hand, requires leisure, which is not only a function of time, but a habit of mind.  Endless work and endless chores have made us unable to sit still.  Like Thoreau’s 19th century Americans, we work to build railroads – but we do not ride upon them so much as they ride upon us. The very notion of idleness has become social anathema for most of us.  “I’m so busy,” is the common refrain. 

 And when we do have time, we fill it with meaningless make-work activity — painting the spare room, steaming the carpets, shopping for a better deal on junk we’ll never use.  We work to buy what we will never find ourselves able to enjoy or appreciate fully. 

Not everyone feels this way about work, of course, and not just Americans.  Recently French President Sarkozy questioned the 35 hour work week, suggesting that his countrymen might work more rather than less.  As Graham Robb wrote in The New York Times, the notion of year-round hard work is hardly to traditional French taste, and the 35 hour work week would have seemed strange indeed to the French of the past century:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1196208998-sTc4OBZ3/QFUCdPVX/Im7A

Few Americans would probably like to take the French as an example, but I’d say this isn’t a bad one.

The New DIA

Last Saturday I attended a members preview of the newly expanded Detroit Institute of Arts, a disorienting experience.  Exhibits have been placed in smaller, more intimate settings, and before many of the paintings are displays featuring commentaries by local and nationally recognized academics and intellectuals.  Are these comments meant to deepen the meaning of what hangs on the walls? 

What I liked about the old DIA was its openness — the galleries were larger, more airy, and explanatory material was largely confined to the usually detailed pamphlets placed in small holders on the wall.  Now viewers are confronted with glosses on the art that become almost as central a feature as the art itself.  Call it the triumph of criticism, or even an invitation to viewers to recognize that art can be interpreted in many ways and from many angles, but it feels stifling, on the order of limiting the thematic possibilities of a novel to the few blurbs on its back cover.

A museum should be like a library, one where patrons decide what is worth reading.  On repeated visits, one book leads to another, and over time the patron has constructed a web of texts that begin to make sense in proportion to each other.  Seeing art, like reading, is a process of discovery, reflection, and connection that cannot be made for us. 

The End of Public Culture

This afternoon I drove several miles down a busy road, one I have traveled many times, only to realize that there was not a single bookstore amidst the Wal-Marts, Home Depots, and CVS pharmacies that I passed.  Were there one, it would likely have been a Barnes and Noble or a Borders rather than the kind of independent store that was more common even 10 or 15 years ago — the sort of place where you might have to special order much of what can be found easily at the larger chains today.  The expansion of the megachain bookseller seems like a step toward the democratization of information, something like the internet.  After all, anybody can walk into one of these places, grab a Tolstoy and a coffee, and start reading.  Major bookstores today perform the same function that public libraries did years ago (with the exception of the coffee bar).  In this sense, the private corporation has taken over the role previously relegated to the public sphere.  Information is marketed and purchased, not come by freely for the greater good. 

Where the public library might be said to have an interest in engaging citizens in culture and public affairs, the bookstore has an interest in selling you not only books, but coffee mugs, tea cozies, photo albums, greeting cards, and chocolates.  The small bookseller of the past tended to establish a more personal relationship with the customer, but one which was always in the end unmistakable as a business transaction.  The library was the place for anonymity and impersonal transactions: present your book, show your card, and walk out.  Now this is more or less the model of the big box store transaction.  The only thing we demand of the store is that they have whatever we want in stock.  The only thing they demand of us is our money. 

This seems public in the sense of the public sphere always hinging on the maintenance of a secret or hidden identity: I don’t know you, you don’t know me, let’s keep it that way.  In fact, however, we are known: our preferences are noted, recorded, and catered to; we receive e-mail messages and flyers in the mail directed to our own personal buying habits.  The pretense of the formal transaction is a shadow of real privacy in decline.

Hopper and Lonely Courage

This past weekend on a visit to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. I attended an exhibit of Edward Hopper’s paintings.  When I first got to know Hopper’s work, perhaps 20 years ago, I equated the light in his paintings with the gauzy haze typical of the Hallmark-sponsored made-for-television movies that used to air on CBS.  Not America, but Americana.  Having seen Hopper’s works in isolation on museum walls in Chicago and New York, I began to form a different view. 

Nothing, though, could have prepared me for what I saw last weekend.  Hopper’s figures, nearly always alone (even when in the presence of another figure on the same canvas) often exhibit a strength and courage in the face of their own isolation, best understood in a painting that contains no figure whatsoever: “Sun in an Empty Room,” one of Hopper’s last works and the final piece at the show.  This work is viewable, along with the show’s other works, at

http://www.nga.gov/press/exh/229/images.shtm

The light in this painting forms pale blocks that point us outward toward the window on the right, as though Hopper himself, at this point approaching the end of his own life, looked forward already to leaving the bare rooms that he and his painted figures inhabit and toward something greater, more inviting, a place crowded with greenery and new life.  It’s the reward at the end of a life lived, like all lives, in isolation and even terror, the hope of the next stage.