Glog ENG 101 15

For as long as humans have been writing, they’ve been writing with a purpose. Not necessarily for an audience, but for a reason nonetheless. Writing can serve as a means of communication, expression, and therapy, and for a countless number of other purposes. I doubt, however, that writing is or has ever truly been about the physical book, this thing over which Sven Birkerts obsesses.

Birkerts’ main focus throughout his writings is the necessity of the written word to the literary world. Birkerts urges that the literary experience is the central value of reading, and that it can only be found in book form. He asserts that books in other places are simply not books, and that the technologization of reading has injured the reading world, especially the reading habits of the youth. In fact, at times, it seems as if Birkerts’ fear is beyond the fear that new generations will stop reading books, but that they will become increasingly less thoughtful over time.

What Birkerts fails to consider is that the reading world has many facets and purposes, few of which fall into the realm that Birkerts focuses on. He considers the reader in a general sense, and the reader’s habits, but fails to consider the reader’s needs, and ignores the author entirely. In this way, Birkerts miss-measures younger generations and the fate of reading.

Birkerts does not put his argument in perspective with the goals of authors. He seems to prattle his argument around without their consideration at all. To elaborate on an earlier point, when many authors write, they want to be read. I expect that most of them do not worry about how they will be read (beyond the scope of intellectual property) but are primarily concerned that their messages are being read and considered. Or else, they are not writing to be read, in which case it really doesn’t matter what physical form their words take. If Birkerts is right, and written word can only be truly considered in the bound book form, then I expect authors would cease typing out books and move back to writing their works out on paper in notebooks (considering that authors need to comprehend what they are writing when they are writing, and this extension of writing failure on a computer screen would extend to them too). And yet, this cartoonish scenario, that somehow one cannot be swept away by words if they are not smellable, touchable, printed words, is just that: cartoonish. It may be Birkert’s failure as an author that leads him to overlook their goals, but nonetheless, the reason to read is often to understand the point of the author. This important facet of reading, the writing and its intention, should not be excluded from the literary world, and summarized as he does into the intention to immerse the reader into a story or world.

To consider the reader, Birkerts relies on his own memories as a not too wealthy, not too poor kid reading in his somewhat suburban home. But, he fails to realize that there are many more people in the world than there are seats in libraries or reading chairs in quiet corners. It’s a feature of reality that books and their traditional enjoyment are simply not accessible to every person, and frankly, they are also not every person’s cup of tea. Not everyone has a cozy suburban lifestyle that lets them curl up with a first edition novel. In many rural areas in impoverished countries, computers and internet access are the only link to the outside world. But it seems that Birkerts misunderstands the problem at hand. Perhaps he does not realize that some people can use only computers to read. And if he does, he looks down on them without considering them. Like him at a young age, they are making an effort to read and intake information in a way that is simply impossible for them otherwise, and his slight treatment of them is unfair.

Beyond the rural areas of third world countries, there are people in America who do live quite suburban lives and do have cozy corners to curl up in, and I believe it’s these people that Birkerts addresses in his articles. At risk of being too personal, I’ll attempt to make my point by sharing my lifestyle:

On a typical day, I wake up at 8 AM, go swimming for an hour, and then go to breakfast before class. For the next four to five hours, I focus my attention on professors and lectures. Often, I visit office hours and talk to professors about my progress. After classes, I eat lunch, swim for another hour, and then begin studying until dinner. I cook my dinner myself most nights, and after I eat I complete any left-over assignments for the day. Before I go to bed, I read a book for fifteen minutes, sometimes a bit more depending on how tired I’m feeling.

Why do I spend so many hours studying? Because I am no stranger to the increased competitiveness of my generation. Last semester (when I attended Cornell University) I personally witnessed pre-med students sabotaging each other’s labs in an effort to get ahead. Simply put, your neighbor is help only until they are competition, which for any undergraduate student means between one and four years from now.

So, if I’m so academic, why don’t I read for more than fifteen minutes a day? I can make time for it; I’m a firm believer that if you can’t make time for something, it’s just not important enough to you to make time for it. But that’s not why I don’t read more. I don’t read more because, like every college student I know, I’m preparing for the extremely competitive job market that lingers around college graduates, and I am inclined to spend my time knowing what Uca pugnax’s impact on the Salt Marshes of Lewes, Delaware is, and not what impact Clockwork Orange had on the literary world at its time of release. Simply put, I, like so many of my classmates, am learning different things: things that are relevant to my career field, and I’d challenge Birkerts to tell me that I’m part of a deteriorating generation, when in fact my generation seems to be one of the smartest, most talented (if not ruthlessly competitive) generations yet.

And so the question posed here is a trick: I read more than fifteen minutes a day, although at the moment I devote about fifteen minutes to Tolstoy, and the rest of my time is spent as a practical, level-headed student who knows that studying is probably more important than immersing myself in the troubles of a wayward couple. Honestly, I’m shocked that Birkerts would equate the relative decrease in readers of classic literature with an decrease in educated, thoughtful young Americans, when really, it seems that young Americans are simply wising up and realizing that quoting Tolstoy, even in the original, does not pay the bills.

Further, his lack of consideration for the non-literary reader is incredibly apparent in his work, and smacks of his assumption that literary intellectuals are the only intellectuals. He writes for the educated reader, though I think that if he were truly concerned for “less educated” generations, he would not begin his first chapter with a Virginia Woolf reference. In fact, he later mentions, “By now the astute reader will have picked up on my game.” (Birkerts 13) This quote suggests that his book is not actually a document to encourage the reading of literature and bound books, but instead a gossip publication to share with other well read gentlemen and ladies who will likely read this and nod in agreement and go on with their daily lives, which are so incredibly separated from younger generations that they deem Birkerts to be accurate.

However, one can never know if Birkerts is accurate or not because his points are very rarely supported. Most of his reports concerning younger generations seem to be general observations, and not based in any fact whatsoever. This frustrating realization makes Birkerts’ points all but invalid. There seems to be no limit to the ridiculousness that Birkerts will imagine.

For example, in Birkerts’ essay MuhVuhHuhPuh, he worries: “And then I despair. I conjure up a whole generation of children enslaved by a single carefully scripted, lushly animated narrative. Not even a narrative created by a single artist, but a team product. A studio job.” (Birkerts 30) This is so clearly ridiculous that it almost doesn’t warrant response, but a few points can be made in disagreement.

First, it is not in anyone’s interest to have fat, drooling robot babies who watch Hannah Montana all day every day. Who does Birkerts think is paying for his nursing home room a few decades from now? And who will take care of his child when she, in turn, cannot care for herself? Simply put, even if children were stupid and lazy enough to become enslaved by such a program, no responsible or sane person would turn the program on. Each generation relies on the next for prosperity, care, and, at least, Social Security benefits, and would not willingly allow their supporters to become slack-jawed couch potatoes.

And secondly, I would doubt that any child can honestly be kept from running amuck for hours at a time. I vividly remember my childhood, when there were internet and cell phones and video games, yet I usually set these things aside to go fishing, digging up salamanders, and climbing on rotting logs that sat theatrically over tiny creeks with my neighborhood friends. Of course, not all young children are like I was, but it’s clear that children like other children, they like interaction, and I seriously doubt that they are in any danger of willingly recreating the ironically detached Wall-E generation in any length of time.

In fact, it’s not obvious that Birkerts has had more interaction with the apparently ever-dumbing younger generations than he’s that with the students of a “local college.” This local college, quite possibly a community college, has a feature that’s true of all colleges: the students of that college chose to attend that college. And that’s not to say that they all had the same reason, but students tend to choose colleges for similar reasons, come from similar educational backgrounds, and have similar interests. For example, students at Yale all have highly focused and strengthened academic skills, while students at University of Maryland tend to be excellent athletes and students who go to Washington College can stand to be surrounded by corn fields. These types of trends are sociologically inherent in colleges, wherever Birkerts taught among them. The result of this is that blanket conclusions about the college-age crowd should not be made from a sample of just 25 students who all attend the same college. And clearly, this is an exaggeration of the situation. It’s not likely that Birkerts relies on these 25 students for all of his opinions, but it is likely that he is making assumptions without any quantitative evidence. It is difficult to address Birkerts’ worries on these matters without having any clear evidence that they are any more than his biased observations.

And so the reader’s needs, habits, and inclinations are ignored, and instead he or she is type-casted as the lesser version of their father. The author’s intentions are overlooked, and the reading world is squished into the small facet of itself that Birkerts has enjoyed most and benefited from. But it’s clear that while the coming generations are changing, they are not deteriorating intellectually, but coping with the extreme environments that Birkerts himself has never been exposed to. And further, it’s important to note that many authors would care more that their message is received than the manner in which it is received. These people, their needs and even their wants are equally (if not more) important to the reading world as Birkerts’ classic-reading crowd, and it’s that realization and consideration that could give Birkerts the perspective and understanding of the next generation that he lacks. Until that point, The Gutenberg Elegies stands as a decent objection to the technologization of literature, and a poor assessment of the fate of the future intellectual world.