Tha Antidote to Literacy
by NIH literary editor, St. Clair Carr
The times are grim for literary types. We need our daily fix of literature and it's getting harder to find. Although the supply of books is greater than ever, prices have skyrocketed and quality has plummeted. I get the jumps a lot these days.
The stuff costs these days. Try buying a book at the monster bookstores which have suddenly appeared on every corner. It helps to be Bill Gates. My 1968 Penguin edition of Three Men in a Boat sold in Canada for 85 cents. The current Penguin edition, identical in every way to the 1968 edition except for the cover, costs $9.99. That means the price of the book has increased at over twice the rate of inflation.
Another book which in 1968 would have sold in paper for about 85 cents is Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It has been reissued in trade paper for $14.95. The bigger trade paper format is very popular these days. The pocket book format is rarely used for anything with even a remote resemblance to literature. Those monster trade paper editions help the literature pushers keep up their cash flow. And needy literati are driven to desperate measures to get the cash for their daily fix.
Have a look in one of these monster books at one of the monster bookstores. The percentage which do not constitute literature at all is now enormous. The mind boggles at the acreage of bookstores given over to self-help books, motivational books, New Age books, ghosted celebrity biographies, and shelf after shelf of big fat bloated guides to the latest ephemeral computer fads. The good stuff is hard to get these days, and the streets and alleys are full of literati dying of boredom.
Indigo and Chapters and the other monster book vendors have become antidotes to literacy. If you need literature, they can't help you much. What's worse, they're being taken over by that Most Monstrous of All Monsters, The Most Evil Influence on the Face of the Planet – the Oprah.
The monster stores now feature shrines to the Oprah's latest selection of inspirational literature. Some of her choices are in fact real literature, but they are not promoted as literature. They are promoted as Valuable Guides to Success. Even if they were valuable guides to success, that still means they wouldn't be literature.
When was the last time you saw a successful person reading literature? Have you noticed Mark McGwire reading At Swim-Two-Birds in the dugout? Has Elle Macpherson held you spellbound as she discourses on the Letterman show about narrative conventions in the work of David Lodge? I don't think so. The whole point of literature is that it requires your attention. While you're paying attention to it you have no time to organize the campaigns of self-improvement (for example, perfecting your ability to hit a ball with a stick) which are essential for success. Furthermore, only those who are comfortable with the selves they have can have the courage to do what literature requires – give serious consideration to another person's inevitably different conception of the world.
I could go on but I'm getting the jumps real bad. I've got to get well. I'm going to a used bookstore where I've heard they have uncut French novels.
The Antidote to Literacy © Coolth, 2000
