On Vacation
Posted on May 10, 2008
Walkabout Jones is taking a few weeks off to write speeches for Barack Obama. Long speeches, composed on rolls of toilet paper, mailed to his campaign headquarters unsolicited. So far, no luck. But this week we’re switching to paper (blank pages from myriad credit card offers) and hope is running high. If all else fails, we’ll put our message to music with the help of a bluegrass band and yodelers.
However it goes, the work of crafting a vision for America takes time. So the site is taking a siesta for a few weeks. Maybe forever, assuming Obama is so impressed by our masterwork he appoints us Director of Homeland Security or official White House nacho taster. Either job would be a step up.
So chill for a few weeks, Jonesians. Who could have imagined just a few days ago, we’d be in this unique place in history, where we could stalk Barack Obama with rednecks, Ricola, Tostitos, and hope?
In the unlikely event we’re not his running mate, Walkabout Jones will reluctantly return in June.
Check you later,
WJ
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Baghdad by the Bay
Posted on May 5, 2008
Sharing: Jonathan Franzen
Posted on May 2, 2008
A few months ago, I gave away my television set. It was a massive old Sony Trinitron, the gift of a friend whose girlfriend couldn’t stand the penetrating whistle the picture tube emitted. Its wood-look veneer recalled an era when TV sets were trying, however feebly, to pass as furniture—an era when their designers could still imagine them in a state of not being turned on. I kept it in inaccessible places, like the floor of a closet, and I could get a good picture only by sitting cross-legged directly in front of it and touching the antenna. It’s hard to make TV viewing more unpleasant than I did. Still, I felt the Trinitron had to go, because as long as it was in the house, reachable by some combination of extension cords, I wasn’t reading books.Â
I was born in 1959, on the cusp of a great generational divide, and for me it’s a toss-up which is scarier: Living without electronic access to my country’s culture, or trying to survive in that culture without the self-definition I get from regular immersion in literature. I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly lonely. It has little to do with the mediascape that constitutes so many other people’s present.
For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images—a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers—feels apocalyptic.
Novels are by no means dead, of course—just ask Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy. But the novel, as a seat of cultural authority, is teetering on the brink.
In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts registers his surprise and dismay that its decline has not been more widely mourned. Not even professional book critics, who ought to be the front line of the novel’s defenders, have raised the alarm, and Birkerts, who is a critic himself, sounds like a loyal soldier deserted by his regiment. The tone of his elegies is brave but plaintive. Birkerts begins his defense of the novel by recounting how while growing up in an immigrant household, he came to understand himself by reading Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger and Herman Hesse. The authors, as well as the alienated romantic heroes of their books, became models for emulation and comparison. Later, on the desolate emotional beach on which the wave of sixties idealism seems to have deposited so many people, Birkerts weathered years of depression by reading, by working in bookstores, and finally by becoming a reviewer. Read more
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