Book ‘em, Dummo
Way back when — the early 90's — when I lived in the Chicago area, a minor tempest erupted in the tea cup of the letters to the editor when a mother complained about her daughter having to read a book over summer vacation. The poor child was to enter the ninth grade the next fall, and her ever-watchful if mindlessly blind guardian thought it execrable that the school should suggest that the girl read a book during the intervening several months. It would ruin her daughter’s vacation, she declaimed. After all, the mother charged, the school wasn’t in charge of her daughter over that time.
By the way, it wasn’t a particular book but any book. Not some fire-fodder profanity like "Catcher in the Rye" or "Huckleberry Finn". There was considerable and not inappropriate palaver about how this woman should have her license to mater revoked. The matter was finally resolved — in my mind, though certainly not in the mother’s — by a simple comment by a teacher who wrote of the too-protesteth parent, I always thought that reading was a vacation. Case-o closed-o.
Yup. Echoed the sentiments of my mother who once wondered how someone could get on a trans-Atlantic flight without a book. She didn’t feel a Walkman and a fistful of tapes were adequate fuel -- at least distraction -- for the hours of constriction in the aluminum cylinder. A professional writer herself for a quarter century, it was beyond her understanding that people would not default to the leaves of literature at every opportunity. We’re talking a woman who taught herself French and read Proust propped up on the window sill above the sink as she did the dishes.
I was brought up in a large house which center of activity — other than the kitchen — was the library. It was where my mother wrote and my father read and the children were tolerated if they were quiet, which wasn’t much fun for the children, but it was a big house so we could find entertainment elsewhere. And it wasn’t in front of the television set, which we had at sufferance for major world events, and not for numbing the cranium.
Books were always a great joy for me. They either enhanced my growth or stunted it, according to different criteria. There was a time toward the end of my first decade when my mother was concerned that I didn’t go out and play enough with my friends. I would instead fill the baskets of my bike with books at the library every week and spend delicious hours playing with the Hardy boys, the Happy Hollisters, and Bronc Burnett; later I would travel the world with Sabatini and Kenneth Roberts.
We have lost interest in reading, it seems. One of the local city councilman objected to funding the library, saying that none of his friends ever went to the place. It is a clue that the man operates five McDonald’s franchises. I think if he thought that far, he’d count himself dam-site lucky that people can read the drive-thru menu kiosks, though truth be told, those pictures do help to speed those palateless peasants to the tasteless trough of salt-’n-grease. An intellectual in Redding -- more a target than a sign of greatness -- is someone who has a subscription to TV Guide.
The ever-expanding that once was merely vast wasteland that is television has deprived us of our imagination. It thinks for those who haven’t the energy or impetus to think for themselves. It obviates the synaptic circuits, and over time will no doubt result in the atrophying of that part of our brain that separates us from the lower animal orders. But we’ll save a lot of trees.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.