functional (il)literacy

“Nowadays, nobody’s feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else’s.” -Gore Vidal 

The L.A. Times Book Review is about to go the way of the polar ice caps in our day. Only five stand-alone Sunday book reviews remain in America; Chicago, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and D.C. will be the only cities in which you can wake-up, open your Sunday paper, and find lively debate and discussion of all that is literary.

Big deal, some might say, “We can just find out about books on the internet.” Correct. And, in this age of democritization of all knowledge, whether it be nuclear or literary, the gatekeepers are growing more and more powerless all the time.  Everyone’s ideas and opinions become as valid as everyone else’s. 

The reason that we had gatekeepers, in the first place, whether they be artistic, scientific, or political elites, is to enable specialization of knowledge. To enable an understanding of the historical context that new developments, within any particular field, are occuring within, and how to continue progress within that field. Without them, we are merely haphazardly pursuing knowledge and seeking progress without any sense of context to guide us.

It makes me wonder if those original celebrants of democratization, in modern history, the enlightenment thinkers, realized that openess of information, coupled with equality of status, might very well one day lead to the destruction of the very process of rational thought that they so celebrated?

el primero blogo

“Dear Venus, If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids….You are as well prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you- look at the burnish of you.”  Martin Amis, House of Meetings. 2007.

Starting off the whole blog thing with a passage from Mr. Amis’s recently published work of fiction about the Soviet Gulag, that I had the fortune of hearing him read from and discuss a few weeks back. The above qoute is from the beginning of the novel when the narrator is introducing the current Russian malaise to a member of the younger generation before leading into the Soviet era.

The house of meetings was apparently where those ghoulish and ghostly walking visions of death that were Stalin’s political prisoners, working in prison labor camps, were allowed to meet their wives and girlfriends to share a night of intimacy, together, after they had suffered from years of malnutrition and were bereft of all libido. This opportunity to meet your lover, at the house of meetings, was both a blessing and a curse: you were fortunate enough to see the woman that you loved, but you couldn’t get it up. (The impotence of modern man in a mechanistic and totalitarian world?) As you left the house of meetings, your ego shattered, the other prisoners would give you understanding nods. The comradery of the dispossessed.

Mr. Amis’s next book (non-fiction) is to be entitled “The Pregnant Widow” and is based on the metaphor of a revolution giving birth, to a new idea or movement, and then dying off itself. It is said to focus on the sexual revolution as the primary social movement of post-war Western society.