Don't eat junk food or waste your time with junk reading. That's
the advice from the editors of Publio: Culture at the Boiling
Point, a magazine that celebrates, according to its mission
statement, the "rich bedlam" of today's world and is "free of any
specific political agenda or ideological bent."
The advice in the Winter 2006 issue from the editors: "To
confine your reading habits to Big Media is to commit to a steady
diet of ice cream and marshmallows. In a market ruled by the bottom
line and higher ratings, media conglomerates operate according to
the tyranny of instant gratification. Revealing a breast and
announcing the latest diet fad sell more magazines than presenting
simple truths and compelling reflections on our culture."
One of the magazine's articles, "Artist's Apocalypse," envisions
the end of animals and humans, the end of artists, in the next
global collapse. The ants survive, and the spiders. And the
question? "Will there ever be art again? Will the world of insects,
at some very distant stage of their evolution, give rise to
creative insects that make art?"
The speculative answer in the article is that insects will not
produce artists but excellent designers, like spiders spinning
extraordinary designs. Or the art of insects might be more
inherent, as with the beauty and delicacy of butterfly wings.
Admittedly, that's some heavy speculation, less marshmallowy
than reading about Brad Pitt's latest fling or which Greek
millionaire is partying with Paris Hilton.
Another article, "Kemo Sabe: Camp America, Tonto, and the Lone
Ranger," quotes African-American writer James Baldwin (1924-1988):
"It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a
world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian."
Continue the editors, regarding the warning against a diet of
ice cream reading: "Worthless information has the same effect on
the mind that plain sugar has on the body. It requires no effort to
digest. It accelerates but does not nourish. We become what we see
and read. We are extensions of the screen, the monitor, the machine
-- nothing but an erratic click of the remote."
But the choices are out there, say the editors, and it's our job
to get beyond the fluff: "It is a disservice to reduce our
curiosities and intentions to row upon row of glossy magazines that
show some skin and promise the secrets of how to better' please him
or her.'"
And so, spurred on by that advice, my New Year's resolution is
to read more seriously. Here's my opening list, already purchased
and not a marshmallow in the bunch:
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish
Epoch, 1743-1933, by Amos Elon, the wrenching history of
how a small and stunningly successful minority came to be perceived
as a deadly threat to German national integrity.
Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays
1952-1995, by Allen Ginsberg, the
hippie-mystic-gay-teacher-activist-revolutionary apostle of the
Beat movement.
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty
Million, by Martin Amis, a history and memoir on Stalin
and the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West.
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary
Generation, by Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer-winning story of
how Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and
Madison prevailed over vast obstacles in setting the course for the
nation.
Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants
Kill, by Jessica Stern, an examination of how people come
to see themselves as instruments of divine wrath, gained through
face to face interviews with some of the most dangerous religious
militants of our times.
Bad Trip and Size Matters: How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on
America's Families, Finances, and Freedom, both by Joel
Miller. In the first, Miller argues that the government's war on
drugs is the ultimate bad trip. The second, Size Matters,
says Instapundit.com, "is a virtual manifesto for the PorkBusters
movement."
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become
the Smartest Person in the World, by A. J. Jacobs, a
memoir of Jacobs's all-consuming quest to read all 44 million words
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, A to Z. I'm only on
Jacobs's chapter F and already I've learned that there aren't many
bald Indians or Asians, Friedrich Engels didn't apply his
anti-capitalist prescriptions to the profitable operations of his
own company, Aztecs called magic mushrooms "God's flesh," and
Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women.
topics:
Africa, Communism, Oil
