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Were the Lambs Silent?

I finished reading Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs this morning.
I read it years ago when after seeing the movie with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. I don’t remember reading the book the first time and my recollection of the movie is vague. I did notice that Dr. Lecter’s comment on serving human liver with fava beans was moved to the end in the movie.

My most insightful impression on this reading was that Dr. Lecter progressed from devouring minds as a psychiatrist to devouring bodies as a serial killer, which appears to be an indictment of psychology in a book that popularized criminal profiling. I don’t intend to criticize, I enjoyed the book immensely, but it did not strike me as particularly well written. Too many sentences that sounded awkward in my ear, too many words that clunked because a better choice was available. The writing reminded me of Stephen King, another writer I like to read but would prefer that he put on a little more polish. Both Harris and King tell stories that are hard to put down with engaging characters, but read a little rough, like an elegant piece of furniture with a finish that needs another rubout and coat of varnish.

The characters central characters in The Silence of the Lambs are all driven by their psychology, which derives from their childhood experiences. In this book, we don’t know about Lecter, but Harris’s other books depict it as grotesque. Jame Gumb, a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, was dumped by an alcoholic mother, whom he idolizes. Clarice Starling was deprived of her mother’s love and had to save her horse from her uncle and the glue factory. These wretched childhoods are not seen so frequently in books from the first half of the Twentieth Century. Even Dickens’ orphans were better treated.

Have brutally wretched childhoods become more common? Or have they become more interesting and more discussed? I have no means of knowing, but the media certainly cater to a taste for childhood misery. A scan of a local television app this morning reveals two stories involving children involved in gruesome crime. Thirty years ago, we didn’t have apps to look at, and I didn’t find a newspaper from 1984, but I think child brutality was not an established genre then. But I’ll bet it was rampant.

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Six Reasons To Read P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse (pronounced “Wood House” as I learned after pronouncing it incorrectly for many years) was a prose stylist and one of the great humorists of the 20th Century. S.J. Perelman, James Thurber, and Ring Lardner are his peers. I reread a few of Wodehouse’s novels and short stories each year. My Wodehouse paperbacks have worn rounded corners and yellowed pages, but I keep on reading them. Here is why:

  1. Current events. Bertie Wooster and his posse are frequently jailed for knocking hats off policemen. Would they have been jailed more frequently if the police wore webcams?
  2. Political Theory. Wodehouse’s heroes are from the wealthy upper classes, but they struggle against oppression. An aunt insists Bertie marry a mountebank, a secretary bullies a titled pig fancier; these all chronicle life under the iron heel.
  3. Health. Jeeves has a mixture that instantly cures hangovers. This is the stuff of health legend.
  4. Style. Silver cow creamers appear in Wodehouse plots. My grandmother had a porcelain cow creamer. The tail was the handle and the cream poured from the cow’s mouth. As a child, I thought a porcelain cow creamer was the tip top of sophistication. Then I read Wodehouse and discovered that the upper crust has silver cow creamers.
  5. Art. I once spent a day in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London looking for a silver cow creamer. They have a whole herd of them, but the cows all have matchstick legs and flies on their backs. My grandmother would not have a cow with flies on her table. Apparently, sophisticates like flies on their table.
  6. Education. Wodehouse was published in Playboy so modest swains in search of wisdom could enjoy Playboy without looking at the pictures.
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Electronic Deep Reading

fawnI read an interview with Will Self this morning in the Guardian. Is the fate of our literary culture sealed? He regrets the passing of “deep reading,” reading in which the reader is fully immersed in the text. The opposite of deep reading is shallow reading, the kind of reading I do when surfing the web, an idle activity. I catch the gist of a piece and flick to the next item, trying to pick out what is interesting to me and move on. This style of reading is the kind I do in the stacks in a library or wandering in a bookstore. Read just enough to decide if I want to check out or buy the book. Then I take it home and read it. If it is good, I read it as deeply as it deserves or resonates with my interests. Reading is a continuum that runs from shallow to deep. I imagine it is the same for most readers.

Do I read electronic texts deeply? Of course. While surfing, when a report or essay strikes me as important to me, I often become immersed and read it as deeply as I read paper books. When I read a book that arrests me on my Kindle, I am lost to world. (Ask my wife.)

I experience many differences between the electronic reading experience and reading a paper book, but they are most similar, I should say identical, when I am most absorbed. Mr. Self writes about forgetting all “the workaday contingencies of their identity” while reading deeply. Among those contingencies is the media itself: desktop display, phone, dedicated reader, paperback, custom leather binding, they all are forgotten when deeply reading paper or an electronic display. Or at least I forget them, and I don’t think I am unique.

Publishing is certainly changing, but I very much doubt that reading itself is changing. Electronic reading is superficially different from paper reading and those superficial differences are challenging because they force readers to change habits they have developed since they were children: the way to hold a book and the how it feels in their hands, turning the pages, using a finger for a temporary bookmark, judging where they are by the thickness of pages already read. These are all parts of the reading experience that are not reproduced in electronic reading, but they have nothing to do with deep reading.

Until readers get beyond these and many other habits, they may have difficulty achieving deep reading electronically. As a software engineer, I have transitioned into electronic reading over at least two decades, so I am not a useful example, but I notice among my friends, the acclimation period is measured in weeks and months, not decades. Also, I observe that better readers, usually the ones who claim to be most attached to paper books, are the quickest studies at electronic reading after they start.

It’s fun to declare that the world is going to hell on a flat screen display and eInk, but I doubt that deep reading is on its way out.