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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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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.

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Riding It Home

When I was a teenager, I bucked bales in the hay fields every summer from June to August. It was hard work, monotonous, dangerous, and working conditions were horrifying by today’s standards. In the fields, the sun beat down relentlessly, but the bale bucks all went shirtless, eight, ten hours at a stretch. Unloading hay in the barns, the air was thick with hay dust; sometimes it was hard to see fifteen feet.

For the first couple of weeks each summer, my back was a sheet of blisters as layers of skin burned, peeled away, and burned again. I slept on my stomach and took aspirin for the burn and fever. After a bad day in barns, I coughed black phlegm. I still associate summer with sunburn and congestion.

The work was picking up, carrying, and stacking forty to seventy-five pound bales onto wagons and into the barn. The cut ends of the hay wore through jeans and slashed skin; arms were red and bleeding by the end of the day. Dousing them with diesel oil soothed burn and seemed to speed healing, if you could take the searing pain when the diesel hit raw flesh. I wonder what a physician would think of that home remedy.

The toughest job was stacking the bales on the wagon. Some bales had to be lifted over your head in a military press onto the top of the load while standing on a jerking wagon on rough ground; just standing up was difficult. Carrying, lifting, and placing the bales on an unsteady platform took strength and skill. Comic tractor drivers popped the clutch to knock the bale bucks over in mid-lift. If an injury stopped you from working, your summer job was gone.

Fifty years later, a dermatologist has found pre-cancerous lesions on my skin. My orthopedist attributes the arthritis in my knees, hips and back to those years of grinding on my joints in the wrong ways.

Do I resent the hayfields when I have trouble standing up in the morning? Or when my dermatologist orders another biopsy? Not often. Would I wish it on a teenager today? No. They have their own learning fields.

But stacking hay on a wagon, you have choices. If you stack a sloppy load, it will collapse and have to be restacked. If you stack a perfect load, your self-serving perfection is a waste of the crew’s time.

The farmers had a way of forcing this tradeoff. They pushed mercilessly to get the hay on the wagons, and then made the stacker climb to the top of the load and ride it home to the barn—often five or so miles on rough county roads as fast as a pickup could pull the load. A stacker could place the bales any way he pleased, but he had to ride his load home. A stacker who wouldn’t ride it home was, well, someone who wouldn’t ride it home.