Further Thoughts On My 'Addiction'

Unfortunately, I’ve tabled ‘Saturday Songs’ this week for two reasons: firstly, the ominous fact that it’s Tuesday night and, secondly, because I didn’t listen to much music the past week…I’ve been traveling!

That said, I can offer some further thoughts on my (our?) addiction to entertainment. To be truthful, I was not entirely without ‘entertainment’ over the past week; that would be some kind of minor miracle. (I think I would need to go backpacking into the wilderness to actually escape the long reach of music, film, art, etc.) The crucial element of the past week was that I left my laptop at home. Recently, my laptop has begun to feel like an exploratory, experiential extension of self; I find new music, new films, and new artistic ideas through my laptop. (Also, rather obviously, I blog with my laptop…)

So I was without an extension of my seeming artistic self for nearly a week.

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The funny thing…art doesn’t just disappear. It’s everywhere, even when I thought that I left it behind. It coasts through the background of our conversations, popping up at odd moments—and that wasn’t just the case with my conversations, but with those of many of the people with whom I traveled—art was an inescapable force. It was a easy to grasp structure. Of course, there are always concurrent interests; I spoke briefly with an Italian woman about Latin American literature—she had, of course, a major in North and South American literature.

But even then, Tim, our tour guide up in the Highlands, structured the stories he told with artistic references; he used film and music references to color his stories about the Isle of Sky. Sometimes stories were even structured through their interactions with artistic forms. For example, the story about the road that Calum MacLeod built from his small crafting (farming) community of the island of Raasay (located off of the Isle of Skye) was explained partly through journalist Roger Hutchinson’s non-fiction book about MacLeod’s struggle and then also through the forthcoming filmic adaptation of the story.

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Tim, of course, was none too keen on the upcoming ‘Hollywood’ rendition of the story, but his distaste (and probably my distaste as well) for the story speaks to an interesting lens we apply to our experiences. We live and experience and, as we experience, we simultaneously cast a screen—or apply a lens, however you’d like to word it—over those experiences to view them in a ‘Hollywood’ way.

Maybe it’s not so much that we’re ‘addicted’ to entertainment, as David Foster Wallace argued in Infinite Jest, as the fact that we actively structure our existence through our relationship with entertainment. I don’t mean to say, “Oh, I’m going to watch a film at 4 p.m., listen to an album at 6 p.m., etc.” but rather offer that as we go through our day, we track our experience alongside a different kind of experience—maybe the kind of life that Hollywood would have us live—or the kind of life a pop song might ensconce.

Further thoughts are likely to follow…

Saturday Songs - Feb. 18

1. “If I Needed You” – Robby Hecht

During her performance last year at Hamilton College, Liz Longley and her accompanist Gus Berry played a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s best-known tune. Of course, I lost my mind, as I do whenever Townes crops up in unexpected places. Longley was just about the last songwriter I would have expected to land on Van Zandt as an inspiration; more indebted to the confessional singer-songwriter and bubblegum pop schools (and a graduate of Berklee School of Music), it seemed like an odd inclusion in her set.

Afterwards, when I spoke with Berry and Longley about the song, they confessed that they knew next to nothing about the song. They had simply learned it from a friend and fallen in love with it. Of course, I didn’t have the foresight to ask them the name of this friend. The friend turned out to be another lower-level singer-songwriter Robby Hecht. (To be clear, I don’t use ‘lower-level’ as a critical description; it’s only a description.)

Every once in a while, I drop a Townes song into Spotify or on Google and search for covers. Cover versions of Townes songs can be incredibly rewarding; Van Zandt was not the best singer and certainly had no flair for arrangement—you’d need only to listen to the awful string/orchestral accompaniments on his first two albums to know that—but the songs can usually hold their own.

So it was with some excitement that I found this warm, moving rendition of “If I Needed You.” But alongside Hecht’s voice, there was a female, harmonizing part. I listened carefully through the first two verses. Who else could it be other than Liz Longley?

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2. “Right Into Love” – Johnsmith

You can’t get much more ‘everyman’ than this guy. This is the kind of music you might find on a Wednesday night in a bar somewhere in Heartland America. The downside to the ‘everyman’ approach is that it quickly devolves into cliché. Very quickly. I challenge any one of you to listen to one of Johnsmith’s albums all the way through and remember back to three or four different songs. Immediately likable and unproblematic, they blend together from one song to the next.

However, this song is nice because of all the places it namedrops. I always find these ‘place-songs’ irresistible. And it’s not just towns—Johnsmith makes an honest attempt to capture all different elements of this road trip: shooting stars, sleeping bags, patched-up blue jeans, chestnut braided hair. There are alos some neat turns of phrase—“quintessential counterculture hippie pair” being one of them.

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3. “How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep” – Bombay Bicycle Club

I feel a bit compelled to include this song in light of the fact that an Edinburgh College of Art student spent six months designing and filming the stop-motion animation music video for this song. I’ll be honest: I’m a little terrified of the music video, in which a clay-looking man floats through a seeming dream world. It’s a little too much for me. However, the song is fantastic, building weird texture on top of weird texture until midway through the song when the drums explode onto the top of mix and pull all the elements together. Coldplay could probably learn a thing or two from the rise and fall of tension that the band so effectively employs throughout this song.

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4. “Traitor” – Richard Buckner

AllMusic claims that Buckner belongs to the Texas singer-songwriter school alongside the likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, but I would offer that Buckner has a little more in common with the late alt-country-rock maverick Chris Whitley, who also liked exploring weird and different textures and dark moods. Buckner never travels quite as far as Whitley did (banjos and electronic ‘noises’ on the same song), but he certainly delves into similar musical ideas. Listen to the interplay between the almost punky, lo-fi guitars and the shimmery keyboards on this song. A lonely slide guitar dips in between those two elements, completing the texture.

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5. Aim & Ignite – fun.

I’ve already raved about this band before—led by Nate Ruess, formerly of The Format—but I’m going to take a few seconds to again put forth the endearing brilliance and, yes, the fun of this band. For what I’m going to assume is a very limited time, their debut album Aim & Ignite is up on Noisetrade for free download. In an earlier Saturday Songs post, I described their song “All The Pretty Girls” as follows:

“Like a manic cross-polination of Electric Light Orchestra and Queen, ‘All The Pretty Girls’ is chock-full of (almost) mechanically perfect harmonies and expertly timed percussion taps and trills and hits à la Queen and once you add in the string parts and the clearly-processed backing vocals (see E.L.O.’s ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’), you’ve got a bizarrely fascinating song.”

You should probably download this now.

Are We Addicted To Entertainment?

In David Foster Wallace’s behemoth novel Infinite Jest, there is a film that is so entertaining that once people see it, they cannot stop watching it. All they want to do is keep watching the film: they don’t want to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, have sex, or what-have-you. They just want to watch the film. Part of Wallace’s point here is that American society (perhaps Western society) has a serious addiction to entertainment; in a way, there’s a dangerous irony that people finish the 1,079 page novel…it sort of proves Wallace’s point. (That said, many people never get around to finishing the damn thing.)

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Here’s the thing. Today, I finished the third season of Breaking Bad. In a previous post, I talked a little about my admiration for the show. Indeed, it’s a great show and worth watching for those of you who are unfamiliar. However, there’s a weird, uncomfortable caveat about the fact that I’m already starting to dig into the fourth season, which is that I started watching the show only about three weeks ago.

In my post about John K. Samson’s‘petition song,’ this blog entered the unlikely world of math, so I figured that I might keep the numbers going. Let’s say, for ease of calculation, that each episode of Breaking Bad is roughly 45 minutes long. There are seven episodes in the first season, 13 in the second, and 13 in the third. That…wait a minute, I’ve got this…is 33 episodes. Broken down into hours, I’ve spent more than a day of my life watching Breaking Bad.

In the long run, that might not sound so disturbing. An episode every week for a bunch of weeks in a row over a few years doesn’t exactly scream addiction. But an entire day out of the past 21 days of my life? Could Breaking Bad really have done that to me?

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I wish that Spotify and iTunes had a built-in log feature just so I could run a little experiment. If my indulgence in Walter White’s meth-centered life is somewhat disturbing, then I figure that the amount of music I listen to on a regular basis would really knock me out. How much time do I spend listening to music—even if there’s multi-tasking involved, i.e. I’m listening to M83’s album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming as I write this—over the course of a day? A week? A month? How much of my life is being filled in that way?

What about books? While reading isn’t exactly a pastime engaged in by most of the world—music and film seem to have more and more of a monopoly on the entertainment front—that’s a terrifying question for an English major. How much time do I spend?

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Am I an addict?


[More on this subject later...]

John K. Samson's Brilliant 'Petition Song'

Protest songs have been pretty common fare in popular music over the past century. While I think it’s fair to note that there are ‘levels’ of protest songs in terms of power—i.e. Bob Dylan’s “The Time They Are A-Changin’” doesn’t have quite the political oomph of Neil Young’s “Ohio”—they all have one feature in common: their functionality. Protest songs are designed to instigate change or at least call into question cultural and political practices and norms. “Ohio” might be the best example of a protest song; Young crafts a simple, striking rock song about the 1970 Kent State shootings of students by the Ohio National Guard.

Released only weeks after the May 4 shootings, the song peaked at #14 on the Billboard 100—a peak that might be attributed to the ban on many AM radio stations due to the controversial usage of President Nixon’s name in the lyrics. The song became emblematic of the counterculture movement that was still burgeoning in the early 1970s and Young—along with Crosby, Stills, and Nash—all became defacto spokesmen for the anti-war movement.

However, I’m not really interested in talking about protest songs; I’m more interested in the potential of a song to set out and attain a certain goal. I think “Ohio” is certainly a song that had a large-scale social impact upon its release; young people around the U.S. immediately identified with the rage and vitriol in the song. However, the goal of the song isn't exactly explicit within its exposition; it's somewhat vague. If the ‘goal’ of Young’s song was to express anger about the shootings and have the listener do the same, then there is only a loose political implication.

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However, that’s not so much a definite goal as the goal espoused by John K. Samson through his song “Petition”—or, as the album titles it “www.ipetitions.com/petition/rivertonrifle/.” That URL links to an actual online petition created by Samson in order to have former NHL player Reggie Leach, or “The Riverton Rifle,” voted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. In some sense, the tune might then be taken as a protest song; Leach has not yet been voted into the Hall, so it protests that unfairness.

However, the direct URL link and the emphatic lyrics (“We, the undersigned, put forth his name / to the Hockey Hall of Fame”) literally point to the fact that the goal of this song is not semi-‘vague’ in the manner of the aforementioned CSNY hit. The song literally functions as the petition itself; indeed, Samson has the song’s lyrics up on the ipetition.com website. Has the song worked so far?

Since the inception of Samson’s web-based petition on June 19, 2010, 1,024 people have signed it. (For reasons I can’t explain—I’m not a hockey fan, but a Samson fan—I number among them.) In the 22 days since the release of Samson’s album Provincial (on January 24), the petition has been signed by 511 people, as compared with the 513 who signed over the previous year and a half. The site was previously working around one person a day…so I think (obviously!) that there’s something to be said for the effect of the song on listeners.

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But what does it mean for a song—I’m going to just put it out there: a ‘work of art’—to have a definite goal like that? What if the goal is reached? Does the song becomes just…I don’t know…a footnote in the annals of hockey history? “Ohio” has a broad historical premise that it works around; in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it still provides the modern listener with tremors of disquiet. But if Leach were to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, the petition would be redundant. The song would be…at peace?

I haven’t yet acknowledged a larger problem: most people have no idea who Reggie Leach is. (I can say this because my hockey-playing girlfriend shrugged when I offered the name. "Brian Leetch?" she asked. "He played for the Rangers.") Even then, I think it’s safe to say that many people interested in the ‘indie’ music world (of which Samson is a part) don’t know enough about hockey to recognize the subject of this curious ‘petition song.’

But what if the song doesn’t actually have that goal?

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If the lyrics indeed form a petition, Samson has set up them up as a kind of puzzle. None of the verses—besides the clause dealing with Leach holding the Stanley Cup—have anything to do with his accomplishments in the NHL. Instead, Samson provides a glancing portrait of a man who overcame racism as a child (verse 2), a man whose talent could provoke a father into buying a new television and then enlisting the youngest child to hold the antenna by the window so that he can watch a hockey game (verse 3), and a man whose photograph would adorn bedroom walls for years (verse 4).

Samson makes little reference to actual career highlights and hard numbers. The only hockey statistic even hinted at is the detail that “the Rifle fired his first 500 here [in Riverton], then slapped his way into the NHL” (verse 1), but that detail is a number that could apply to oodles of hockey players out there. I would offer that the lack of hard statistics is the point of the song. Samson isn’t simply offering a petition for the induction of Leach into a hall of fame; he’s offering a new method of appreciation. Why should the hall of fame matter if it caters to hard career facts and statistics? What matters to most people who watch sports is not just the facts and figures, but the personalities at work out on the ice/field/court/etc. (Hence Bennett Miller’s film Moneyball is so depressing…players are reduced to numbers on paper.) While Samson doesn’t offer evidence and I can’t offer any either, I think it’s safe to say that Leach’s success out on the ice motivated a few First Nations members to play hockey.

In that way, Samson’s song ‘petition song’ is maybe a more significant tribute to Leach’s memory than an induction to the hall of fame could ever be. How many sports players have been validated through a great pop song? If you’ve got examples, leave them in the comments! 

Saturday Songs – Feb. 11

1. “Smart” – Girl In A Coma

I discovered this indie three-piece band from San Antonio through NPR’s always eye-opening Tiny Desk Concert series. Although I suspected a lot of the charm of their performance came out of the acoustic mode, it turns out that their recordings remain just as likable and are true to their namesake song (“Girl In A Coma” by the Smiths). “Smart” is quick, catchy and sounds like a lost gem from the 1980s—like it could have been an outtake off The Queen Is Dead.

A few critics have even noted the striking similarity between the voices of lead singer Nina Diaz and Morrissey. Like Morrissey, Diaz is playful with her voice: listen to the way she bends the line “Do you ever start to wonder / what’s it like to be alone?” There are even traces of an inspired British accent on “like!”

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2. “Goodnight Irene” – Kelly Joe Phelps

[Apologies for the above video - I could not find a slide guitar version of Phelps, but you can find the song on all major music sites...and Spotify!]


Of all the songs in the American folk tradition, Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” might be one of my favorites. Although everything about the song seems to come from such a dark, angry place, the song still bubbles with a beautiful warmth. Phelps—better than anyone else I’ve heard—succeeds in drawing out the warm inner beauty of the song. Pulling out his slide guitar (Phelps is a virtuoso), he wraps the lonesome lyrics in a hazy webbing of tremulous slide notes.

Phelps’s warm baritone presses the tune even further to the status of a lullaby. In fact, I fell asleep listening to this song last night. For a song that toys so openly with suicide, it’s a marvel that Phelps endows it with the comforting quality that it has.

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3. “Always” – Andrea Grass

[A live version, unfortunately, so there's no piano.]


Another Spotify discovery, there is nothing hugely original about Glass; she treads the familiar female singer-songwriter territory, singing about love and loss and heartbreak. You know the deal. However, this song strikes me for its encapsulating warmth despite having such thin instrumentation. I’m always glad to hear a great song like this one that hasn’t been drowned in studio affects: unnecessary percussion, silly keyboard hums, and pitch-perfect, auto-Tuned voices. The backing piano provides the helpful countermelodies to Glass’s lyrics, but other than the piano and Glass’s guitar, the song has all the signs of a coffeehouse performance…which it should!

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4. “The Ransom” – Madison Violet

The pop-country duo Madison Violet was far and away the band that I listened to most this past week. Not only have I been exploring their recent 2012 release The Good In Goodbye, I’ve also been investigating their back catalog, especially their 2009 album No Fool For Trying. While there are several tunes that I’ve had rattling around my head from that album, the one that has really stuck with me is “The Ransom.”

A forlorn tale of being musicians low on the totem pole (“motor court hotels are going to confiscate my soul”), “The Ransom” is notable, like Glass’s song, for its quiet, careful instrumentation and the beautiful, haunting harmonies between Brenley MacEachern and Lisa MacIsaac. You might also check out the second track “Lauralee” and the heart-rending tune “The Woodshop,” about a father who must build his son’s coffin.

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5. “A More Perfect Union” – Titus Andronicus

This song—and the entire album—almost resists description. From the excerpts of Civil War-era speeches to the complaints about growing up in suburban New Jersy to the quite nearly Conor Oberst-worthy lyrics to the punky Celtic thrashing which reigns sonically through most of the tunes, Titus Andronicus have made some bizarre artistic choices. However, all that said, this is a really great band with some truly rip-roaring riffs and catchy head-banging fun.

Walter White's 'American Dream'

I watched Twin Peaks 17 years after the second season finale. Lost addict that I was, I watched the final episode of Lost—the final one—nearly two months after everyone else had. I was avoiding Lost message boards and Wikipedia pages like a madman. I started watching The Office regularly during the middle of the third season. In the world of television, I seem to always be lagging behind everyone else.

So it isn’t much of a surprise that I’m a season and three quarters behind in watching the AMC hit show Breaking Bad. I am lurking on the fringes of the third season—on the third episode; I am slowly (or rather, quickly) making my way through the intertwining stories of high school chemistry teacher-turned-meth cook Walter White and his partner in crime Jesse Pinkman, a former student of Mr. White.

I realize, of course, that I am somewhat behind the times in commenting on troubles of the mysterious Mr. White, but I had the thought recently—having recently been reading about societal techniques of repression for my anthropology of death class—that Walter White is living what amounts to the actual ‘American Dream.’

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What I mean to say is this: the typical ‘American Dream’ is qualified as having a rewarding (both emotionally and fiscally) job, a nice-looking house in a nice-looking neighborhood, and a happy family. While the national literature—i.e. the Declaration of Independence—establishes nothing so specific as those three elements, it offers that each person (or “man” in the exact reference) has the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I should point out that I have no wish to comment on the political views of the founding fathers—only give a passing nod in their direction on my way to looking at Walter White’s peculiar version of the ‘American Dream.’

It is peculiar because it is violent and illegal. What is so fascinating with any person’s relationship with the law is that you define yourself according to it…even if you choose to break it. (I’m assuming the law is knowingly broken; I'm not dealing with psychopaths.) Even though Walter has an argument with his DEA-employed brother-in-law Hank about the legality of marijuana and other drugs, part of the appeal of these drugs in the first place is their illegality.

There is an undeniable thrill in breaking the law. I will openly confess here that very real personal thrill. While there’s a thrill in underage drinking, there’s far more of a thrill in something like trespassing. You are very physically crossing a boundary.

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When Walter and his wife Skyler are having raucous sex in Walter’s small compact car in the school parking lot, Skyler (pantingly) asks Walter, “Why is this so good?”

“Because it’s illegal,” he answers.

It’s almost as if a halo of joy and excitement surround the possibility of illegality in Breaking Bad. Every character in the show engages in some form of illegality—from minor offense, such as that of Hank in watching Walter provide his underage son with alcohol, to the major offenses, such as Walter's methamphetamine production, drug sale, and murder.

The show creator Vince Gilligan has gone on record to note that he wanted to write a television series that started with a protagonist who slowly shifted into an antagonist. The one issue for me is that Walter—at least not yet—has not faded from being a protagonist. As far as I’m concerned, he has, so to speak, stripped away his superego and let his id run rampant. All the Freudian repressions of sexuality (to an extent, anyway, in the car-sex scene) and violence started to be enacted.

It’s no secret that sociologists and anthropologists (not to mention psychoanalysts like Freud) theorize that there are dangerous impulses lingering just beneath our skins. It’s a demented kind of pleasure to watch those impulses be acted out through the character of Walter White...a kind of 'American Dream'?

Saturday Songs – Feb. 4

1. “If I Had A Boat” - James Vincent McMorrow

Not a sneaky cover of the famous Lyle Lovett tune, as I initially suspected, McMorrow has crafted a cagey, ominous song with undertones not only of the lush, singer-songwriter territory of Justin Vernon, but also the electronic touch of James Blake. But what McMorrow manages—despite the clear studio production of the tracks—is a raw, unnerving emotion. The final half-minute of the song more than adequately demonstrates McMorrow’s emoting chops.

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2. “Some Things Never Change” - Robert Francis

Everyone rejoice! Robert Francis has a new album due for release on May 22! That might be far away, but Francis has been kind enough to lend us a taste of the album with a free download on his website. The song—“Some Things Never Change”—is breezier than the fare on his 2009 album Before Nightfall. In terms of production values, the song expands on the warm, haunting atmosphere of Francis’s reworking of “One By One” on Before Nightfall (it was also on Francis’s debut album). It’s not quite as catchy as “Junebug”…but, then again, not many songs are.

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3. “Old Pine” - Ben Howard

I love a folk artist who can play guitar. That’s not to say that I dislike anyone who can merely strum chords and write great tunes…just that some guitar chops is always a cherry on top. Howard leads off his debut album Every Kingdom with this nigh-virtuoso acoustic guitar workout. The song would be fine without its epic outro, but the outro—along with the guitar playing in it—separates Howard from the chaff of the folk singer-songwriter world.

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4. “Sun in an Empty Room” – The Weakerthans

It might, in some odd way, be negligent of me to omit this song from Saturday Songs for the fact that I’d like to write about it in more length in another post…because I’ve listened to this song at least 50 times in the past week. It wouldn’t fair to call this song merely good. This song is great. It might be one of the greatest pop songs I’ve ever heard. While I haven’t listened hard (and long) enough to Samson’s work to fairly judge him as one of my favorite songwriters, I do think that he’s one of the best pop songwriters working today. It’s simple: he understands the form. He knows what kind of details to put in this song to make it work; the imagery and emotions do not require immense reflection to “get” the song. Samson’s words and the way he phrases them into a melody make everything crystal clear.

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5. “You Must Go” – John Hiatt

While most people prefer early Hiatt—the “Have A Little Faith In Me” years, as I like to think of them—I prefer Hiatt’s 1995 album Walk On to most other work in his discography. Sure, there are a bunch of weak songs on that album…even some songs that aren’t worth listening to at all. However, there are several cuts that come across to me as so honest and real that I cannot ignore them. Sure, there are pleasures in “Thing Called Love,” but nothing about that song measures up to the fatherly wisdom of a song like “You Must Go.” While “Thing Called Love” sounds like more of an exercise in musical expertise, “You Must Go” sounds more like a barnyard romp with a bunch of friends.

Beating Up On Jonathan Franzen

In the scattershot literary landscape that is the United States today, Jonathan Franzen has emerged—along with the late David Foster Wallace (see his much-circulated graduation speech given at Kenyon College in 2005)—as the preeminent spokesperson for the non-academe intelligentsia. In the current cultural backlash (especially in a post-Occupy world), anyone who speaks out for the divide between ‘good’ culture and ‘bad’ culture is bound to be branded as ‘elitist’ or, at very least, ‘controversial.’

While Franzen hasn’t clarified that divide in so many words, he has nevertheless appealed to that loose understanding. For example, see the kerfuffle he caused when he spoke out against his 2001 novel The Corrections being included in Oprah Winfrey’s book club. Franzen labeled Oprah’s picks for the book club as being “schmaltzy.” Now there are plenty of great novels in her book club and I’m not here to address that decade-old feud, but I think—as a broad generalization—that it’s worth sometimes trying to draw lines in the sand when it comes to ‘popular’ art and more ‘serious’ art.

Franzen’s latest faux pas involves his relationship with e-books, particularly in that he accuses those who read on e-books as not being “serious readers” in the Telegraph two days ago. I think, ironically, that people are taking his sentiments too seriously. I would argue—maybe without the blessing of Franzen, but what does that matter in the long run? I’m pursuing my own argument now—that there is an important philosophical argument hiding underneath what might seem to be ‘technology-hating’ rhetoric.

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Franzen claims, “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. […]

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

In Torie Bosch’s summary of this latest Franzen feud on Slate.com, she helpfully points to an article in the Telegraph by Tom Chivers, who wonders: “Does he think that e-publishers will surreptitiously edit classic works? […] In all honesty, I suspect that this is an example of a very clever man using his considerable brainpower to dress up unconscious prejudice in what sounds like reasoned argument.”

In response to Bosch’s concerns, I think she overlooks Franzen’s more philosophical point. There are crucial differences in the ways that we approach paper and screens. I’ll emphasize once more that I’m merely following Franzen’s faded footsteps down this path of argument, but I would contest that there are deep psychological and cultural associations that we bring to any interaction with a screen. For more than half a century in human history, screens were the playground for film and, briefly, television, before they had anything to do with computers. (For a great, hard-to-read, difficult, and rewarding discussion, check out Gunt her Kress’s discussion of how the screen has replaced the page as the major form of communication in his book Literacy in the New Media Age.)

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We all have to remember that the widespread use of the Internet and computers is a very recent development in our history. We still have trouble cognitively understanding how to communicate through them. (See Ilana Gershon’s excellent book The Breakup 2.0 about ending relationships through Facebook and other technologies.) While our experience of the Internet has a remarkable number of dimensions, the primary experience is one of openness and change. For anyone who has ever used the unfortunately addictive StumbleUpon application, you know that the Internet is unfathomably deep. There is no end to the Internet. There is also no tidiness to the Internet. There is no sense of neatness and cleanness. There are corners of the Internet, here and there, which are well-swept and kept up, but for every ‘complete’ experience on the Internet, there are hundreds of dead links and cluttered blog pages and random image files.

I think this extreme randomness that is part of any Internet experience (indeed, perhaps part of the Internet ideology) and the Internet’s implicit association with screens is what led Franzen to say what he said. I’m equally uncomfortable associating my reading experience, which should hopefully not be cluttered, unless it be intentionally so (Naked Lunch?), with something so open-ended and changing.

So maybe the worst thing you can say about Franzen is that he didn’t express himself all that well…assuming he was trying to arrive at a similar screen/page argument. As for e-books? I don’t like them. I don’t like Kindles and Nooks and iPads either. But you already knew that, didn’t you?