My great friend Tim Kreider is writing another article, this one about books that shape us in childhood, and “why literature and art in general loses its power to change our personalities and our lives as we grow older. “
Since I have no idea if my response got to him in time for his article, or whether it’s useful, I’m posting what I feel relevant here. Fair warning: I’m a fast and careless writer more often than not. This isn’t wordsmithery, this is a hurried -but genuine and substantial, I hope – response to a request from a friend.
Hi Tim,
I’m not 100% convinced your thesis
is true of me, in that I still feel pretty moved by things I’m
reading. In fact, I’m reading and being influenced more than ever I
think lately, as I’ve begun to read more consciously. Your certainly
right that books in our youth shape us (for me- it’s Peanuts
again) but I think the subtle growths we are capable of in our
adulthood are still significant, even if they don’t appear so from the
outside.
But maybe my thinking about this is strange, and if so, for two reasons.
1: I may be overemphasizing the mature growth a conscious person goes
through. If I’m over-compensating, it’s only to not seem a stagnant
adult.
2: I’m a notorious blank slate. My memory is so horrible, I barely
remember my own efforts and conversations of last week, let alone the
books I read a long time ago. Often I think the only thing shaping me
-that I’m conscious of- are the things in my present.
That said, I’ll try to give a proper response to this.
Childhood: Peanuts books. Mad Magazine. Books about cartooning. Novels
about animals: Call of the Wild, Born Free, etc.
There was a silly children’s book about a pumpkin who goes trick or treating
as a spider that I rather liked.
Adolescence: Foxfire books. These were a series of (10?) documentary
anthologies about the skills and stories of Appalachian people.
I found the self-sufficiency and simplicity of their lives and
behaviors so incredibly powerful.
Douglas Adams. Any smart kid with a disbelief in the real world has to
discover these at some point. Lucky boys and girls have sympathetic
adults to lend them; I actually stumbled on these cause they were in
the first part of the fiction section that I was browsing in my local
book store. Then I found out later that everyone knew about them!
Vonnegut: Same as above. Disbelief and frustration with the idiocy
around one will lead one to Vonnegut.
Love and Rockets. Cerebus.
A book of poetry by a guy named ANTLER. In the Whitman, Ginsberg vein,
poems about the woods, people doing simple things, slight
impeachments of our society, etc.
Age 17-20ish: Dharma Bums by Kerouac. Still to this day I’ve never
read On The Road, but I’ve read Dharma Bums two or three times. Again,
like the Foxfire books, it’s about freedom and simplicity, and
choosing actions that are coarse and simple, living close to the
ground for benefit of the spirit.
Understanding Comics.
Adult years 21-30:
Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities. Showing that literature
could be a sparkling creation, guided by curiosity, and intelligence.
Borges should have done this for me, but I never responded to Borges
as much. His erudition was beyond me.
(Image courtesy Mmothra blog- thanks!)
In Search of the Miraculous and other books about GI Gurdjieff.
(Hi Staats!) This
more than any other book maybe had an explosive effect on my
personality. This, coupled with two or three terrific acid trips at
age 21 or 22 (actually, I might not have read it all the way through
until 24 or 25) gave me my still governing principles about well,
Life, the Universe and Everything.
A Pattern Language- a hippyish book about the options available in
planning a city, a town, a street, a home. It made me realize that if
we create our surroundings using the needs of people as our governing
idea, we would be happy. What a crazy thought! But it also went into
the depth and the subtlties of people’s needs. Poetic needs, needs of
quiet and of loud culture, of ritual, bonding, but of solitude and
nature.
Small is Beautiful much like the above, about our economic systems.
See Hutch Owen’s Working Hard for regurgitation of that.
Philip K Dick. The Moomin Books by Tove Janssen.
Jealousy, and Towards a New Novel, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Taking off where Calvino started
in my brain, Robbe-Grillet sling-shotted it even farther.
Link here from my blog posting after his death.
Lastly, two books about art. One, a comprehensive overview of modern
art, devoured while I was stranded and mostly alone in Morocco (and sent to me by
Jon Lewis- hi Jon!) gave me a brain opening primer into art from the 19th
century and on. My college experience woefully incomplete, books replaced
it where necessary.
Two, Classical Music for Dummies. Seriously! The entire world of
Western Classical Music was sealed and taped up and the windows
painted black til I decided to read something about it that would take
me through it. I can’t imagine living in a world without Beethoven, or
Debussy or Brahms now.
Later adult hood 30+:
Harold Bloom books on “The Canon” and “On Reading” this or that, helped me
understand how to read. Again, I never had good reading classes in
college, It gave me an appreciation for writers I haven’t read, but
now look forward to: Milton, Dante, etc.
All the comic books which through careful inspection have helped
teach me how to DRAW and think about comics. Tezuka published
by Vertical (go Vertical!).
Currently, every time I read Nabokov my brain explodes into thinking
about how to use words, and how glorious rolling around in them can
be. Further, Margaret Atwood makes me crazy for every reason,
Mary Gaitskill has a tailor’s approach to her raw materials that
excites me, and Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude is forever
burned in my brain. All this
has happened in the past few years!
Let’s hear it for the late bloomers!
Alright, this is where I gush like everyone else. Nothing original here. Leela and I have just returned from Maui where we taught in Makawao for 10 days and ravenously visited the rest of the island in our free time.
The place is so full of life, of green and moisture and ocean and streams and lovely birds and wild-looking delicious fruits. It’s got wild chickens (see right (or is that one some sort of pheasant?)), lovely people, a defunct volcano (2 actually), hundreds of microclimates (including types of desert, tundra, rainforest, etc.), great coffee, silence, color, a love of art, the 4th best observatory on the planet (off-limits to the public), ranching, rodeos, plein-air art festivals, hula, keiki, craters, cattle, sugar cane everywhere, mangoes to die for, dragon fruit, glorious avocados
,folk-art, giant trees, zen monks, taiko, pork-in-the-dirt, spam sushi, surfer car rental places, a long and fascinating history and tropical fish that will basically swim up to your cheek and kiss you in your pores, as if you needed one more reason to begin sobbing from the beauty of it all.
And Travis Fristoe, if you go to Maui, you have a coffee waiting for you at HAZ BEANZ in Pai’a. They’re only open 7am – 1 pm so go early and then go sit with the sleepy dog next door.
SOME FRAGMENTS as I get organized.
To all my friends searching for happiness, success in love, career, life, listen to Kiki:
The 92Y in New York City is opening a hip, beautiful new space in Tribeca and are christening their space with a show of their three cartooning teachers: Lauren Weinstein, Matthew Thurber and Tom Hart
I’m in love, and I can’t hide it anymore.
When Shooting the Outline happens, there’s no emotional color, no dramatic texture, no story unfolding in front of you, just things you have to know about in order for you to get it. Everything, when Shooting the Outline, feels like a montage. To quote the guys from South Park: It’s a training montage! … Always fade out in a montage!
Announcing THE FOLD, a new web tv show by the astounding Polly Frost, her brilliant husband Ray Sawhill and crazy genius Matt Lambert.