Lippard.Multics 1986-12-02 14:26:19 mst Tue Subject: Eight arguments for the elimination of reading To: english@BFLY-VAX.BBN.COM, silent-tristero@BFLY-VAX.BBN.COM, info-cobol@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU Date: 02 Dec 86 10:34:32 EST (Tue) From: dm@bfly-vax.bbn.com [Sorry about the overlap on these three mailing lists] Newsgroups: net.books Subject: On the Elimination of Reading Posted: 6 Jun 86 08:55:24 GMT Organization: UniSoft Systems; Berkeley, CA Sender:slesh@unisoft (Bob Schlesinger) This article is reprinted from the May 23 East Bay Express, one of the Bay Area's free weeklies. Jack Mingo is the author of "The Official Couch Potatoes Guide to TV Viewing". Don't know him personally, but with ideas like those which are in this article, uh ..., er, well don't expect to find him at Waldenbooks. Enjoy. Bob Schlesinger !ucbvax!unisoft!slesh ************************************************************************* EIGHT ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF READING Thank God I'm not a reader any more. Sure I can scan headlines and skim articles, but it's not the same. Still, like any other reformed (not cured) addict, I sometimes get the craving and I get it bad. Late at night I wake up longing for vintage writing - archaic words by people long dead arranged into sentences too complex for those of us accustomed to the simplified language of TV and "People" magazine. I keep an unread copy of Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" next to the bed to test my willpower just as Gandhi was said to have slept in the same bed with pretty young women to test his chastity. Apparently he found out, like I have, that if you roll over and think of something else, the craving eventually passes. Strangely enough, I gave reading up without premeditation. It just sort of happened. I got just too damned busy all of a sudden - the pressures of a rapid transformation from carefree bachelor bohemian who lived by the credo, "Never walk so fast you can't take time to smell the flowers," to deep-in-debt family breadwinner whose motto might be, "If the flowers aren't a blur, you're not driving fast enough." To my surprise, though, I feel better off without reading. My head is clearer without all those words rolling around in there all the time. I'm more creative. I have ideas that are my own and not just playbacks of something I read last week. My mind knows how an attic must feel after a successful garage sale - uncluttered, clear, with space for walking without always tripping over something. I have become convinced from my own experiences and those of others that reading is not healthy for individuals and society. Some might say, therefore, that it should be "abolished", but I am a moderate: I advocate only that reading should be "strongly discouraged" and, whenever possible, kept away from children and other impressionable people. The reasons are quite simple: 1. Reading can cause profound personality change. No need to justify this statement because most people would agree with it. Otherwise publishers would not be selling millions of dollars worth of purported "self-help" books every month, bought for the express purpose of changing how people think, act, feel, relate to others, work, have sex, believe, even eat - the basics of personality. I know a guy who is transformed every time he reads something. When he reads the medical articles in the "Reader's Digest", he immediately develops all the symptoms. After reading "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", he walked with a peculiar gait for weeks. Lately he has been reading "The Color Purple", and every time I see him his accent gets more and more southern. While these changes are relatively harmless, they point out the danger: If reading has the power to change your personality in ways that are good, then it is most likely true that reading also has the power to change you in ways that are unhealthy, even evil. I shudder to think what would happen if my friend ever read "Helter Skelter", "Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", or anything by Stephen King. 2. Reading can cause lasting physical damage. Everyone knows that heavy readers are pudgy, weak, pale, listless, worried-looking, pimply-faced, teary-eyed, and myopic. 3. Reading is a drug. You may think that this statement is hyperbolic and metaphorical, that I'm purposely exaggerating for effect. If so, you should be aware that one of the symptoms of too much reading is looking for metaphors, foreshadowing, allegories, and the other cheap effects writers use to dazzle their followers. But I am saying quite literally: reading is a drug. Clear out the musty, word-besotted cobwebs in your brain and think for a moment about the many negative physical and psychological effects of reading. If a pharmaceutical product has the same side effects it would be banned by the FDA. Yet somehow publishers are getting away with manufacturing tons of the stuff every day, and they are considered by most to be quasi-respectable citizens. Take it from someone who has experienced the depths, reading abuse ranks in vicious side-effects among the worst of the debilitative drugs people abuse. Reading is both a hallucinogen and a narcotic. Like LSD, reading is said by its proponents to expand your mind, but it actually makes you see and hear things that aren't there, alters your thought patterns (in this case pushes you toward the permanent straitjacket of left-brain linearity), is a dangerous escape from reality, and makes you prone to delusional thinking (to be fair, there is no solid evidence supporting the persistent rumor that Diane Linkletter was reading "Man and Superman" before trying to fly out of her top-floor window). Paradoxically, reading is also a heavily addictive sedative, the strongest you can buy without a prescription. Suggest giving up reading for a month to somebody who is heavily into it, and you will see all the behaviors associated with drug addiction: denial, belligerence, insistence on the ability to quit any time (except now), promises, threats, and copious weeping. Try watching a reader with a book sometime: the half-closed eyes, the catatonic stare, the nervous twitch of the fingers turning pages. Mentally remove the book and your reader looks like any other junkie nodding out in a doorway. It is not a pretty sight. I've been there, man; I know. In my unsavory past as a reader, I harbored the delusion that I wasn't really an addict. In retrospect, though, the telltale signs were everywhere. The times I risked my livelihood while plowing through a book a day on the job. The lean years I went without food in order to buy something to read. The simultaneous subscriptions to 26 different newspapers and magazines, each of which I read cover to cover. The extreme irritability and irrationality when interrupted while reading the morning paper. Tragically, being susceptable to reading addiction may be hereditary. In my family all five of my sibs are the willing victims of the purveyors of print. One of my sisters - the one who read every word Agatha Christie ever published, always starting with the last chapter first - somehow fell a full six months behind in reading Time magazine. Rather than declare defeat, throw out the pile 26 copies high and start afresh, she continued stockpiling and reading chronologically until she caught up with the present three years later. (Strangely enough, she was happiest when she was six months behind because she could read, in the same way she went through Agatha Christie mysteries, with the smug omniscience of knowing how everything would come out.) 4. Reading blurs the line between reality and fantasy. Experiments by brian researchers have shown that when the mind is deprived of all the information it needs, it fills in the gaps itself. For instance, you can recognize a person you know even if her face is half hidden because your brain fills in the additional details from memory and imagination. Or when you listen to a conversation in a loud room, you can miss hearing nearly half the individual words and still mostly get what's being said. Reading, because it cannot supply all the information that your mind is accustomed to, also triggers this. Your brain automatically fills in the missing details with pieces of what you are familiar with. For instance, when I was a young reader devouring the books in the Wausau, Wisconsin, public library, our basement became in my mind the laboratory of Tom Swift, Boy Scientist, and our washer/dryer (which chimed "How Dry I Am" when finished - but that's another story), his atomic-driven time machine. The woods that Davy Crockett explored became the woods in Marathon Park behind the grandstands. Furthermore, the characters in books became the people I was familiar with: Long John Silver as Mr. Swensen, the grouchy old guy on the corner. Or Joe Corbett, Boy Athlete, as Chucky Elkey, the older kid next door. As a result of all this intermixing between reality and fantasy I often had difficulty keeping track of which was which. Even now, there are cases where I can't keep track of what really happened and what I read. Even to somebody as psychologically stable as I am, this can lead to serious mental confusion (for example, on hometown visits I still stay away from the Marathon Park grandstands in fear of grizzly bears and renegade Native Americans). 5. Everything you read goes directly into your subconscious, where it lies dormant, waiting. . . When you read, somebody else's thought patterns, biases, opinions, impressions, experiences, even their commercial messages are recited by a little voice inside your head. If reading stayed there, things would be okay. You could think about what you were reading, filter out what you don't want to keep, and consciously decide what you wanted to accept as true and remember. But nearly all research indicates that everything you read bypasses the selection and thought process of the conscious mind and goes directly into your brain's storage centers without filtration or analysis of content. Hypnotism and direct electrical stimulation of the brain have yielded dramatic confirmation of this, resulting in experimental subjects being able to recite word-for-word extensive passages of "long-forgotten" texts they had read years before. Sure, you've probably read some serious essays and literary classics. But even if you've received a doctorate in comparative literature, odds are your "serious" reading is just a tiny part of the bulk of the written words you've stored up over the years in your subconscious brain. Think of the massive amount of text you've absorbed since you first learned to read: Dick and Jane readers, Archie Comics, trashy novels, magazines, street signs, billboards, bumper stickers, shopping lists, mattress tags, bathroom graffiti, religious tracts handed to you by perfect strangers, tax forms, fortune cookies, candy wrappers, the ingredients panel on cereal boxes, computer training manuals, Sears Roebuck catalogs, mail that begins with "You may already be a winner," Christmas card form letters from relatives, baseball cards, campaign literature, your sister's diary, massage parlor ads in the yellow pages, and the placemats in McDonalds, to name just a few examples of what you have lying dormant in your brain. Worst of all, you can't avoid adding to all that stored material, even if you wanted to. Words are everywhere. As soon as you set eyes on them, the words are sucked into your brain's storage centers whether you like it or not. And if that isn't bad enough, psychologists tell us that bits of material stored in the unconscious are continuously leaking into consciousness. It is sort of like having a toxic waste dump inside your head to which you add another load every time you read something. Think of your storage memory cells as rusting barrels full of unstable and potentially deadly chemicals that are continually seeping into the groundwaters of your stream of consciousness, and you'll have an idea of the long-term effects of reading. 6. Reading destroys forests. How many millions of acres of woodlands are destroyed every year by our insatiable collective reading habit? 7. Serious reading puts you dangerously out of step with nearly all of the people around you. In a culture where intellectual activity is considered suspect, even subversive, reading and attempting to discuss books and essays of a thoughtful nature will put you in a very lonely position. An optimist said, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." In reality, the one-eyed man would be diagnosed as being insane and mental health experts would prescribe Sharp Stick Therapy to his optic nerve to cure him of his hallucinations. 8. Reading is widely recognized as a threat to civilization as we know it. Nearly everybody seems to agree with the general principle that some books and magazines are harmful and should be banned. Unfortunately, the agreement breaks down when people start getting specific. Fundamentalists and some Christians nominate "Hustler" and the "Rubber Bondage Quarterly". Conservatives nominate "Robin Hood" ("socialist propaganda"), "Catcher in the Rye", Vonnegut, Ms. Magazine, the "American Heritage Dictionary" ("filthy words") and most science textbooks ("Evolutionism"). Progressives nominate Tom Sawyer ("racist"), Peter Pan ("sexist"), and anything from the Hoover Institute ("Reaganist"). And so on, and so on. Except for the American Civil Liberties Union and a few other cultists, nearly everybody has a short list of books and magazines they wouldn't mind roasting marshmallows over. And small wonder. If you think about it, it becomes clear that nearly all writers are malcontents at heart, probably even anarchists. Most of the like to stir up controversy and societal strife not only because doing so sells books and magazines but because it matches their nihilist yearnings as well. They are secretly trying to sabotage present-day institutions and governments in the hope of eventually taking over when these crumble. Understanding that, there is no reason why we should let them get away with writing, publishing, and distributing whatever they damned well please. It is reading itself that -------------- is a menace to society, not just a few categories of books and magazines. Reading is an anti-social activity. A simple illustration of this is available every morning on buses and subways -- commuters quite literally hiding behind newspaper curtains. No other mass medium has such power for swaying the impressionable masses. You've never seen a revolution caused by a movie or TV show, but books have been behind nearly every major disturbance since that troublemaker, Tom Paine. That's why literature is systematically suppressed in those countries where political and cultural stability is more highly valued than some abstract commitment to free expression. And, conversely, that's why those with a stake in creating instability and chaos, such as rebels trying to bring down the established government in third world countries, put so much emphasis on literacy campaigns. They know that readers tend to become incorrigible troublemakers. (Later, when they get into power they usually try to stuff the reading genie back into the bottle, not always successfully.) Epilogue: In discussing this article with friends, they thought it ironic, maybe hypocritical, that I would use the printed word to call for the end of reading. But I wanted to reach the people who need this information most of all. No need preaching to the already print- free, after all. Her is a self-diagnostic test: If you've read this far, you are probably hopelessly addicted to the printed word. Given that, let me leave you with one thought, contributed by a good friend of the anti-reading effort. Read it twice to make sure it goes deep into your unconscious: READERS OF THE WORLD PUT DOWN YOUR BOOKS. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR PLACES. ================================================================================ Note 181.1 The Elimination of Reading 1 of 6 DAIRY::SHARP "Oh no! Not another Don Sharp clone!" 2 lines 12-JUN-1986 15:12 -< Hallelujah, I see the light! >- - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OK, I'm convinced. Recreational drugs and cable TV are a real waste of time and money. I'm going to switch to READING!