Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
It’s a cliche to say that Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic book, but that statement grows only more appropriate by the day as we move yet further from an active print culture. Where online platforms may once have provided some fleeting illusion of long-form communication (Instagram captions, Twitter threads), we’re now seeing popular apps flooded with short videos of between ten seconds and a minute in length. TikTok works like a proud satire (in constant acceleration) of Postman’s critique of television - scenes are cut together at record speed, and a user’s timeline scrolls quickly and automatically through each video, with no regard for tonal contrast or the sequential processing of information. Knitting! Bombs in Ukraine! My pet owl! Now this! A robotic voiceover impedes our ability to judge arguments for sense or sensibility.
As a post-2000-er, the part of Postman’s book that resonated with me most was his evaluation of educational trends - the trend of outsourcing the job of the book to the television, the trend of lightening a supposed educational load with supposed entertainment value, and - to make both of those things easier - the trend of taking knowledge out of order and context. These modes of thinking appear to be everywhere in education at this point. They ironically took the joy and meaning out of much of my own school experience, and I believe they are currently hindering the abilities of people under a certain age to practice what is called ‘joined-up thinking’. We may well have created our current memetic political environment by tending towards ‘edutainment’ rather than traditional book-learning - or it could be the case that the slogan-slingers were created through social media but could be made to think in three dimensions with some remedial reading. Either way. Postman is right.
Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
It’s Lolita, but not really - Nabokov tries his hand at the totalitarian dystopia, approaching with characteristic linguistic trickery. A Clockwork Orange-esque Slavic conlang, a hallucinatory vision of several different architectures at once, names turned inside out - this short volume comes with everything but a coherent message. At times, Bend Sinister seems under-edited and burdened with narrative cliches - propaganda, violent arrest, escape over a wild border - which say essentially nothing about intent or vision - they seem to exist just for the sake of it. I still find myself wishing I could adapt the novel into a film. Nabokov’s strength continues to be the simple word juxtaposed against the second simple word. Sound and visual and pun are considered, and before we know it, we reach a third word - more a collage than a proposition. He would make a fantastic Tang dynasty poet. The Tang dynasty poets would all make fantastic filmmakers.
Sidenote: Have You Seen This Scam?
I’m thinking of writing a series of articles about the rise and fall of Rookie Magazine and its built-in subcultures as experienced in the early-to-late 2010s, and would like to eventually cover the colossal failure of School of Doodle - a Kickstarter-funded, Riot-Grrrl adjacent nonprofit learning platform which ended up being binned and repurposed as fodder for a Gen Z marketing research firm. If you know what I’m talking about or engaged with the initiative at any point, please message me or reply to this email. I’d also love to hear from ex-Rookie contributors or superfans who think they bore witness to the death of the site.