Information Overload -- Art is Hard Work

   

   When I was 17 and fell in love with reading — deep immersive reading — there existed no Cable TV, no DVD or VHS, no smartphones and, alas, no Internet — the scourge of true reading everywhere.  I did not read commercial fiction; I read deep works, and I read, easily 4-5 hrs. a day, every day, engrossed in whatever, or whomever, it was I was reading.  When I was 19, with a small sum of money I got from a car accident, I bought the entire Collected Works of the great Swiss psychiatrist, C.G. Jung.  I read all 20 volumns.  I had to drop out of UCSD to do it.  It took me nearly six months.  It transformed my life.  I don't think it would be possible for me to attempt, let alone pull off, that feat today.

   I read voraciously in my twenties, slowed in my thirties as I dived into the making of two indie films that robbed me of nearly eight years of my life.  I still continued to read whenever I could because, well, there were authors who I needed to read.  Sadly, I don't read as much as I used to, and every day — every day! — I feel guilty about it.  I don't mean I don't read at all.  I read articles in The New York Times, The New Yorker, various articles in The Hollywood Reporter, etc., ad infinitum, but what I mean to say is that I'm not reading in that deep immersive way that got me through, e.g., Fyodor Dostoevsky's masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, a book so transcendent when you finish it that you're almost breathless when you finally come to the end and put it down.

   And why?  Because in order to read works like The Brothers K or The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, you have no choice but to surrender to the hours necessary to stay in the work, in the imagination of the author, if it's fiction.  You cannot read for ten minutes, put the book down, check some E-mail, buy something online, or re-jigger your Netflix queue, then come back to Dostoevsky.  It doesn't work that way.

   I've been ruminating on this a lot lately, not only because mySideways sequel Vertical is nearly 150,000 words — average by yesterday's standards, long by today's — and I fear that people aren't reading it the way they would if this were the '60s, when deep immersive reading peaked, but also because I fear what this absence of deep immersive reading is doing to us as a culture.  I'm written about this before, so I don't want to belabor the issue, but there's nothing that replaces deep immersive reading.  Nothing.  What it does for the development of the mind — the building of powers of abstraction, e.g. — just can't be duplicated by the ways in which we take in content today.

   And speaking of taking in content today.  That's the other problem.  The DSM-IV manual — which defines all psychological disorders from depression to addiction to schizophrenia — will, I'm told, in 2013 list excessive hours spent on the Internet as an official addiction!  I have to freely admit that I now spend more time on the Internet than I do reading traditional books — I still haven't caved in to the Kindle or the iPad (though I want to).  I try to rationalize this seismic shift in my content intake as being a result that I spend my day immersed in words — my HBO pilot that I'm writing (and rewriting), the Sideways play, which is going through rewrites — and the last thing I want to do when dinner time rolls around is turn off my TV, shut down my laptop, and open a book.  I've read a great deal in my life, but I still feel a tremendous sense of guilt over the fact that I write books for a living, but I now have difficulty reading them.  And I LOVE books.  I love the feel of books.  When I was young, it meant a lot to me to finish, e.g., D.H. Lawrence's masterpice Women in Love and place it on my book shelf.  It symbolized a certain accomplishment.  The more books that filled my shelves, the more shelves I had to buy, the more I felt like I was intellectually and artistically pushing forward in some undefinable way.

   I'm worried that novels will only be written as fodder for movies — which is not altogether a bad thing.  I worry that what's replacing the experience of reading — where only the mind turns the page and nothing else — will create a generation of ADD and ADHD individuals who can't even enter into an extensive discourse because their verbal skills are so undeveloped from lack of deep immersive reading.  Everything has been shortened:  we don't even E-mail; we text.  We've moved from Facebook posts to 140 character Twitter flicks.  The langorousness of, say, letting oneself go to Cervantes unqualified masterwork, Don Quixote, may become an experience that's a relic of the past.

   I don't know what I'm saying here.  I'm just musing on these things.  I'm worried that I see so few movies in the theaters these days, and, instead, watch them in these fractured ways where I pause, check some E-mail, answer the phone, go back to the movie, instead of just surrendering for two hours to the experience, transformative or appalling, of being in the theater in the hands of that filmmaker's vision.

   But, books haunt me.  Their unopened presence — the ones I haven't read, that is — makes them seem lonely.  My heart goes out to them.  And there're so many of them.  It didn't seem that way when I was 18 and reading 4-5 hours a day.  I felt like I could read my way through the entire UCSD library.

   I worry in this day and age of information overload from so many content generators that the book, the experience of being alone with the unique imagination and voice of another, and the feeling one gets when they reach the end of a beautifully crafted, eloquently written, story, will one day be lost forever.