Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times: A Collection of All Original Essays From Today's (And Tomorrow's) Young by Kevin Smokler

Author:Kevin Smokler [Smokler, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Technology & Engineering, Literary Collections, Publishing, Social Aspects, Literary Criticism, General, Books & Reading, Authorship
ISBN: 9780786738748
Google: CA-bCPBup8UC
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2009-10-15T21:14:52+00:00

PART THREE

THE NOW

DISTRACTIONS

Tom Bissell

All this new technology

will eventually give us new feelings

that will never completely displace the old ones,

leaving everyone feeling quite nervous

and split in two.

—DAVID BERMAN, “SELF PORTRAIT AT 28”

Ours is an infantile generation—though I do not intend this as an attack. If you were born in the fourteenth century, you were a part of the Plague Generation whether you liked it or not. Video games, action films, the power ballad—many of us are endlessly distracted by the infantile and, however ironically, love it, consume it, defend it. Comic books were my greatest distraction. This is not exactly a blockbuster confession. With all the people coming out of the comic closet these days, I keep expecting Louis Farrakhan to cop to a secret love of The Uncanny X-Men or The New Mutants or The Legion of Superheroes. Of course, I loved all three, as well as Swamp Thing and The Avengers. They were My Favorites. Needless to say, I have not kept up. At a certain point, the travails of Kitty Pryde, Sunspot, Dr. Alec Holland, Lightning Lad, and Vision ceased to command my attention. Comics typically attend to a peculiar sort of adolescent alienation. The genius of early Marvel comics, as many have previously noted, was their introduction of profound emotional estrangement into the lives of superheroes. DC comics, until the mid-1970s (when the Green Arrow and Green Lantern, most memorably, found the former’s young ward, Speedy, in a grimy men’s room with a heroin needle plunged into his arm), had virtually none of this. Yet Peter Parker was a weak, dateless dork who lived with his skeletal aunt, Bruce Banner endured a constant terror of his own emotions, the Fantastic Four were riven by a longstanding love triangle, and the X-Men lived within the oasis of a Westchester County mansion that protected them from the very society they had pledged to safeguard. Anger, frustration, rejection: These heroes felt it, too.

Eventually, however, one grows up. The alienation inherent in donning colored spandex and going head-to-head with Kraven the Hunter ultimately proves less compelling than the alienations one begins to feel around the age of fourteen or fifteen. Having been hopelessly transformed into a reader by comics, I turned to books. Opening Rabbit, Run in study hall as a fourteen-year-old high-school freshman, stumbling dumbfoundedly across lines such as “Rabbit goes to his wife and, putting his arms around her, has a vivid experience of her—her tear-hot breath, the blood-tinged whites of her eyes” made me conscious for the first time of a writer’s individual voice. Prior to Rabbit, Run, I merely read books for their stories. Even Stephen King, whose novels I ripped through one after the other, did not affect me the way Updike affected me because I read King for what he wrote about, not how he wrote about it. But I felt behind Updike’s prose an unfamiliar urgency, a need to communicate some larger, scarier truth than automotive demon possession or the vampire next door, no matter what pains King took to ground such phenomena in the soil of the convincingly mundane.

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