Miller's Admission

Brutus

May 29

I finally reached the titular anecdote toward the end of Brian Miller's Kayaking with Lambs (2023) and realized I'm overdue with my review. Will appear soon as it's now on the front burner. In the meantime, let me highlight and expand upon something that Miller wrote that struck a chord in me. He mentions five foundational books from his youth that remain quintessential reading for adolescent boys but goes on to reflect on a number of books he tried to read but put aside unfinished for reasons unknown. Naturally, I've got my own stories from youth when the literary world opened up broad fields of activity and imagination that assist in the formation of identity based on shared culture.

My memory of that time (Miller and I are contemporaries) was that when making friends, one would immediately gravitate to either the bookshelf in search of reading material or to the stack of LPs for music to hear (or both). Of course, preferred media have metamorphosed since then as eBooks and listening lists for streaming rather than physical media. Dematerialization is frankly a significant loss, though those born and bred into the digital age are fundamentally unable to recognize it. I've heard numerous reports that because entire libraries of books, music, TV, and cinema are now available electronically essentially for free (a cornucopia that becomes a déluge), the shared culture of my youth embodied in carefully curated collections is not recapitulated in a shared youth culture today. In addition, because dominant forms of media no longer require deep reading or dedicated listening, youth today spend their time almost exclusively watching (scrolling) passively. Reports also suggest that today's adolescents and young adults read no books whatsoever beyond those required for school (if even that). I've written already about the transition away from literacy to a new, degraded version of orality, though that subject is better unpacked by media theorists.

But that's not my main point. Rather, I reflected on Miller's admission in Kayaking with Lambs that he has a shelf of partially read books, a vague a concession of defeat. He plans to return eventually to Herman Melville's Moby Dick and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederation of Dunces, restarting from the beginning as "retries." I've never been favorably inclined toward either of those titles or in fact the most frequently cited book others purport to have read but never actually did: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. But here I must admit my own brief list of abandoned books, though I intend instead to resume from where I left off. They include (in no particular order) the following:

Daniel Schwindt's The Case Against the Modern World
Peter Zeihan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning
Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy
Pankaj Mishra's The Age of Anger
Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West

I intended to book blog through Schwindt but never got started. I blogged roughly halfway through Mishra and Ong and will return to them. But it's Spengler that truly defeated me; it's a truly difficult book that was one of the most discussed books of its era (the 1920s). In my defense, I'm really more a listener than a reader. The LP stack I used to consult in now a wall of CDs. Indeed, I just began a CD exchange with another enthusiast whose collection is more expansive than my own and it's quite a slog. Classical music has stronger appeal for me than literature, though the call of the Great Books tradition does compel me periodically to pick up and read titles that feel somehow indispensable. The most recent example I can recall is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Perhaps because of the manageable lengths involved, a number of YouTube channels are devoted to first-time encounters with pop and rock music now many decades in the past. Even with the entire discographies of groups from the 1970s such as Rush, Styx, and Genesis fully available via streaming services, a large number of those born after, say, 1995 have never heard them. Unusually famous acts such as The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson undoubtedly fare better. On the flip side, I don't know any songs by Drake, Dua Lipa, or Ed Sheeran and frankly couldn't care less. Their target audiences don't include me. Once in a while, like the Kardashians (ugh ...), some pop phenom manages to break through my armor of disinterest to make a fleeting impression, but I'm not nourished by the experience. I'd rather listen to classical music or (gasp!) read a book.