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Literary Shmooze #1
Literary Shmooze #3
Literary Shmooze #4
Literary Shmooze #5
Literary Shmooze #2
There is an old story that at a convention of grammarians,
one learned fellow declared solemnly that although a double negative
could create a positive, there was (alas!) no double positive that
could create a negative.
Whereupon some wise guy in the audience stood up and drawled,
with an ironic sneer: "Yeah yeah."
Just goes to show you: everything changes when you add
a tone of voice.
As we face the waning of print culture -- in this Internet
world, does anybody doubt it ís on the way out? -- the impact
of the tone of voice, the spoken word, on the survival of literature
becomes exponentially greater. For the Jewish people, the People of
the Book, whose entire culture is wedded to and imbedded in a vast
cumulative literary tradition, the impact of audio is absolutely crucial.
Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment of the publishing
industry. And the reason is not that people now need to be read to
like little kids because they are not as smart as they used to be.
Undoubtedly they are as smart as they always were. The reason audiobooks
are growing in popularity is that people are switching media, switching
the sensory arrangements by which they absorb their culture.
I went to the National Arts Club in New York to read a
segment of my novel The Book of Candy and when the program
was over, the people there -- all erudite, lettered people -- asked
me which writers had been most influential on my work. I said: this
one and that one and then mentioned S.Y. Agnon. Silence. I said: Agnon,
the Nobel Laureate. Silence. I said: the Israeli writer, the one who
got the Nobel Prize, who wrote the The Bridal Canopy and A
Book That Was Lost and Betrothed, all translated long ago
into English, all available to everyone. And one student said 'Oh
yeah, I know! Agnon! The little old man with the black kipah.'
And I realized that this great Jewish writer, who had
died only in 1970, had been almost forgotten.
So I said to myself: Okay. Now don't get crazy. Agnon
is a high-end, serious literary writer. And a foreigner after all.
But then I called Doubleday Publishing to find a picture
of Edna Ferber, author of Giant and Show Boat and So
Big and Fanny Herself, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, member
of the Algonquin Round Table and a proud Jewish woman. All of Ferber's
books had been published by Doubleday, and the girl on the phone had
no idea who she was. Had never heard of those titles. She asked around
her office until she found someone old enough to remember. The most
successful woman author of her day, a writer of romances and adventures,
sales in the millions, and Ferber too, like Agnon the Nobel Laureate,
was forgotten.
So as a Jewish writer, facing my country's cultural amnesia,
I find myself looking again at the readers. I wonder: where do they
go for the inventions of the imagination, where do they go for reverie,
unformulated time and peace and quiet to muse and dream?
I walk through the lives of my grown children. They wake
up and the radio hits them; the television news hits them; while they
are shaving, voices tell them what's up with the world; on the subway
they hear singing, roaring, screeching, announcements; in the car
they hear music and news; in the streets as they walk, people are
yelling, gears are grinding, electronic bass pours from stores and
cars; the elevator has music, the supermarket has music, bargains,
"Attention Shoppers!" The mind's focus is split and splayed
and frayed like the wires in a cable. Even as they sit at the computer
in their corporate cubbies, urgent E-Mail messages come flying through,
cybertext pops up on the screen, electronic voices insist: "You
have seventeen new messages in your mailbox!"
And I realise that there can be no attenton paid because
there is no silence. And I think to myself, if I can find an
island of silence, a moment when the resting, unassailed mind is receptive,
I can put literature there. And I look around me and I see who's got
the silence, who's paying attention.
And it's the kids inside the headsets.
Why should the record makers be the only ones to creep
in under those headsets? Why should the rappers and the rockers be
the only ones to inhabit that precious silence and catch the attention
of the young? At the millennium we are in serious danger of losing
our cultural memory. Shall we dare to stand on ceremony and insist
on the purity of print? Isn't it obvious we need more than print,
not a replacement but a literary supplement, to keep us conversant
with our own roots? Are we not threatened enough as a culture and
scared enough as readers and parents and teachers to try what obviously
works?
So I buy my first book on tape.
And before the year's end, I call up the great narrator
George Guidall and I ask him if he will help us record The Assistant
by Bernard Malamud. And he says yes.
And here we are.
Susan Dworkin
Jewish Contemporary Classics, Inc.