The Soft Lunacy: Episodes of Literary Obsession

2016 was a bummer. Lots of famous people died, including David Bowie, my musical hero. Trump was elected president, which is baffling. The year was grim on the sociopolitical front, but also for me personally. My dog died right after Christmas 2015 and I spent most of the next year mourning him. I had to change apartments. My job started to seem unstable. The media churned out a constant supply of anger and bullshit. Facebook, where I spend far too much time, was confirmed to be the dumb echo chamber we all know it to be, though the steady dopamine drip of likes continued to blind us to how out of touch we are with anyone outside our cultivated spheres. Culture seemed on the skids. I read with envy and annoyance the positive reviews heaped on books by edgy poets writing poems about f*g. Scores of academics got fat grants to write studies of Star Wars. My students informed me that making them write a five-page essay was cruel, especially when I only gave them a week to write it. Few of my students bought the books I assigned. Our discussions were limited to talking about the scant info they gleaned from Amazon reviews. I can’t blame them. I didn’t want to read the books either. In fact, if there’s one thing that 2016 seemed to represent to me it was the futility of books. So many were published and yet no one seemed to be reading them. In 2016 I read five separate think pieces on the decline of literacy. Some of these were written by academics arguing against long, deep reading in favor of educated aliteracy. I’m still not sure what that means. Something to do with being smart enough to get the gist of a book without having to actually read it. In the golden age of television, where Netflix instantly streams first-rate content, who has the inclination to bother with books?