The English Major

There's a wonderful post about the importance of the English Major by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. But what immediately struck me was this photograph. Now, this may just be a reflection of my own state of mind, but it does seem to me that this image is deliberately provocative. England might not be sexy, but English is. I don't know if anyone has noticed this but there do seem to be a lot of adverts on the sidebars, (dating ads, from what I can gather) of skimpily dressed women or cartoons with the caption 'undress me' etc. All seems to be quite normal.

It may be that images affect men and women differently. A woman looking at the picture above might look at it quite innocently.

To be honest, I think we'd all be a bit better off with fewer images, less music, and less noise. What chance of judgement is there when we are bombarded with 'information', when the imagination is given free play? 'Taste' has now come to mean-except in a few rarefied circles-the same thing as raw, unrefined,wanton preferences or desires, an expression of pure subjectivity. The irony being, of course, that the desires themselves are in large part constructed by the big corporations. But to talk of standards, norms, or understanding when it comes to taste is to at once be accused of snobbery and elitism. To talk of the dangers of images, the abuse of language, is to open oneself up to the accusation of being an old fogey, a prude.

But isn't reading a pure escape, a flight of the imagination that mirrors, even if darkly, the writer's creative instincts? Yes, in some ways the hyperinflation of words, the exponential growth in the printed word (or the electronic word) also has similar effects, but you wonder if we aren't talking about different mechanisms here, and if the ancient contract between word and world doesn't set up all kinds of resistances.Perhaps ebooks will change that as they alter our physical experience of reading-the texture of the texts, the notion of a fixed place and reading (as opposed to reading on the go). Mobility, speed, flexibility, the quickening of the eye, lightness, the undesirability of 'boundaries'...all of these things, so essential to the domination of capitalism, will no doubt make the book, silence, the commons, the Jewish/Islamic aniconic attitude or temperament less palatable. Instead, the deluge. The major will become a minor. Preserved, no doubt, for nothing today can allowed to die in a natural way, its memory stored somewhere in the land of google or in a 'cloud'.

The ancient skills of looking carefully, of looking away, of letting things rest, of not reaching out to grasp everything..the ability to say "I do not know", or "I do not want to know", all of that seems lost in an age that prizes the tearing away of veils. Open access, 'the knowledge economy', the super highways of the net, instant access, free downloads, live streaming, the porn shop of the heart where you can get whatever you want. You are 'one click' away from nirvana. Yes, that's it, our lives streaming away. That blur in the photograph, that was me...I think.  The revolution will be televised. The revolution will be television. Dumb it down, check out.

Drink up, Khayyam. Our bones are old, our soul is out of style.