B Is For Book

...preferably a long one.

Dona posted a Facebook link to an article by Alan Jacobs in The Chronicle of Higher Education (see below) about "long form" reading and the quality of deep attention that fewer and fewer people are able to bring to a text:

Some people—many people—most people—will not experience that internal necessity of being in books, in texts. But for [some]people...books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.

If there is anything--legal, cheap, not harmful, and for which you don't need another person--better than being in a book, I'd like to hear about it.  I learned to read before first grade, but my earliest memory of being in a book, of being carried off by the current of another mind, dates from the summer when I was eight and reading Kipling's Jungle Book.  I sat enraptured in my grandparents' solarium, with the shades closed against the blazing midday sun, hoping that my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and the maids would sit down to eat lunch and not notice that I wasn't there. 

My childhood was a long series of interruptions from Heidi, Mary Poppins, The Wind in the Willows, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin (all in Spanish translation, since I read them long before I learned English).  "Put down your book and take a walk/take a nap/write a letter/practice the violin/go to school..."  I would surface like a diver, blinking at the light.  After a minute or two getting oriented to the world of tables and chairs and well-intentioned adults, I would put down the book and do whatever was required, inwardly counting the minutes until I could take the next dive.

Things haven't changed much since then.  Falling into a book in the evening is still my preferred reward for a day well lived or simply endured.  And I like my books to be long ones, so that I can swim at leisure among the reefs and trenches of another mind.  The brief dips offered by magazines (including the updated New Yorker), not to mention the medium I'm using right now,  just aren't as satisfying.

Sometimes I wonder if my addiction to reading isn't equivalent to a TV addiction.  After all, not every book I read is a masterpiece,  and there are sometimes masterpieces on television.  Still, given the choice between a book and a TV program, I'll pick the book.  I suspect that a major reason may be that when I read I'm in control.  I decide when to speed up and when to slow down, when to stop and take a second look.  With a book, I'm the driver;  when I watch TV, I'm on a tour bus, and tours have never been my thing. 

Do you like your books short or long?  How do reading and watching TV compare for you?

My TV Show, Part the Third

My TV show ended after three summers, but its effects are still with me today--and I'm not talking about being cured forever of the fear of public speaking.

Here's what happened. After my mother had signed me up to do the show, and after I'd been to the studio for my fifteen minutes of instruction, my mother notified me of another commitment she had made on my behalf. The studio was giving a party for the crew. Apparently, one of the crew had cast his eye on me during my visit to the set, and had asked my mother if he could take me to the party as his date. And my mother had given her consent.

I was outraged. This was America in the 1960s, not some god-forsaken third world country where women were traded for camels, I yelled. Why should I go anywhere with a guy who didn't have the nerve to ask me out himself? But my mother was implacable. She had told the guy he could take me to the party, and to the party I would go.

Alas, I'd been brought up as a good Catholic girl, taught to honor my father and mother, so, gritting my teeth, I got ready and waited for my date to pick me up. He could not have been more pathetic. He was short and skinny, dressed in baggy shorts and a red football jersey that came almost to his knees. His hair was thinning already, and he wore a smirk on his face. I detested him on sight, not because of his looks, but because of his cowardice.

With every cell in my body screaming "let me out of here!" I got into his car. We drove in silence for what seemed like hours. At the party, which was held outdoors, the director introduced me to the crew I would be working with. I was sitting in the semi-darkness, trying to stay away from my date, when a voice said, "here's one you haven't met yet."

I remember looking up and half seeing someone tall and broad shouldered bending towards me. We shook hands and every one of my formerly screaming cells became instantly alert. I scanned the environs. There was a pale blonde hanging about--his date--but that did not worry me. What did concern me was hearing that he would only be working my first show (he was a cameraman), as he was leaving the job to attend summer school.

I need not have worried. After the first show, he took to dropping by the studio when I was there. Soon he asked me (not my mother!) for a date.

The last programs of my third summer on TV had to be videotaped in advance, so that my cameraman and I could go on our honeymoon.

And to this day, my mother takes credit for the whole thing.

My TV Show, Part The Second

(If you're wondering how I came to have my own live TV show during my college years, you can find out here.)

The end of my junior year in college was full of angst. On top of preparing for finals, I was having to write the textbook for the televised Conversational Spanish course that my mother had signed me up to teach that summer. Worst of all, I had just broken up with a boyfriend, felt sure that life was basically over for me, and was weeping copiously into my books several times a day.

I got through finals somehow, and handed a tear-stained manuscript of the textbook to the TV station manager. A couple of days later I was summoned to the studio for instruction. Here is what I was told: start talking when you get the signal, look at the camera, stop talking when we tell you. And don't wear prints--you'll look fuzzy. A couple of days after that, I was on the air.

Was I nervous? What do you think? Since the show was aired live, I was well aware that any mistakes would be seen and scoffed at by the invisible multitudes watching the show. My biggest fear was that I would not be able to time my final sentence to end exactly at the off-air signal.

Soon after the first show, my parents departed for North Carolina, and I moved into the dorm. Bliss! No house to clean, no dishes to wash, no grocery shopping, no babysitting my sister. Just classes and homework, and the TV show once a week. I quickly regained my joie de vivre.

Nevertheless, even after I lost the worst of my nervousness about the program, unpredictable things happened, like the time I had to abandon my car in a flood on my way to the studio.

The campus was all the way across town from the TV station, and I used to drive there in the afternoon in my little car. It was a dark blue Renault Dauphine, with the charm of all things French but made, I think, of papier mache , and with all the power of a lawnmower.

One afternoon I was driving to do the show when I got caught in a horrendous rainstorm, right in the middle of downtown Birmingham, Alabama. The intersections were underwater, the traffic lights were dead, and cars were being abandoned right and left. I could feel my little Renault swaying, but I had to get to the studio (I was supposed to go on in fifteen minutes) and I would never make it if I had to walk.

Eventually, though, I had to pull into an alley and abandon the car. The water was up to my knees. I had ten minutes til show time. I found a telephone booth and called the studio, and they splashed up in a huge late 1950s Impala and rescued me.

I ran upstairs to the set and sat down at my desk. I was panting, and soaked to the skin. Someone handed me a towel and I wrung out my hair. The music came on. I kicked off my sodden shoes and looked into the camera. "Buenas tardes," I said, with my best smile.

(To be continued.)

My TV Show, Part The First

When I was twenty, I had my own TV show. This was many many years ago, practically the 18th century, but TV had already been invented. It was live; it was black and white; and I was on it.

This was just before PBS came on the scene, when states had their own educational channels. My mother, a Catalan housewife with a university education, fresh from four years in the jungles of Ecuador, had been recruited to teach Spanish to the school children of Alabama, on the educational TV channel. She was forty-two at the time, had never owned a TV set before coming to the U.S., and had just had her second child. At sixteen, I saw nothing unusual in any of this. She was a mother, after all, and supposed to cope with stuff.

My turn came four years later, when I was in college. My mother's school-year programs were such a success that the TV station wanted to add something different--a summer course in Conversational Spanish for a general audience. But there was a problem: in the summer, my father was on the faculty of a music camp in North Carolina, and my mother and my baby sister went with him.

Forty years later, it still rankles with me that, while my buddies where whooping it up in the dorms, discussing Sartre and listening to Bob Dylan, I had to go back to my parents' house every afternoon, to babysit, hang diapers on the line, wash dishes, and make myself generally useful. When I begged to live on campus my father said "What is wrong with this family that you want to live away from us?"

One afternoon I came back from campus to find my mother reclining on her bed. "I have some important news for you," she said solemnly.

"You're not...pregnant again, are you?" I asked.

"No. But you have a job this summer."

I had been looking forward to summer with all my heart. With my parents in North Carolina, there was no choice but for me to live in the dorm while I took a full load of summer school courses. Contemporary Philosophy at 7 a.m.? I was all for it, as long as I was able to live on campus. So now I had a job. How bad could that be?

"What is this job you have found me?"

"You will teach a television program." My mother went on to explain that this would be a new course, and that I was to write the textbook for it--more of a large pamphlet, actually, but still....

"But I can't!" I gasped. " You know I can't. I'll be taking Contemporary Philosophy and Algebra, and there's no time to prepare. I have spring finals next week..."

"You have no choice. I have told them at the station that you will do it. Get to work on the textbook right away."

You know how it is. Sometimes you want to kill your parents. Sometimes I still do....

(To be continued.)