Magnum Opusitis

This past week a conversation with the wife turned on how a reviewer could read a book a week and still find time to write.

Dorothy Parker has one answer: "I don't want to review books anymore. It cuts down on my reading."

Post middle-age, if only for the sake of eyesight, choices must be made, and you need the local quack to innoculate against Magnum Opusitis. It means the end of history -- before my last booster, I arrived home lugging the thousand-page Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. It took months to shake off like a bad flu. Parker notes the warning label, "to be read with a furrow in the brow."

Exposures to the disease come at least twice a year at the Central Rappahannock Friends of the Library booksale, espcially during the Friday night members-only feeding frenzy which only has one North American rival in the annual Filene's bargain basement wedding dress shoot-out.

Whether growling at the usually mild mannered second-hand book dealer from the friendly shop on the next block as he beserkedly hurls volumes by the yard into a cavernous Absolut box; leaping over what Aerosmith might generously describe as a fat-bottomed girl crawling under the table to ingest any stray morsel of literature that might have fallen down the back, or glancing furtively at what the 'professor,' grabs just before you can clamp your paws on it, a blitzkrieg of crazed Ralph Waldo Emerson devotees advances over small children and grandmothers alike until the pounding symphony cresendos as five hundred pound sacks come crashing down on the cashier's desk pausing only for one final brief quixotic culling of what you can't imagine ever possessed you to pick it up in the first place. Dante's Inferno - in the original Italian - what?

Reading tastes evolve gradually after eons of struggle. What might have emerged in early childhood as a predeliction for the gentle wisdom of small-town newspaper editors like Robert Qullen, who wrote, "As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer," may mutate, after decades of nerve wracking sixty mile commutes, to a fondness for an acerbic Cyril Connolly who was once accused "of arriving in time to spit upon the grave before the mourners had departed," after he'd written a mildly scatching review of recently deceased poet, A.E. Housman.

Perhaps book reviewers pressed for time might eliminate unnecessary inconveniences, say, editors, as much as possible. Trent Reznor recently proposed to his record company that they release the band's new album, as is, on-line, minus copyright protection, for $5. After he was turned down he left the company and started his own.

I can top that. I write for no recompense whatsoever and move straight to publication. Of course, there aren't any consumers either to worry about. A New Yorker movie critic wrote a few weeks ago that "user-generated content marks either a long-over due democratization of the arts, or, if you prefer, a mass proliferation of the mediocre."

I'm not sure I care. As a character in a Louis Auchinloss novel gripes, "You artists...can't look at a landscape or a bowl of fruit without thinking how you will put it on a canvas so that somebody else will see it as your landscape or your bowl of fruit. That is the inescapable vulgarity of art." What prospective talent this admittedly raw artist may possess is optimistically more akin to what Clive James describes as the capability of a jazz musician to notice and combine "other people's individual creativity into a larger vision." I'd contentedly replace 'larger,' simply with 'my,' and be done with it.

David Denby, another New Yorker movie critic puts it this way, "Like mystics or ancient philosophers, we long to perceive the secret and idiosyncratic pattern within chaos, the singular currents running through the tumultuous sea. We are denied this in life, since we can never recall everything in an event happening around us, no matter how many times we replay it in our heads."

The longer I keep at this, the more the patterns form out of currents, and what once was unconnected takes on a certain logical patina. A.J. Leibling points out a fella who joined successive splinter groups until he ran out of wood. Parker, as usual, has the last best word, "Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both."