MarysLibrary

But What If We're Wrong?

Chuck Klosterman's new book is called But What If We're Wrong? Talking About the Present As If It Were the Past. It is rich and deeply informative and brilliantly entertaining. Mind blowing in a way. Similar in some ways to Malcolm Gladwell's books. 

It's purportedly about what the people of the future - 2066, 2116, 3016 - will know about the late 20th and early 21st century. Another way to say this is that the book is filled with Klosterman's predictions about what will be remembered about the present in 50, 100, or 1000 years.

He starts by examining what we now know. Or think we know - he puts a lot of emphasis on how difficult it is to predict the future when we don't really know what's going on and has gone on in our own day. He spends a good deal of time talking about rock and roll, rock 'n roll, rock, and pop - four very different genres between which even now we are beginning to be foggy when it's time to name the "greats." Will Elvis represent the late 20th century in three hundred year or might it be Dylan? Is there a chance The Rolling Stones will be forgotten and The Monkees will be revered? Alas, all too good a chance.

To demonstrate rather effectively the problem we're facing he suggests a game. Ask someone to name quickly, off the top of their head, a well-known figure from various times in the present and the past. 

21st, 20th, 19th, 18th centuries. 17th century - now the problems begin. Almost anyone who has been sentient for the last 20 years or so should be able to name a handful of people who were alive between 1600 and 1699. Pocahontas, Louis XIV, Christopher Wren, Milton, Handel, Rembrandt. But it's here that folks begin to have a problem picturing exactly when Newton was examining apples and Shah Jahan was building the Taj Mahal.

16th century -  I did fine here: Martin Luther, Cortes, Michelangelo, Cervantes. 15th century - I came up with Gutenberg and Boccaccio. Except I've since looked it up and I was wrong about Boccaccio. 14th century - Dante and Chaucer. A ruler? Um, Richard III? 13th century - Bacon. And, . . . Thomas a Becket? Turns out I got that one wrong too.

When we reach the 12th century I can no longer go on. With all my education and reading I can't off the top of my head confidently name one figure who I'm certain lived in the 12th century. Most people don't get past Shakespeare. So how much of our age will be remembered in 200 or 300 years? And what of all the rich choices we have today will having staying power?

After making his point, Klosterman wanders through a great many topics, including science and especially sports. Malcolm Gladwell has predicted that professional football will be done in 25 years. And with the rest of his startling predictions the author is able to give some more or less convincing evidence.

It would be a totally different wold. But different worlds are created all the time and the wold we're currently building does not reasonably intersect with the darker realities of team sports. We want a pain-free world where everyone is the same, even if they are not. That can't happen if we're still keeping score.

The temptation here is to go and on because so much of what the author talks about is new. These ideas haven't been in the wind. We haven't faced many of the arguments he makes and examples he gives are, as I suggested, mind blowing. 

Rethinking escapist literature

I spent much of the last four days with my ninety-five-year-old cousin Helen Fagin, who is a holocaust survivor and was professor of the holocaust at the University of Miami for some time, and a wonderful, remarkable woman, and she was telling me about when she was in the Rodomsko ghetto in 1942. She had been at Krakow University until the war interrupted her studies, so she was assigned in the ghetto to teach younger kids she would have been nineteen, maybe twenty), and in order to assert normality, these ten-or-eleven-year-olds would come in the morning and she would teach them Latin and algebra and things that she was uncertain that they would have any use for, but she would teach them. And one night she was given  copy of the Polish translation of Gone with the Wind, and she explains this is significant in that books were banned. Books were banned by the Nazis in an incredibly efficient way, which was if they found you with a book they would put a gun against your head and shoot you. Books were very, very banned, and she was given a copy of Gone with the Wind. And each night she would draw the curtains and put the blackout in place and read, with a tiny light, two or three chapters, losing valuable sleep time, so that the next morning when the kids came in she could tell them the story of what she read, and that was all they wanted. And for an hour every day they got away. They got out of the Radomsko ghetto. Most of those kids went on to the camps. She says that she tracked them all later and discovered that four - of the dozens of kids she taught - had survived. When she told me that it made me rethink what I do and made me rethink the nature of escapist fiction, because I thought actually it gave them an escape, just there, just then. And it was worth risking death for.

-- Neil Gaiman, speech at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, Florida, 2013 

Kidnapped by a book

Have you ever looked idly over the front matter of a book and before you know it you're on page 23? That happened to me this morning.

Four books arrived a couple of hours ago in the mail (along with Virginia boiled peanuts but that's another story) and I decided to put bookmarks in the books and place them here and there in my TBR pile. (Ok, piles, if you need to get pedantic.)

One book is the next Tony Hillerman. I've been reading my way through his Leaphorn Chee novels. A S Byatt's Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, a book I ordered long ago and forgot about. Gorgeous book, filled with enticing pictures. The Fellowship, a collective biography of J R R Tolkien, C S Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. I've been borrowing it from the library and then having to send it back for six weeks or more while somebody else had a crack at it and then borrowing it again and beginning again from where I left off - or perhaps from page 1 because I had forgotten what I had read. Now it's out in paper so I gave up and bought it.

And Rod Scher's Leveling the Playing Field, a book about trickle-down technology that I bought thinking I'd pass it along to my sister's husband's father. (The Chinese in their wisdom have a name for such a relative but alas we don't.)

Anyhow, When I went to place the bookmark on page one I encountered this:

Once there was a giant who lived in a cave. He was by all accounts a fairly gentle giant, and a peaceful, hardworking one. He mined the cave for guano -  bat and owl droppings, mainly - which he sold as fertilizer to the farmers in the area around the cave.

 . . . But without realizing it, Pieter [that was the giant's name] was digging up and selling history. . . .

How could I not keep on reading this?

And now you will have to excuse me because I have to get back to that book . . .