At the London Review Bookshop the other day, Kathleen picked up a copy of No Name, the second of Wilkie Collins’s “sensation” novels of the 1860s. Like me, she had read and enjoyed The Woman in White and The Moonstone; and she was curious to see what else Collins could do. He did not disappoint. Right up until last night, just before dinner, Kathleen was not to be seen without No Name in her hands. Her brow arched over twinkling eyes, she turned every page as if remembering to take a breath, and I knew that she was engrossed in an adventure. Every time she tried to describe the book to me, it came out sounding rather like Harriet the Spy, and with barely buried glee Kathleen conceded that this might indeed be the case. She began begging me to read No Name even before she was halfway through, and, to thank her for my interesting week in Amsterdam and London, I promised that I would. Now that I’ve begun, I wish I were back in London for the duration, if only to help me clip through the novel’s 660 pages as briskly as Kathleen did.

***

I find myself meditating ever more deliberately on the gulf, as I see it, between what I’ll call multimedia informational experience and the much older interplay between reading and writing. Today’s thoughts were triggered by David Carr’s column in the Times about The Ativist, a site that I hadn’t visited before which is devoted to what investor Eric Schmidt of Google calls “the need we all have to tell stories in multimedia.” Let me be clear at the outset that I have no objection to multimediated expression — and also that I have less and less interest in exploring it. Let’s allow also for the possibility that my thoughts on the matter are determined largely by age(ing). My idea, in any case, is that the tradition of reading and writing, familiar since the inauguration of book printing in the Fifteenth Century, while it may continued to be practiced by relatively few people, is as vibrant as ever. It needs neither stimulus nor protection. If abandoned, of course, it would altogether cease, but my bet is that attentive minds will continue to find that wide but discriminating reading is the steadiest source of inspiration for good writing, which in turn contributes to further reading. I should not say that the ecology of reading and writing is a closed one; there are many other sources of inspiration, some arguably more vital than reading (raw experience comes to mind, of course; and the bond between written literature and the feature film will be a gloriously intriguing knot for a long time to come). But reading a great deal of good writing is the most reliable prompt to good writing. We may say that reading is a necessary but insufficient cause of good writing. And the importance of reading and writing, taken together, is plain: they alone provide the matrix for sorting out our most pressing concerns, from the gestation of human identity to death, and from love to despair.

I don’t mean to slight the engineers: our world would be a poorer place — it was a poorer place — without a command of weights and measures expressed in numerical terms. It is not inconceivable that we will one day be capable of saying everything that we have to say in digits. But that day, it seems very clear to me, lies a long way off; we’re going to have to know ourselves much better than we do now before we’ll be capable of such streamlined discourse.

For the time being, we have words, imprecise as they are, to signify our impressions. Matthew Arnold put it all much better in Culture and Anarchy, but his ideas might need restatement in the age of handheld devices. Reading, writing, and the consideration of life that they (and they alone) make possible require calm, quiet, and patience to a degree hardly favored by contemporary bustle; but then it is probably the case that the given contemporary bustle at any moment in our past has been unfavorable to reading and writing, and that the scintillations of immediately accessible multimedia are merely the latest in a long line of fads. What makes the new wrinkle different from all previous ones is the widespread misapprehension that multimediated expression is not so much a distraction from reading and writing as it is their replacement. That’s the bad idea that I want to label as such, conspicuously. I shouldn’t be surprised to find that we really do all need to tell stories in multimedia. But that will never have much to do with the transaction of reading and writing, a concourse of recorded words in which experience is transformed into understanding.

***

I had thought of taking the day off by spending it in bed, but I went to the movies instead. Because of the terrible wet weather that we’re having, I was more or less obliged to see Dark Shadows. (That British all-star thing about the hotel in India is showing up here, but Kathleen wants me to wait to see that with her.) The soap opera on which Dark Shadows is based was broadcast during my undergraduate days, when I watched little to no television; from what I could make out, it involved vampires camping it up on daytime TV. So I never saw so much as a minute of it. I’d have stayed away from Tim Burton’s adaptation as well, if it hadn’t been for Eva Green, whom I like very much. With her blindingly arctic smile, she makes a very good wicked witch. Everyone else in the cast, if any good at all, seems thrown away on the project, especially Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Michelle Pfeiffer appears, discomfitingly, to be acting out an allegory of ageing actresses. The vulgarity of the project, while not irritating, pervades and deadens every frame, like the bilious make-up. The Collins mansion is a ludicrous monstrosity that seems designed to amaze audiences who have never been anywhere, and does not begin to be slyly humorous. There is in fact nothing sly about Dark Shadows.

The most banal thing about Dark Shadows is, ironically, its lack of shadows. The lighting is almost religiously flat, falling on all surfaces equally. In at least one scene, Johnny Depp strikes a pose that begs for the sort of high-contrast composition that made actors such as John Barrymore seem tragic even when their roles were pathetic, and Eva Green (like Elizabeth Moss in Darling Companion) often brings the young Joan Crawford to mind, but without any of the nerve-snapping tension in which even MGM took pains to embed her. Where Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist recapitulates the artistry with which the old studios compensated for the lack of color, Tim Burton’s movie seems inspired, as if anything could be, by the ambivalent colors of the Seventies — no artistry at all. And Maine — I ask you! Has anyone been to Maine? The only scary movie with a Maine setting that seems more than halfway plausible is Dolores Claiborne, a film of resolutely prosaic settings whose one naturally dramatic scene involves heavenly bodies. Much as I love the East Coast, I do regret its complete lack of seaside clifferies.

I came home and watched The Tourist, which is no more significant than Dark Shadows but a lot more entertaining, and very sly. I wish that Angelina Jolie would play more spy movies as the lusciously cool Elise Clifton-Ward; she’s as over-the-top as can be, but she keeps her footing. I watched the final scenes carefully, noting the faint but vital stages of Johnny Depp’s facial cleanup as the big payoff approaches; lock by lock, his hair and beard grow more kempt and ruly. The Tourist is vulgar, too, but briskly: you have to pay attention to its excesses, or you’ll miss them. I wasn’t really paying attention; I was tidying the blue room, which, between Will’s visit yesterday and my unpacking, had grown unkempt if not quite unruly. Now the only mess in the house is atop the dining table, and it’s really only a matter of piled books. I’d much rather read them than sort them out. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2012 at 7:16 am.