Reading – Page 4 – Auxiliary Memory

Pop Culture vs. Social Media

by James Wallace Harris, 1/1/25

I began pondering the differences between generations that grew up with pop culture versus generations that grew up with social media when playing Trivia Pursuit. I then noticed the same differences while watching Jeopardy. Pop culture is about what most people know, while social media is about knowing the details of subcultures.

I’m often surprised by how much young contestants on Jeopardy know about the 1960s and older pop culture, but old and young players are very selective in their knowledge of 21st-century trivia. For years, I thought people my age just couldn’t keep up with popular music after 1990 because of changing mental conditions. But now I wonder if it’s because popular music shattered into countless genres appealing to various subcultures. In other words, there became too many art forms to remember their trivia.

I was born in 1951 and my personality was shaped by the pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Pop culture was primarily television, AM radio, movies, books, newspapers, magazines, and comics. People watched the same three television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC. They often saw the same hit films and listened to the same Top 40 songs. They usually read a single daily paper. Some people read books, usually, paperbacks bought off twirling racks which sold in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The most common magazines seen in people’s homes were National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Time.

The by-product of that limited array of pop culture was people within a generation shared a common awareness of what each other liked. You might not watch Leave It to Beaver or Perry Mason, but you knew what those shows were about.

People growing up since the Internet, especially since the explosion of social media, didn’t have popular culture, they had social media that focused on subcultures. Social media might be all about sharing, but people’s shared interests have broken down into thousands of special interests. People on the internet crave contact with others who share their interests, but no one group, not even Swifties, makes up a popular culture.

There are songs on Spotify with billions of plays that are completely unknown to the average American. The Academy Awards now nominate ten pictures for the Best Picture category, but most Americans have seldom seen them before they were announced. Hundreds of scripted TV shows are produced yearly yet it’s quite easy for all your friends and family to have a different favorite. My wife and I struggle to find shows we’re willing to watch together.

Mass media has broken down into specialized media devoted to subcultures.

Pop culture was a product of mass media. It inspired group identity through common knowledge. I’m not sure it exists anymore.

Social media is a byproduct of individuals trying to find others sharing similar interests. It isolates people into smaller groups. It promotes individual interests that limit people’s ability to overlap with other people’s interests. It makes people specialize. You become obsessed with one subculture.

I wonder if the MAGA movement is unconsciously countering that trend. They think they want to return to the past, but what they want is to be part of a large group. Their delusion is believing that if everyone looked alike and thought alike, it would create a happier society. I’m not sure that’s the case. The 1950s were not Happy Days, and the 1960s wasn’t The Age of Aquarius.

I’m not sure that happiness comes from the size of the group you join. Some happiness does come from interacting with others and sharing a common interest. I also think people might be happier knowing less about subcultures, and more about pop culture. But that’s just a theory.

Could people withdraw some from the internet to become more physically social? I don’t think we can give up on the internet, but do we need to use it as much as we do?

I liked it when my friends watched the same TV shows or movies. I also loved that my friends knew about the same albums, and would play them together, or go to the same concerts. Pop culture was popular culture. Will we ever see that again? And is that a delusion on my part. Am I only remembering a more social time from youth that naturally disappears after we marry?

JWH

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND by Elena Ferrante

by James Wallace Harris, 10/19/24

Technically, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is the first novel in a four-volume sequence that is collectively referred to as the Neapolitan Novels. Now that I’ve read all four books, I dislike that tagline for the whole story. The four books are really one whole novel, and even though Naples, Italy is very important to the story, it doesn’t properly describe the complete novel. Each volume picks up exactly where the last one stops. If they were published in one volume with no subdivisions, you wouldn’t notice any transitions.

For this review, I’m going to refer to the whole as My Brilliant Friend, and when needed, I’ll point to the individual titles as part of the story. The structure below uses the dates for the English translation. The books were originally published in Italian one year earlier.

My Brilliant Friend (2012)
- Prologue: Eliminating All the Traces
- Childhood: The Story of Don Achille
- Adolescence: The Story of the Shoes
The Story of a New Name (2013)
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014)
- Middle Time
The Story of the Lost Child (2015)
- Maturity
- Old Age: The Story of Bad Blood
- Epilogue: Restitution

Circular Plot and Recursion

The complete story begins where it ends. And throughout this long story, it constantly refers to itself. It’s so recursive that it feels like two mirrors aimed at each other. It’s also cyclical because it’s about daughters and their mothers, who eventually become mothers of daughters. In so many ways, this story mirrors its parts.

The novel is about two women, Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo, who call each other Lenù and Lila. The story feels like an autobiography, and we have to remember that the author’s name is Elena too. Elena Ferrante hides behind a pseudonym, but this novel feels very autobiographical. Lenù and Lila react and respond to each other so intensely that it’s hard to tell who originates what traits. I even imagined that Elena Greco is writing about two versions of her own identity, the one who writes books, and her ordinary self. And it’s interesting that Ferrante hides behind her pseudonym, claiming she wants to remain anonymous while Lila also wants to remain anonymous throughout the story. So many reflections.

Literary Novels

I’ve always thought the greatest of literary novels feel biographical or autobiographical. They don’t need to be about real people, but they do need to feel like they are, and this novel offers two realistic portraits. Another trait of great literary novel is setting. We often think of London when we think of Dickens, or Russia when we think of Tolstoy, or Ireland when we think of Joyce. Ferrante has made her book about Naples and Italy.

If you’ve only read the first volume, My Brilliant Friend, you should tell yourself that you never finished the novel. The Neapolitan Novels boxed set runs 1,965 pages. On audio the four books run 78 hours and 52 minutes. To give perspective, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy averages about 60 hours in the various audio editions. Different translations of The Bible run 82-102 hours. The seven volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past runs 154 hours and 14 minutes. In other words, the whole My Brilliant Friend is a literary heavyweight.

Most novels that come out in a series are never artistically heavier than a single volume. That’s why when I finished reading the single volume entitled My Brilliant Friend, I couldn’t understand why the writers polled by The New York Times considered it the top book of the 21st century so far. It was good, but not that good. That’s because it’s only one-fourth of a whole. Now that I’ve read all four volumes, I can easily see why it was voted the top novel of this century.

Will it Become a Classic?

Whenever I read a highly respective modern novel I’ve wondered if it will someday be considered a classic. I’ve never felt sure about any modern novel to predict one before. However, for the whole of My Brilliant Friend I felt like it was at least an equal to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. That novel only runs 36-40 hours in audio, so it’s about half the size of the full version of My Brillian Friend. The Ferrante novel is far more ambitious, at least in being a biography of two women, so maybe it needs twice the space that Tolstoy used to tell us about Anna Karenina. However, Anna is never developed in such detail like Lenù and Lila.

We follow Lenù and Lila from being little girls to old women, and that makes a huge difference in storytelling ambition. This novel is primarily about friendship, even though it says almost as much about kinship. Men do not come across well in this story. This novel is feminist at a visceral level. I’d also say this book is an anti-chemistry book in the sexual sense. Time and time again, hormones overwhelm Lenù and Lila into making bad life-changing decisions. The great loves of their lives are the same evil Mr. Right. Nino Sarratore is no Mr. Darcy. Ferrante makes Nino one of the detestable bad guys of literary history. I can’t believe that Lenù and Lila didn’t immediately recognize that he was a clone of his father, Donato, the slimy seducer they knew from childhood.

The Prose

It’s hard to judge the writing of a translated novel. I do know that Ann Goldstein’s translation of Ferrante’s Italian prose is clear and precise, and the writing comes across as vivid and impactful, but the style is plain and unadorned. It lacks the colorful authorial voice of two recent novels where the prose enchanted me, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Nor does it have any the wonderful authorial commentary like old literary writers Dickens or Tolstoy since Ferrante’s story is told in the first person.

A lot of modern bestsellers have the highly refined writing style taught by MFA programs. Readability and clarity are valued over wordy digressions and colorations. This is one reason why I have a hard time predicting if a novel will become a classic a century from now. The classics we’ve crowned from the 19th century all have distinctive writer’s voices. Ferrante’s voice comes across through the characterizations of Lenù and Lila, and it’s confusing to distinguish Elena the author’s voice from Elena the character.

Final Judgment

I liked this story tremendously. It may have ruined me for reading lesser novels, especially for reading science fiction, which seldom achieves any kind of deep character development. The whole story of My Brilliant Friend reminds me of two other multi-novel sequences about characters as they age.

The first is A Dance to the Music of Time, a twelve-volume series by Anthony Powell which he wrote from 1951 to 1975 using his own life and friends for inspiration. I reviewed them here, here, and here.

And the other are books by Elizabeth Strout. Collectively, they follow the growth of two women too, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. I’ve reviewed them here.

This first reading of the entire My Brilliant Friend story will not be enough to truly appreciate this novel. Even though it’s told in a straightforward manner, it is quite complex in what it has to say. I listened to the books this time. Next time I’ll read them with my eyes. Luckily, I have a one-volume Kindle edition that includes all four books.

Ferrante made me think about my life as a whole. She also makes me think about aging. And she has quite a lot to say about the relationship between men and women. Her novel might be the perfect illustration as to why we don’t have free will. Whether or not it becomes a classic in future centuries, it is worth reading and contemplating now. It gives us lot to meditate on.

JWH

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

by James Wallace Harris, 9/24/24

I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Strout. I just finished her new book that came out just a couple of weeks ago, Tell Me Everything. It was wonderful. Now I could just say to you, “Go out and read it,” but that’s problematic. This is Elizabeth Strout’s tenth book, and it includes characters that have been in eight of her other novels.

Tell Me Everything is mostly about Bob Burgess, and it includes his brother Jim. They were featured in The Burgess Boys (2013). Bob was also in Lucy by the Sea (2022). Lucy Barton’s first book is My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), and her story continued in Anything is Possible (2017), Oh William! (2021) and Lucy by the Sea, and she’s one of the main characters in Tell Me Everything. Elizabeth Strout’s most famous character is Olive Kitteridge who first appeared in Olive Kitteridge (2008), and her story continued in Olive, Again (2019), but she’s also a minor character in Lucy by the Sea and Tell Me Everything.

One of the exciting things about reading Tell Me Everything is Lucy and Olive meet and become friends. Olive is 90 when the story starts and 91 at the end, but we’ve known her since she was in her fifties, working as a teacher. She’s now in assistant living facility. We’ve followed Lucy for most of her life, and she’s now in her mid-sixities in Tell Me Everything.

I believe the title of the new novel comes from Lucy’s and Olive’s relationship where they tell each other stories about people who have unrecorded lives. But also, because Strout tells her novels by having characters tell their stories to each other. (I must wonder if Strout makes up all these stories, or are they based on stories from people she has known?)

Tell Me Everything is a fine novel to read without having read all the other novels, but you won’t get the full Elizabeth Strout impact unless you’ve read her novels in order. Tell Me Everything reiterates many of the major details of the previous novels but I’m not sure the characters will have the same impact. Bob, Lucy, and Olive in the new book are like the tips of icebergs, very impressive, but you don’t get to see them below the waterline.

The two Olive Kitteridge books are collections of thirteen short stories each, twenty-six stories in all. Sometimes Olive is the point-of-view character, and sometimes she just makes a cameo in other people’s stories. She’s not a featured character in Lucy by the Sea or Tell Me Everything. And she’s a lot more than the character people get from wonderful Frances McDormand’s portrayal of her in the HBO miniseries. Olive is immensely multidimensional. But to understand her requires experiencing all those layers. Many people, the other characters in the novels, and readers who read Strout’s books, hate Olive because she’s so abrasive. I love Olive.

We met Lucy in My Name is Lucy Barton which is a fictional memoir told in first person. It sounds like a monologue by Lucy in audiobook. But in Anything is Possible, we hear about Lucy’s childhood through a series of stories told by people who knew Lucy growing up. Oh William! returns to the fictional memoir style, with Lucy telling her story like a long monologue again. That style continues in Lucy by the Sea. In Tell Me Everything, Strout returns to third person, and Lucy is being observed again, especially by Bob Burgess.

Strout is not an omniscient narrator. We learn about characters from the opinions of other characters, and the opinions we form. It would be interesting if Strout wrote a book about her characters using the 19th century style god view of characters.

Lucy is also a complex character who is an observer of other people. And although Olive observes other people, she isn’t as insightful as Lucy. In Tell Me Everything, Lucy teaches Olive about learning and telling other people’s stories, and we see Olive become a much better observer. Lucy is also very philosophical, but not in a deep intellectual sense. Lucy works to make sense of reality through understanding the emotional experiences of others. Bob often thinks Lucy is naive and childlike, but is she?

We got to know Bob in The Burgess Boys, a third person novel. However, this approach doesn’t move far away from Strout’s basic writing technique of writing novels by collecting anecdotes about other people.

Most novels are about something big. Something dramatic. Strout’s books are about ordinary people who have suffered or are suffering ordinary kinds of experiences and emotions that we all suffer. Most of her characters had troubled childhoods. Some of her characters like Lucy, were quite poor growing up. But other characters are well-to-do or become successful. This makes Strout’s novels feel they are about class. Some reviewers make a lot out of the class angle, but I don’t.

Tell Me Everything is about unrequited love, death, murder, child abuse, jealousy, marriage, infidelity, friendships, aging, careers, art, counseling, fashion, resentment, feelings, emotions, alcoholism, understanding the past, reading other people, nude pregnant women, and much more. As Bob Burgess says, of Lucy’s stories about other people, they are about life.

I know some readers don’t like Strout because her books are about ordinary aspects of life. They don’t involve exciting page turning plots. I find them quite thrilling because they make me think about people and myself.

I’m about to start the third of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, which began with the international bestseller, My Brilliant Friend. They are also about ordinary people involving a lot of characters. I find both series appealing because of what might be considered a sexist take on them. I feel they give me women’s insight into reading emotions. Me, and my guy friends don’t read emotions like the women characters in these novels. I don’t know if this ability is a common trait of all women, or just women writers. But it’s why I like both writers.

JWH

Precisely Expressing an Idea with Visual Tools

by James Wallace Harris, 8/19/24

Composing an essay makes me clarify my thoughts. We don’t think in sentences and paragraphs, but in vague words and images. It’s hard to write a sentence that says exactly what you mean the first time. The act of constructing a sentence helps us find out what we’re thinking.

Every day I watch videos on YouTube, and it’s become obvious that expressing an idea with both words and pictures can convey an idea more precisely. Have you noticed how infographics are being used more often in print and online?

I find this particularly true with the channel Useful Charts created by Matt Baker. Baker’s three videos explaining the types of atheists struct me as particularly clear and insightful. You should watch the series to see exactly what I mean, but I’m going to point out several things he did I thought were particularly good at making his ideas concrete.

I think the chart at the top of the page makes his point far better than if we were to just listen to the video or read the transcript. Of course, if he had written the information in an outline, it might have worked just as well.

Implicit Atheists – A person who lacks a belief in God
- Babies & very young children
- Those who have never heard of the concept
- Those who are truly undecided
- Those who really don’t care
Explicit Atheists – A person who firmly believes God does not exist
- Those who have heard the concept, have seriously thought about it, and have concluded that they do not believe
- What most people assume an atheist is.

But if you had to choose which form, words without graphics, or words with graphics, which helped you to see Baker’s points the easiest and fastest?

Later, Baker works to prove that people who think being an agnostic is different from being an atheist are wrong. Agnostic refers to a lack of knowledge, while atheist refers to a lack of belief. By Baker’s definition, most agnostics are atheists.

However, as the video progresses, Baker makes a good case that the term atheist isn’t especially useful because it doesn’t convey a worldview. That surprised me. I always tell people I’m an atheist, but Baker is right, the term doesn’t say much. The term atheist only says I’ve rejected the hypothesis that God created reality. It doesn’t say what I believe.

Baker claims that a worldview has three factors, ontology, epistemology, and axiology. From that I see my ontology is naturalism, my epistemology is science and reason, and my axiology is ethics. That particular combination is generally a humanistic worldview.

I should not tell people I’m an atheist but say I’m a humanist. But then, if people don’t understand the definitions Baker is presenting in his video, is that term any more informative? Baker goes into explain humanism and its history and says that humanists are naturalists aligned with science and reason interested in improving the world. That gives me a lot to think about.

The worldview image above is a mini lesson in philosophy, but the whole video is a mini lesson in how to classify your feelings about religion and philosophy.

In part 2 of the series, Baker goes into classifying atheists by personality types. For his dissertation he used the Meyers-Briggs classification system. Glancing through his dissertation, the information seems dense. It would take a bit of work to digest it. I bet the three videos explain his research far easier for most people to understand.

I’m left wondering if I should try to write my blog essays with more infographics. Or even try to write a whole essay in infographics.

Baker’s video on explaining atheists is minor compared to those where he explains larger subjects. Here’s his video on “37 Bible Characters Found Through Archaeology.” Don’t be put off that it’s about The Bible. It’s about how we know things. For example, most of the characters in The Bible that we can connect to history were from the Iron Age. And most of the characters that are considered myths come from the Bronze Age. Seeing that laid out graphically is very impressive.

I highly recommend spending some time watching the videos on Useful Charts. It’s making me rethink how to express ideas and concepts. Baker makes a wonderful video comparing commercial DNA tests people use for genealogy.

I was particularly impressed with his video on the “Western Esotericism Family Tree.” It explains a lot about people I’ve read about over the years.

JWH

Reading the Best Books

by James Wallace Harris, 8/16/24

Why read any book when you can read a terrific book? Yes, but which books are great? Recently, The New York Times asked 503 writers, critics, editors, and other experts on literature what were their favorite ten books published since the year 2000. The editors wanted to know what the best books were published so far in the 21st century. They produced this list (NYT-W). It’s a list of one hundred fiction and nonfiction books that tend to be more literary and serious.

But they also asked the paper’s readers to submit their favorite ten books published since the year 2000. That produced this list (NYT-R). That result seems to lean towards the bestsellers that readers love.

The Guardian back in 2019 created their own list of the best books of the 21st century. This gives a British slant.

Each list ranked the books 1 through 100.

I combined all three lists in a Google spreadsheet and sorted it by the books on the most lists. Eighteen books were on all three lists, and thirty-six titles were on two lists. Those 54 titles are the real standouts. The three lists produced 225 unique titles.

I shared my spreadsheet in case you want to look at it, or even download a copy.

My plan is to start reading all the books on the list, focusing on the ones that were on the most lists first. I’ve marked those I’ve already read.

I want to read and study these books. Eventually, I want to make a list of qualities that go into books that create a universal appeal. Now that I’m getting older, I don’t want to waste time reading mediocre books.

Not only do I want to broaden my taste in reading, but I crave finding books that I’ll remember. I don’t expect to remember much, because I can’t remember much anymore, but I want to read books that I remember something, some little takeaway that I can keep.

JWH