`Let's Say It's Damned Tiresome'

In no other part of my life am I as belligerently self-centered as in my choice of which book to read next. I’m guided exclusively by pleasure-seeking whim. I’ve operated this way for so long I even resent reading a lousy book for review, despite the incentive of a paycheck. Five years ago I returned to college and fulfilled the science requirement by taking Human Genetics. The massive textbook, complete with CD-ROM, cost $95, and after one failed attempt never read it again. The prose recalled Theodore Dreiser translated into Swedish and back into English. I took thorough notes during lectures, met often with the professor and lab instructor, and got my only “B.” Obviously, students should disregard my example, though I draw moral support from an unlikely pair of writers.

Late in life, Walt Whitman, one of mankind’s prodigious talkers, yakked away in his little house on Mickle Street in Camden, N.J., to his friend Horace Traubel, who took notes. Whitman was a windbag by nature, in poetry, prose and conversation, but often an entertaining windbag. Here’s what he said on July 19, 1888:

“Let’s be honest with each other, even if the book is a bigwig. If we think a book’s damned tiresome let’s say it’s damned tiresome and not say `how do you do? – come again.’”

Reviewers, take note.

In 1910, Joseph Conrad devoted a brief essay to circulating libraries, later collected in Notes on Life and Letters. The gloomy Pole’s sense of humor favored the heavy-handed but on occasion he makes me smile, as he does here on the subject of “common, hired books”:

“A few of them (not necessarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some others make for you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis of a barrel-organ; the tinkling-cymbals book (it was not written by a humorist) I only met once. But there is infinite variety in the noise books do make. I have now on my shelves a book apparently of the most valuable kind which, before I have read half-a-dozen lines, begins to make a noise like a buzz-saw. I am inconsolable; I shall never, I fear, discover what it is all about, for the buzzing covers the words, and at every try I am absolutely forced to give up ere the end of the page is reached.”

It’s amusing to speculate on the author of Conrad’s “buzz-saw” book, but I checked and confirmed that Rick Moody wasn’t born until 1961.