Month / August 2006

by Edward Champion

Is JetBlue Racist?

I fly JetBlue all the time, but this terrible story from Raed Jarrar, who was asked to remove his T-shirt because it contained Arabic script that “offended passengers” (never mind that nobody could read the shirt), has me rethinking the airline. Calls will be made tomorrow. (via Maud)

[UPDATE: It’s worth noting that, last October, Lorrie Heasley was ejected from a Southwest flight for wearing a Meet the Fockers parody T-shirt. Heasley vowed to file a civil rights lawsuit, but I can find no trace of it. But in a New York Times article, two law professors remarked that the Heasley case doesn’t apply to the First Amendment because only the government can violate the Constitution. Writing in Salon, Andrew Salon remarked upon this troubling predicament.]

by Edward Champion

The Myth of Bored Readership

Nick Hornby notes that reading should be fun. He notes:

To put it crudely, I get bored, and when I get bored I tend to get tetchy. It has proved surprisingly easy to eliminate boredom from my reading life. And boredom, let’s face it, is a problem that many of us have come to associate with books. It’s one of the reasons why we choose to do almost anything else rather than read; very few of us pick up a book after the children are in bed and the dinner has been made and the dirty dishes cleared away.

While I can get behind the idea that books can be fun, the way that Hornby has phrased his rhetoric strikes me as deficient. It’s one thing to march through a lengthy and turgid book and go out of your way to determine what an author is trying to say (even when it fails to strike a chord), but to throw a book aside simply because one is bored or one cannot find a single point of interest is counterproductive and far from quixotic. To my mind, any good reader should remain naturally curious and committed to the task at hand, which also involves reading things outside what she’s comfortable reading. The copout excuse of boredom cannot do justice to a book, nor can it effectively attune or expand a reader sensibilities. The real question a reader should ask is why a book failed to reach her, what about it succeeded or failed, and why the book was incompatible.

The problem isn’t so much that reading isn’t fun, but that Western society retains a terrible prejudice against the intellectually curious, a state of thinking that can be extremely fun. The academic world is often a humorless millieu of rigid deconstruction. A high school English teacher must subscribe to an inoffensive administrator-sanctioned reading list. Any cockeyed perspective, even a half-baked one, outside the acceptable range of responses is considered wrong or incorrect — this, despite proven results from teachers like Rafe Esquith. Moreover, the thought of thinking and entertaining in the same bite is about as daffy as a peanut butter and banana sandwich for lunch.

Hornby’s proselytizing may win him points among his slacker constituency, but why an’t both camps commingle here? Can’t we find a balance that encourages a new generation of fun-loving, energetic and intellectually rigorous readers? Or has our culture become so hopelessly “bored” that the mind stumbles into atrophy instead of curiosity?

by Edward Champion

Another Big Book Involving a Tunnel Not Authored by William Gass

The Independent‘s Matt Thorne talks with William T. Vollmann and the V-Mann spills a few details about many of the projects now at the forefront. Here’s Vollmann on Imperial: “I’m trying to tell the history of the US-Mexican border from earliest times to the present. I’m looking at how a line on paper can change things. When you first look at Imperial Valley it seems hot, flat and dull, but the more you look into it the more secrets you can find. There’s a labyrinth of illegal Chinese tunnels, which was considered to be a myth. But I finally got to go into these tunnels and they’re fascinating. There’s parquet ceilings and I found this velvet nude painting, and some old Cantonese letters I had translated. Some tunnels became brothels and gambling dens and valuables were hidden down there.” (via Jeff)