Out of Time #2, or, Veggiesauruses v. Meatasaurases

The new dino exhibit at The Museum of Texas Tech lies in the dead center of the twenty-five-year-old complex in north Lubbock. The layout is angular and rambling, owed in part to the building's renovation for the visiting Vatican frescoes of two years ago. Because of this arrangement, it is hard to find an real sense of organization there, which might be appropriate, considering that the actual dino-"story" itself has few beginnings, middles or ends—paleontology has often been, after all, a morass of theory, conjecture and sometimes downright imagination. Visitors to the exhibit find themselves wandering from epoch to epoch, from big lizards to little birds (the oldest of which was discovered about forty-five minutes from where I'm writing this), from cooing of the size of nests of eggs to tapping the windows of some of the more unusual creatures depicted.

While centered around a depiction of a fifty-foot mother dino and her young following in her enormous muddy footprints ("no Godzilla, it was I who carried you..."), in a short time you realize that there is one particular item in the exhibit that garners a reaction from everyone that comes through, young and old. It's a skeleton of a twenty-five foot Quetzalquoatlus [sp?] suspended over the southern end of the complex. While the size of the bird (overheard during the last visit: "that's a biiiig damn bird!") is more than enough to garner a reaction, it is that the massive animal kinda sneaks up on you. The identifying plaque is hidden in the corner far away from either entrance and there is no arrow to take your gaze up (fine, I'll admit that I'm not smart enough to look up without an arrow). Thus, a visitor is smarter than I am and surveys their surroundings appropriately while looking at this plaque or they just happen to look up and see this big f@$%ing bird with a foot that could easily pick them up by the head and carry them home to feed the kiddies.

What then, does this enormous bird have to do with the inability to adjust my cultural bandwidth (which the "dino-rants" are really supposed to tackle, see previous)? Permit me another example of personal iconoclasm:

Example 3) On the Death of Fiction
Ohhh no, muses the reader of this weblog, Mike's defense of curmudeonology is going to a bad, dull and overwritten place. Bear with me for just a second friends, as The Man once asked his audience, there'll be more dick jokes later in the show.

The act of evaluating the terminal condition of prose has its two different areas of approach: the hard numbers (i.e, the economic and cultural realities of fiction's (lack of a) future), and the aesthetic (e.g, the Cassandric cries of 'industry' and academic critics on a slow, spiritual demise of the medium). I'll tackle both with as much brevity as I can muster.

Part One--They Shoot Readers, Don't They?(This being the part that comes first and alludes then that there will at least be another part following which will be connected thematically but will approach this rant from yet another vantage point)

The facts are indisputable—American publishers threw the largest party in history last year (indicated by the arrival of nearly 163 thousand titles hitting the shelves last year) and nobody came. In fact, partygoers (read, potential readers of this publishing avalanche) showed as much enthusiasm for the get together as did those invited to my get-together for the last episode of Charles in Charge.

How do I know everybody skipped the suaree (pronounced sua-REE)? In July, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report that concludes that less than half of adult Americans read for pleasure and the numbers are dropping exponentially by the year, to a total of 14 percent in the last ten years (Malcolm Jones summarized the NEA findings quite well in this article in Newsweek).

Now before you click off, fearing that I'll begin keening about the death of culture in our country, breathe a little easier. Instead, I venture that the NEA's numbers aren't all that surprising. They may not even be that awful a thing. After all, beyond our technological capability for infinite distraction, who among us has the time to read for pleasure? I've read more this year than probably any other time in my life, but I've been in college or unemployed for the whole year (and the "ml stephens Reading Challenge" has taken a genuine effort of attention, btw). Meanwhile, most of the people reading this have ninety-hour-a-week jobs, children with play dates and doctors appointments and NASCAR fantasy leagues. We're living in a world that isn't structured for sitting on the veranda with a leatherbound volume in our laps and the dog curled at our feet. And what of it? We made this world (including the "more-work-for-less-pay-and-no-benefits" reality of globalization) because we wanted it this way.

Then, what to say of this printing glut? Logically, publishing conglomerates had a normal reaction to their shrinking marketing base—that they haven't been offering enough choices for potential consumers, thus the increase in product. Some would argue that for each of the quality writers that finally found a home in this yard sale, there was an equal number of shitty ones, and they would probably be right (Alexandar Hemon has written a far better rant on this argument than I could ever conjure. Read it, it's good). However, I don't think that I'm going too far over the bend to comment that this economic model is flawed. By offering more product to an ever decreasing group of consumers, the industry is going to reap the same kind of net reward that I garnered at my New Coke booth at the local flea market. (Who knew?)

Much of what I'm talking about here is partially an answer to the fearful screeches of the Harold Blooms, Michael Medveds and Dale Pecks of the world. Like this chapter of the rants, their cries are also twofold: They too ask "why aren't you people reading?" Never mind that they ignore the answer: "Because we don't need to anymore, you dinosaurs." They ignore this answer because they're too busy asking the next, equally important question, "Why are you reading crap?" It's that alleged assault of crap and the courage to call it that that takes us to...Part Two (The Revenge)--They Shoot Writers, Don't They?(an artsy side of the discussion, a distillation of Deconstruction and a brief defense of Dale Peck), which can be found here