35. Nothing

1.  Someone named Adele won a bunch of Grammy awards the other night.  I did not watch the show.  I had never heard of this person until the next morning when they mentioned she won a bunch of awards. 

2.  I am a professor of English.  Consider the so-called "classics" I've never read.  This is not an exhaustive list. 

• Every novel written by Charles Dickens except A Tale of Two Cities.
• Every play by Shakespeare except for Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing .  (Note: I have a prejudice here.  I think Shakespeare wanted people like me--who cannot act--to see his plays performed.)
• Moby Dick.
• To date, I've never been able to finish a novel by Jane Austen.  I've tried.  She's funny, but after awhile I just don't care about the characters anymore and would rather watch X-Files reruns.
• Paradise Lost.  I know what it's about and I read "excerpts" in college.  Reading excerpts usually helps convince me that I don't really care to read something.
• The Faerie Queen.  Ditto.
• The Brother's Karamazov.  Once again, I tried more than once.  Then I read what Nabokov said about the author and agreed.  Here is what he said in an interview:

Interviewer:  Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar." Why?

VN:  Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

• War and Peace.  Someday maybe.  Someday.
• Any novel by Faulkner or Hemingway.

I could go on.  Enthusiastic students sometimes ask me for a list of books they ought to read. I really have a hard time producing these lists, since lists like these already exist. I tell them I can make a list of books I've enjoyed, but that "ought" seems so dogmatically prescriptive.  And the truth is, there are so many good books to read, that I gave up trying to read the ones I "ought" a long time ago. If I'm not enchanted in the first fifty or a hundred pages, I put the thing aside and move on to one of the thousand  other good books waiting to be read.  It doesn't mean I won't come back to it someday in a different stage of life and give it another go.  I might. I've done this.  I couldn't tolerate Toni Morrison the first time I gave her Beloved a shot, but it was an assignment and I plodded through.  I read it again years later, and really liked it.  By the sixth time reading it, I was utterly in love with it.  I think it may well be the great American novel.  You should read it.

3.  I do not understand how NFL football, this barbarous, uber-specialized, ultra violent, war charade, which leaves young men crippled in body and mind later in life can be more popular in America than major league baseball, nba basketball, nhl hockey, wnba basketball, major league soccer, word cup soccer, champions league soccer, or even youth league soccer. Especially considering how many so-called "exciting games" end up getting decided by place-kickers. 

4.  In May of 2010 Glenn Beck, in his commencement address at Liberty University, said this:

 "It is God’s finger that wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is God’s country; these are God’s rights." 

Such "mormonic" (pun intended), jingoistic, American exceptionalism coming from this particular evangelical university should not surprise me, I guess. What does bother me is how many Christians still listen to this lunatic as if he speaks the very words of God.  I cannot begin to understand this, and find it, quite frankly, a little terrifying. American exceptionalism makes sense as a Mormon doctrine--it fits that narrative, and Romney and Beck are free to spout it all they like.  But for crying out loud, biblical Christians ought to expose it for the nonsense that it is. And then get busy with something more worthwhile like ignoring the two of them and reading War and Peace.  Or listening to Adele on Pandora. Or watching UEFA League soccer. 

34. out of touch

I do not understand "gaming."  At all.  And I don't care.

Perhaps that's how they--the obsessive gamers--feel about literature, sitting in the back of the classroom daydreaming about the gaming they are missing out on while they're stuck in class.