too many Daves

If you’ve seen this post, this post and this post, then you know I’m reading Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill’s 1988 short-story collection.  My path to Gaitskill and her writing gives me a fresh chance to poke at Nicholas Carr’s idea that the Internet “is turning us into shallower thinkers.”

I’m not going to do that — partly because I want to get back to reading Gaitskill, partly because my original 5/30/2010 critique remains right here for anyone who wants to find it.

I’m reading Gaitskill’s stories because Andrew Sullivan wrote a post about an anti-masturbation, anti-porn group called Dirty Girls Ministries. Sullivan’s post didn’t mention Mary Gaitskill. Nor did the Blaire Briody article that triggered Sullivan’s post. But I decided to blog about Briody’s article myself. While writing my post, I tried to build up an idea by referring to a scene from “Secretary.” I Googled the movie. Google led me to the movie’s Wikipedia page, where I learned that the movie is based on a Mary Gaitskill story. I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry for Mary Gaitskill, where I learned that Gaitskill “characterized the film as ‘the Pretty Woman version, heavy on the charm (and a little too nice).’” More Googling led me to a nerve.com interview and this quote from Gaitskill:

My reaction to (the movie), when I saw the rough cut, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. But I just thought, well, whatever. I felt sorry for Shainberg [the director]. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I thought, the poor son of a bitch went through so much trouble, he’s never going to find a distributor, that’s really sad. But then there became this whole thing with money. I didn’t get paid when I was supposed to, and I was concerned that they were going to cheat me, and a lawyer told me they very well could. That was what upset me. I didn’t give a fuck about anything else. I just thought, if I don’t get my money, I’m going to have to kill somebody.

So I didn’t see it for a long time. I got paid, and as far as I was concerned that was the end of the story. Then my sister came to visit, and she wanted to see it. It had been out for some months at that point, and we went to the theatre, and I enjoyed it! It’s not what I would have done but it’s kind of sweet. My actual character in the story, Debby, she would have loved it. It was too cute and ham-fisted, too “wanting to create a positive image.” It wanted to make people feel good about themselves. It was so odd, because I read an interview with the screenwriter, who was sort of blathering about political correctness and how awful it was — well, the movie is the epitome of political correctness! It was a positive statement about people who are into S&M, and those who don’t understand. Which I find icky.

I decided to find and read Gaitskill’s version of “Secretary.” I’ve done that. Now I’m reading more of her stories and getting all caught up in details of why, for example, it was so crucial that she used the word “roughly” in a particular sentence. This experience, like so many others, cements my sense that this part of my original critique of Carr was especially right:

If Carr’s piece causes people to rethink the choices they make online, I’m all for that. But I’ll be upset if Carr’s piece causes people to flee the Internet or to resign themselves to an online reading experience that, to use those words of yours, is “more like watching the landscape from a train.” It’s not just that we can drive our own train. It’s that we’re free to jump the track, to go where we want at the speed we want with as many or as few distractions, digressions, and deep-thinking dives as we choose.

I e-mailed my favorite blogger last night. Today he excerpted my e-mail on his blog. I’m grateful.

As it stands, my words are attributed to “a reader.” It’s an accurate description, but I can’t stay true to my own standards unless I sign my name to my e-mailed critique of “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains,” Nicholas Carr’s piece in the current Wired. If I keep my name off the critique, I will need to stop griping about the sucker punches people throw from the shadows of online anonymity. I like that high horse and I’m unwilling to dismount.

So I’ll post my full e-mail here. As you’ll see, the e-mail refers to “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble,” the title of the post that brought Carr’s article to my attention and prompted last night’s e-mail. The post’s title came from an image Carr used in Wired: “Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory.”

Here, without any further throat-clearing, is last night’s e-mail …

Dear Andrew:

I’m writing because I found “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble” to be almost entirely unpersuasive. It just struck me, though, that there’s something I should do before I dissect Nicholas Carr’s claims: retrace my steps, tell you how I got here. I’ll do this because my accidental, unpremeditated path feels meaningfully different from the “watching the landscape from a train” experience you described.

This started with my wife sending me an e-mail with an uncapitalized “sullivan” in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail, she pasted your Ralph-the-pig-themed “Emails of the Day.” Reading those, I saw the words “pig nipples” in hypertext. Now, I’m not a prude, but I haven’t ever clicked the words “pig nipples” before. Tonight I did. Why? My best guess is that many of those futile, little thimbles that I’ve splashed into the bathtub of my mind have been infused with this basic idea: “Dear Bathtub: We got these ideas from Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan posts worthwhile stuff. He uses links sparingly and intelligently. We can’t click all links. But Sullivan’s links tend to be worthwhile. Remember this. Yours sincerely, Thimble.”

And so I clicked “pig nipples.” This launched my browser, pulled up “The Sexually Ambiguous, Swimming Pig, Ctd” post, and gave me the pleasure of learning the expression “worthless as teats on a boar hog.” In fairness to Nicholas Carr, I can’t be sure that I will remember that expression two months from now. But I’m OK with that. Truly.

Having finished reading the “teats on a boar hog” post, my eyes drifted toward the right of the screen. I saw your picture. My gaze drifted further right to Megan McArdle’s picture. I thought of my friend Aaron, a doctor with keen ideas on healthcare reform who has been unimpressed by some of McArdle’s work. Right or wrong, the thought of Aaron pulled my eyes away from McArdle and back to you. Under your photo, I saw the cryptically truncated words “Filling A Bathtub With A…” With the interrupting ellipses, those five words were even less promising than “pig nipples.” But I clicked anyway, read through your “Filling A Bathtub With A Thimble” post, and emerged feeling skeptical. Remembering Thimble’s note, Bathtub reminded me that you use links sparingly and intelligently and that I could delve deeper into Carr’s ideas by clicking the link in your post. So I clicked.

As I clicked, I was distracted — not by pop-up ads or by a surfeit of hypertext but by hearing my spaniel pad past. This reminded me that I’d already broken my promise to take the dogs straight out five minutes earlier. When made to wait, our dogs sometimes pee inside. I eyed the spaniel, confirmed that he was settling in for a nap instead of sniffing around for a peeing spot, and started to read Carr’s piece. By the end of the first paragraph, I was completely distracted — not by Twitter, not by incoming e-mail, not by the peril of canine piss but by a flaw in the evidence Carr cites.

Carr opens with a UCLA study in which volunteers “used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics — the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car — (while an) MRI scanned their brains …”

Well, Bathtub was roiling at this point. Bathtub wanted me to stop reading, to forget about Carr. Why? Because long experience has taught Bathtub that Google is useful for learning precisely because it allows users to sprint after information at the moment when curiosity strikes, at the exact moment when our minds are most primed to receive, value, and retain information. And Bathtub somehow doubted that these UCLA volunteers, gamely going along with the experiment, were ablaze with curiosity about the nutritional benefits of chocolate or vacationing in the Galapagos Islands or buying a new car or whatever the other “preselected topics” may have been. So Bathtub didn’t think this experiment had anything to tell Carr or you or me about real-life Internet use.

But Bathtub is nothing if not fair. So Bathtub then reminded me that I’ve always learned better by hearing than by reading and that it would be a simple matter to put Carr’s piece on my Kindle, plug in some headphones, leash up the dogs, go outside, stop worrying about pee-puddled carpeting, and command the Kindle’s little text-to-speech robot man to read Carr’s words to me while the dogs sniffed around the front yard. So that’s what I did.

I ended up believing that Carr gets things right and wrong: right when he acknowledges our agency by writing that “we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture”;  wrong, among other places, when he implicitly denies our agency with the “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” subtitle of his forthcoming book.

The Internet is not doing anything to our brains. We may be doing bad things to our brains. But the things that we are doing have been possible as long as there have been libraries. Any library patron has always been free to read a paragraph, re-shelve the book, grab a new one, skim its preface, re-shelve it, wander to the periodicals section, grab the New York Times magazine, flip to the fancy real estate ads in the back, think of West Egg and East Egg and Jay Gatsby, put down the magazine, head to the fiction section, reach out for Fitzgerald’s classic, realize that he’s never read anything by Fitzgerald’s wife, wonder if this makes him a sexist, decide that it just might, scan the fiction Fitzgeralds until he finds Zelda, grab a copy of Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz, start to read the first paragraph, question his own memory, flip to the author bio to confirm that Zelda was truly married to the Gatsby author, see that Zelda was born in Montgomery, think of the Montgomery bus boycott, remember that he’s been meaning to buckle down and read Taylor Branch’s MLK biographies, head off for the biography section.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

Most of us don’t do that in libraries. But we could.

If Carr’s piece causes people to rethink the choices they make online, I’m all for that. But I’ll be upset if Carr’s piece causes people to flee the Internet or to resign themselves to an online reading experience that, to use those words of yours, is “more like watching the landscape from a train.” It’s not just that we can drive our own train. It’s that we’re free to jump the track, to go where we want at the speed we want with as many or as few distractions, digressions, and deep-thinking dives as we choose.

If you’ve read this far, Andrew, you may still be a more patient reader than you imagine yourself to be.

With best wishes,

David