Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times
Edited by Kevin Smokler
Basic Books

Kevin Smokler opens his introduction to this collection of essays by making reference to the National Endowment for the Arts' much-discussed 2004 study, "Reading at Risk." The study made headlines last summer for reporting a number of worrying trends that spanned the demographic spectrum. Not surprisingly, people of all ages and classes, from all corners of the nation, are reading less, buying fewer books and spending more time on other media. The percentage of the population that had, over the course of the entire year, read at least one work of "literature" (defined broadly enough to include Danielle Steel and "The Da Vinci Code") fell below the bellwether figure of 50 percent for the first time in the study's history. Even more worrying was a statistic suggesting that the greatest rate of decline in reading was that between ages 18 and 24. The barbarians were close at hand.

There was, of course, a torrent of commentary about the study in various and sundry blogs, literary magazines and academic journals, but no clear consensus emerged. Was the concerned reader or aspiring writer to give up in despair and take up another medium? Put away the pen and pick up the handy-cam? San Francisco writer Kevin Smokler put this question to a number of fellow writers, ages 19 to 40, including Nell Freudenberger, Neal Pollack, Elizabeth Spiers and Douglas Rushkoff.

The result is a fascinating collection of open-ended essays that, taken together, give a glimpse into an emerging generation deeply committed to the written word, but not in ways that would be recognizable to the midcentury, tweed-sporting, pipe-smoking set at the Times Literary Supplement. If there is an overarching thesis to this otherwise diverse collection of views it's the idea that technology is changing the writing life in ways that are only beginning to be understood. We appear to be less interested in literature because we're no longer fixated exclusively on the printed book. We're spending more time on the Internet, which would seem to be nothing but a big distraction and a waste of time, but it is in fact transforming us into avid consumers and producers of text. The book is dead. Long live the word.

It helps immensely that Smokler himself, along with a number of the contributors to this collection, is technically inclined — hip and caught up on ways that writers can harness the net to advance the greater cause of literature. (Check out Smokler's blog and his ingenious marketing project, the Virtual Book Tour.) The book'a other key things include perennial interests as the writing life, how we discover literature, how we find a voice, and the merits of MFA programs.

Most of the essays in this book are personal or anecdotal. They give us a good idea of where the serious twenty- or thirty-something aspiring writer fits into contemporary American life. Michelle Richmond's take on the MFA option is especially insightful and sobering. Even though she and her colleagues had grand ambitions,

... ten years later, only eight of the writers I knew in my two programs (from a list of several dozen) have published books. No one, to my knowledge, is actually making a living as a writer. Many are disappointed, some are visibly depressed, and some just don't care, because the years have taught them that there are more important things in life than publishing. I suspect that most of us remember the MFA as an amusing jaunt far removed from real life, one that didn't really get us any closer to becoming writers. To be a writer you have to write — and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

A piece by Benjamin Nugent asks the intriguing question of whether, in a culture so obsessed with work, so taken up with trivial and "soul-altering" jobs, a William Carlos Williams would still have found time to write poetry at the end of the day. Tom Bissell queries whether contemporary life — with all the "jumpy pixels of visual entertainment" to tempt us away from books — is filled with more distractions now than there were in the past.

No author seems more cheerfully contented than Douglas Rushkoff about living in the present, among blogs, Amazon.com, and self-publishing technologies. Not only does "online interaction actually make a person's writing better," but, in his estimation, the net-happy scribe is actually writing with a "greater density of thought." The net poses no real threat to books because like many older media that seemed on the verge of eclipse, "a new medium only replaces an old one if it does everything better [than its predecessor]." The net is obviously better for reference, but books are about something more: something tactile, sensual, experiential. Not "a transmission of data; [but rather] a transmission of essence."

Rushkoff sees a future of literature in which savvier writers — ones who truly have something to say — resort to blogs, leverage the power of search technologies, and rein in the tyranny and greed of oversized, out-of-touch publishers to deliver content to readers more efficiently than ever before. Smokler is already there, beating a path with his electronic book tours, spirited audio-blog entries, and growing network of contacts among the digital literati. The intelligence and wit displayed in this book will give anyone concerned with the future of literature something to be hopeful about, no matter what the surveys are saying.

— Robert Francis (robertfrancis70 at yahoo dot com)