"Kanye the Barbarian" or "Kanye West doesn't care about book people"

As he is apt to do, Kanye West raised quite the kerfuffle last week when he declared himself a “proud non-reader of books” (while promoting his own ludicrously slim book, no less). Kanye went on to say, “Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed… I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.”

The outcry from the writerly community has been predictable, with a lot of righteous fulmination on our culture of ignorance and the unforgivable arrogance of Kanye West. Say what you will about Kanye. Personally, I think he’s an excellent producer and decent rapper who’s adopted a manufactured messiah complex as a means of keeping his name in the headlines (The line about not wanting a book’s autograph is just too over-the-top not to be performance art), but I get why so many people have come to hate him.

I won’t go so far as to say Kanye has a point here. I don’t think he’s even trying to make a point, beyond proving that he can generate controversy by making controversial statements. But he does open the door for what I think is a long overdue conversation. Simply put, I think readers have a tendency to overvalue what they do.

Don’t get me wrong – I love reading, I love writing and I love books. In fact, I freely admit to being a literary snob. But I’m snobbish about what I read; my problem is with people who are snobbish about the very act of reading. There seems to be a prevailing idea that being a regular reader affords one a certain superiority over less bookish types. Even though I usually love any opportunity to indulge a false sense of superiority, I’m afraid I can’t completely agree.

My favorite bookstore in the world, Maple Street Book Shop in New Orleans, sells a popular bumper sticker emblazoned with the slogan “Fight the Stupids.” Much as I love the shop, I really dislike the implication that people who don’t read a lot are stupid. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for not reading much, from learning disabilities to time constraints to a basic lack of interest. Just as I know many exceptional writers who can’t spell to save their lives, I know plenty of well-rounded, intelligent people who seldom crack a book. It’s a matter of personal preference and learning style, and it’s nobody’s place to think himself better or worse because of it.

I think that strain of snobbery has hurt the institution of reading as much as any video game system or prime time reality show. The idea that books are only for nerds and eggheads was born out of centuries-old class struggles that carry on to this day. It’s perfectly natural for readers to have a defensive reaction when someone bashes books, but that shouldn’t manifest itself in disdain for those who don’t know David Foster Wallace from David Alan Grier. It’s something of a tyranny of the minority: a relatively small population of voracious readers has long convinced the world that those who don’t care for books are illiterate morons, and that’s too bad. In my experience, heaping shame on people for what they’re not is one of the least effective methods of changing their opinions.

Of course, I don’t believe that not reading is anything to be proud of. If I thought Kanye was doing anything but playing a role, I’d agree that he deserves chastisement for that part of his statement. But think of it another way – if Kanye had called himself a “proud non-watcher of television,” would it have generated the same kind of backlash? I strongly doubt it. In fact, he’d probably have been heralded as a positive influence by the “Kill your television” contingent.

I’ve never understood the knee-jerk “books good, TV bad” mindset. I’ve had intense, life-enriching experiences while enthralled by books, TV shows, movies, albums, paintings, graffiti tags, what-have-you. I’ve also been repulsed and scarred by all of the above. It’s all art, and none of it is inherently better or worse than the rest. Scrolling through any given New York Times best-seller list will reveal a slew of books that I’d consider far less life-enriching than most of what I watch on TV.

Would the “television rots your mind” set really try to tell me that my brain cells would be better served by reading Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (#4 in paperback nonfiction this week) or Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (#1 in hardcover advice) than by engaging the brilliant screenwriting of shows like The Wire or The Venture Bros? And even beyond disposable volumes like Max’s and Harvey’s, there’s some truth to Kanye’s statement: plenty of roundly acclaimed authors really do be so wordy and self-absorbed (I’m looking at you, John Irving). Television at its best is just as valid and worthwhile as any literary format, but somehow bashing TV is seen as meritorious, while dismissing books approaches heresy.

At the bottom of it all, I’m sort of glad to see that comments like Kanye’s can still spark such a vehement response. I’m a great supporter of the written word, and it’s nice to see that so many people still defend literature with such gusto. That gives me hope for the days when my own books finally see print. At the same time, I think we could all stand to chill out and take stuff like this a tad less seriously. The world already looks at the literati as a bunch of uptight blowhards. Looking down our noses at non-readers and whipping up tempests in every passing teacup does little to combat that image.

But don't get me started on Kanye's off-hand dismissal of Twitter. Them's fightin' words!

- Ira Brooker

Watching "Clockers" in a post-"Wire" world

When I read Richard Price’s novel Clockers back in high school, I was pretty well blown away. Here was a book that took me deep into a world about which I knew nothing, that of streetside drug dealers in the New Jersey ghetto. I was captivated by the dealers’ inscrutable lingo, their mysterious street names, the curiously malleable code by which they lived. It’s a hefty novel – more than 600 pages – but I breezed right on through, devouring Price’s muscular prose during study hall and between screenings at the movie theater where I worked.

Back in the mid-1990s, we were still feeling the hysterical reverberations of “Just Say No” and the D.A.R.E. program. Street gangs were an improbably omnipresent bogeyman, even in small town Wisconsin. That made Clockers’ treatment of the crack game all the more remarkable. It astonished me to see dope-slinging treated like any other business, and drug dealers depicted as actual people with feelings and families. Price tossed me deep into the heart of this foreign landscape by crafting a fully seen world, coloring his corners with the most vivid eye for detail I’d ever seen in a novel.

I first picked up Clockers in late 1995, in anticipation of Spike Lee’s forthcoming film adaptation. I was a devoted Spike Lee fan in high school, so the concept of Brooklyn’s own auteur bringing one of my new favorite novels to life was pretty exhilarating. Since it wasn’t the type of movie that was likely to play theatrically anywhere near Sparta, Wisconsin, I had to wait for the video release. When Clockers finally hit the shelves of Preferred Video (R.I.P.), I snatched it up and settled in to my friend Matt’s basement, anticipating a kick-ass evening of tension and artistry.

What I got instead was an okay adaptation that hit most of the right notes but never quite captured the spirit or urgency of the book. Here’s how much impact the movie had on me: at a literary trivia event a few years ago, I correctly answered four of five questions about Price’s novel, which I hadn’t read in 12 years, while the only question I missed was about the movie. In fact, the only elements of the adaptation that stuck with me over the years were Delroy Lindo’s brutal performance as the neighborhood kingpin and the irksome fact that the movie changed the protagonist’s favorite beverage from vanilla Yoo-Hoo to “Chocolate Moo.”

When I started watching the first season of The Wire last summer, Clockers was the first reference point that popped into my head. As the courtyard drama of David Simon’s masterpiece unfolded, I started to believe The Wire was a far better representation of Price’s work than Lee’s film was. There are plenty of obvious parallels between the two stories, most markedly in their lead drug dealers. The Wire’s DeAngelo Barksdale is essentially Baltimore’s answer to Clockers’ Strike, an ambitious young middle manager trying to save his soul while climbing the ladder. Both men have dreams that reach beyond the corner, but each is trapped by his personal relationship with his higher-ups.

DeAngelo mirrors Strike closely enough to make The Wire feel instantly familiar to me, but that didn’t distract one bit from my enthrallment with the show. It’s become almost a cliché to heap praise on The Wire, but every word of that praise is well deserved. (Yes, I am that annoying friend who won’t stop telling you how it’s The Best Thing That Has Ever Been on TV.) Anyway, David Simon and the first-season Wire writers go Richard Price one better by digging even deeper into the day-to-day business of slanging dope and the lives of those who do it. Anyone who’s been stuck in a draggy office job should be able to empathize with the dealers’ head-butting with upper management, disputes with unscrupulous customers and long stretches of stifling boredom. Even more than Clockers, the series drives home the idea that selling drugs is a job like any other, albeit one with an exceptionally high mortality rate. There’s little doubt that The Wire owes a lot to Richard Price, a debt that Simon paid back by bringing Price on board as a writer later in the series.

While jonesing for a Wire fix last weekend, I decided to revisit the Clockers video that’s been gathering dust on my shelf ever since I found it in a supermarket cut-out bin many years ago. (Underwhelmed though I was, I apparently I liked it well enough to drop three bucks on it back in the day.) I didn’t presume it would hold up to The Wire, but I was intrigued to see how much carryover there was between the two.

Clockers’ opening credits sequence – a montage of genuine crime scene photos of young black men killed by gunshots – could stand as shorthand for most of Spike Lee’s directorial career: it’s undeniably powerful, but remarkably heavy-handed. Thankfully, this isn’t one of Lee’s worst offenders, although he does shoehorn in some thudding commentary about social issues from guns to AIDS. Other than that and an oddly slow-jam-heavy soundtrack, I wouldn’t exactly say there’s much wrong with the film version of Clockers. The cinematography is lush and stylish and the acting is solid, with Lindo’s old school hustler and Keith David’s watchful cop standing out. In some ways, it’s a film ahead of its time; the depiction of life on the corners still looks more realistic and sympathetic than most anything that’s followed in its wake, with one major exception.

It’s that exception that really sunk Clockers for me this time around. The Wire looms so large that it seriously deadens the impact of any comparable work of fiction. For every effective aspect of Clockers, there’s a more indelible counterpart from The Wire. Sure, Clockers’ Rocco Klein is a charismatic cop who knows how to talk to dealers on their own terms, but he doesn’t approach the self-destructive brilliance of Jimmy McNulty. Lee does a good job of introducing Errol Barnes, a stone-cold killer with a haunted past, but he’s not half as scary/sympathetic as The Wire’s Chris Partlow. And when we meet a hero-worshipping young boy in danger of being seduced by the streets, no Wire fan could help but flash on the wrenching stories of Michael, Randy, Namond and Dukie.

None of this is Clockers’ fault, of course. It’s just that The Wire changed everything. Call it the Beatles effect: Their early music was fun, iconic and revolutionary in its own right, but the release of Revolver rendered songs like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” instantly dated, if not downright frivolous. The Wire simply lays waste to all that went before it. Procedural shows like Law & Order and CSI were never exactly heavyweights when it came to things like plotting, realism or dramatic integrity, but I could still sit down with them for some empty-headed entertainment. Now David Simon has rendered them nearly unwatchable for me. I’m afraid to revisit my previous all-time favorite cop show, NYPD Blue, because I don’t want the contrast to ruin it for me.

So where does that leave Clockers? Price’s book, I think, remains undiminished. Admittedly, I haven’t read it in more than a decade, but I still retain vivid memories of the bracing prose and fully drawn characters. In some ways, the novel may have been more cinematic than the movie. When I remember scenes from the story, they are as they played out in my head back in study hall, not as Spike Lee translated them to the screen. Price crafted a difficult, indelible novel that deserves its place among the best literature of recent decades.

As for the movie, I don’t want to be too hard on it. It’s an admirable adaptation, handsomely shot and populated with top-notch performances. It ranks in the top tier of 1990s “hood” flicks, yet it feels weirdly unsatisfying. Maybe my reaction would have been different had I gone into it with no knowledge of the book, but as it is the movie stands mainly as an interesting footnote to a couple of fantastic works of art. Lee’s work is more than passable, but I’m very glad that David Simon eventually (if indirectly) gave Price’s novel the adaptation it so richly deserved.

- Ira Brooker

Recent Readings: "Marabou Stork Nightmares" by Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting changed my life. Well, I suppose it would be more accurate to say that John Hodge and Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting changed my life. I first saw the film when I was 17, the night it opened at the King Theater in downtown La Crosse. As a clean-living country boy from rural Wisconsin, there’s no reason I should have connected so intensely to the antics of a bunch of heroin-addled Scots, but for some reason the adventures of Renton and company just hit home for me. I saw the movie six times in the theater and stole a copy of the video as soon as it was released.

I held off on reading the book for more than a decade, largely because I was repeatedly told that it was much better than the film. It may sound odd, but I loved the movie so much that I didn’t want to tarnish it by viewing its superior source material. Of course, when I finally broke down and read the book, my friends were proven right. Welsh’s novel is absolutely amazing, one of the finest works of literature written in the last few decades. The characterizations, the use of dialect, the shifting points of view – it’s all brilliantly done and endlessly readable.

Not long after I finished Trainspotting, I was offered a chance to share a stage with Irvine Welsh at a public reading (thanks, Sexy Bald Men!). It was a hell of a rush, even if Welsh’s accent rendered most of his reading indecipherable for me. After the show, I violated all of my self-imposed fanboy laws and gushed my praise all over him. I didn’t even do that when I saw John Goodman at a sushi restaurant, and that dude was Walter Sobchak, for god’s sake!

All of this needlessly in-depth preamble just serves to show how hyped I was for Marabou Stork Nightmares, my first encounter with Welsh outside of the Trainspotting vernacular. I picked it out of a small array of Welsh novels at Crow Books in Burlington, Vermont based mainly on the unique premise: it’s told from the perspective of Roy Strang, a coma patient who constantly blurs the grim facts of his waking life with the exciting fantasy world he’s constructed within his head.

Reading this book turned out to be an exhilarating, horrifying, nauseating experience. It’s an excellent novel in just about every respect, but also one I wish I could block from my memory. The story of a bright but profoundly damaged young man who’s been raised to associate violence with love, sex, self-worth and nearly every other facet of his life, this is one of the grimmest books I’ve ever read. The stories of the Strang family’s extremely dysfunctional home life are hard enough to take – Roy’s ongoing campaign of sadism against the family dog is especially cringe-worthy – but it’s an excruciatingly long and graphic rape scene that truly pushes this into nightmare territory. I won’t provide any spoilers, but I’ll say that I’ve never before been so intensely horrified by a passage of fiction.

Unpleasant though it is, Marabou Stork Nightmares is eminently worthwhile because the brutality never comes off as extraneous. It’s a story of abuse and neglect at every level, from personal to societal. Welsh’s narrative is disturbing because it has to be. Pulling any punches would dilute the horror of Roy Strang’s existence and the impossibility of his attempts to escape into his homemade world of adventure. Even the traumatizing rape sequence is well-earned. As much as I found myself wishing Welsh would back off and spare me just a few ugly details, I had to respect his decision to spell everything out in its vicious totality. "Shock value" generally has a negative connotation, but that's only because many writers emphasize the shock at the expense of the value. Welsh's approach underlines the heinous nature of sexual assault and augments one of the book’s most important themes, the futility of trying to escape reality.

All told, Marabou Stork Nightmares solidifies Irvine Welsh’s status as one of my favorite living authors, but it also made me resolve to take a break from grimness and read something a little more uplifting. To that end, I promptly embarked on Cormac McCarthy’s feel-good, Oprah-endorsed father-son romp The Road. After Marabou Stork Nightmares, that one was a regular laugh riot.

- Ira Brooker