[Prestidigitweeze]

What does it say about perceived vs. actual literacy when Guillermo Del Toro's preface to the Penguin edition of Arthur Machen's The White People is infinitely more erudite than Dave Eggers' Shatner-friendly introduction to Infinite Jest? The first book, a collection of genre-relegated short stories by a master of macrocosmic self-restraint, is often dismissed as not being "real literature"; the second is an attempt to include as much verbal (and verbalized) consciousness as possible into a single novel by a writer who is often lauded for being both high-minded and whip-smart (insert Rawhide sound effect). Yet the generational celebrity chosen to comment on that novel is a writer who seems to me to be utterly bankrupt of any sort of critical intelligence. Everything that Eggers touches, from David Foster Wallace to Maurice Sendak, gets diluted with references to "feeling" and "heart" in look-how-humble-I-am emotional and typographical lower case (which does nothing to disguise the William Shatner element -- it's like listening to Shatner stage-mumble).

Meanwhile, Del Toro's knowledge of literature and structure becomes immediately apparent upon reading his introduction to Machen. He might conceivably tell the reader something they don't know, as opposed to Eggers' ad populum barking, in which the latter celebrates the reader's projected mediocrity in ways so slimy they stick to one's mind days later like Krazy Lobotomy Glue.

How about you, dear MR member -- are you ever annoyed by writers who are supposed to be smart and aren't -- especially after reading writers who really are smart but tend to be dismissed rather than celebrated?

I still remember the time I ran into someone who was going to Brown and thought they wanted to talk about literature. They clearly knew nothing and apologized for that, saying, "Sorry, I didn't read very much before college; I don't know a lot."

But then I pointed to a horror anthology on the shelf and, to make the person feel better, said, "Well, I'm in that book which admittedly has a silly cover."

Whereupon the person who had not known anything by or about George Eliot, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Valery, Huysmans, Borges, Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov, Pynchon or even the Beats -- let alone read a page by any of them -- began pointing to the cover and simpering, making a little too much of my attempt to make him feel less insecure. "I'd never be in a book like that," he said. "That looks so stupid."

"But have you read any of the stories in that book?" I asked. "You have no idea how good or bad they might be."

"I'd never read a book like that," he said, and walked off, having found a way to dismiss the person who asked him scary questions before.

That lack of experience with reading, coupled with an utterly cover-deep approach to content, is exactly what you find in universities all over America. Very often, the most dismal students are promoted over the thoughtful ones because they reassure their professors that, yes, indeed, the person at the lectern is the smartest person in the room. You see this piggybacking of mediocrity into the so-called literary world over and over, and that is why we're told to read books that will supposedly change our lives, only to disappoint us with their elementary wordplay, timid bohemianism and vocabularies reduced by ignorance rather than craft.