Literature a la carte

Today's random thought explores one way that books are different from other forms of human expression.

Books are alone among creative works in that they demand such a great quantity of time to absorb them. A typical book -- say, the 'Brothers Karamazov' -- might take several weeks to read, and that's with few distractions. But most other works of art come packaged in forms designed to be taken in at one sitting. Most works of music clock well under an hour, and all but the longest operas are done in an evening. Films don't often go beyond a couple of hours.

A painting, however large, is designed to be seen at once, unless it's one of those extra long "cyclotron" paintings they used to do in the 19th century, like the Civil War one I remember they had on display at Gettysburg, Penn. when I was a kid.

Even in the world of words alone, full-length books are the odd man out. Short stories are, well, short. Magazine articles are, too. Poems are usually downright pithy. But books, real books that take days to digest, aren't.

So what to make of this distinction? Is the very length of a book, and the amount of detail that it contains, the reason for the form's persistence? Is that alone what makes a book a singular thing? Or is that one reason why the importance of books is declining, and that few people read them. We just don't have time.

So wouldn't the pressures of our age, then, lead us to a literature where brevity is indeed the soul of wit, and everything else, for that matter? If we're going to have a literature, isn't it worth trying to tell stories and rearrange life in print in a form that limits the reader's commitment to two hours, just like a good movie?

And to expand on that further, maybe the way to go is to create a set of stories, all of which clock in at the two-hour limit. They'd all have to stand alone, on their own. But they would also be interconnected, with common characters and locations and themes, though it wouldn't matter which one you read first. That way you can allow for people's reading habits and tolerances in the contemporary age, but also still create an extended feast that could take advantages of all the power and sweep of a typical book's length. Read as much as you want. Literature, buffet style.

Just to drive home the point, set some action in one of those multi-ethnic all-you-can-eat buffets that have popped up in towns around New England, and presumably elsewhere, with Chinese, Italian, Thai, and other cuisines gracing the steamer trays. Ice cream, too!

How to ruin an airline terminal

I first saw United Airlines' Terminal One at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in April, 1989, when I changed planes there on the way from Manchester, N.H. to Minneapolis. I found the then-new complex exhilarating.

I loved the way the glass and steel and vaulted ceilings all seemed to say "We are a classy airline and this is our home base." I loved the way the noses of aircraft came right up to the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the main concourses; I remember staring in wonder at the sheer size of a nose of a Denver-bound DC-10 parked right against the glass.

I loved the underground pedestrian walkway, with its 750-foot-long jazzy neon sculpture "The Sky's The Limit" accompanied by a new age reinterpretation of the Gershwin 'Rhapsody in Blue' melody that was a big part of the airline's marketing; the cumulative (and brilliant) effect, I thought, was to calm harried passengers even as the moving walkways sped them to the satellite concourse. I really responded to the gestures to train station architecture in a terminal that somehow seemed to celebrate travel itself, complete with views not only of planes close-up, but also the vistas of tailfins slicing past as aircraft conducted takeoff rolls on a nearby runway.

Terminal One was all movement and excitement and precision, designed to allow tens of thousands of passengers to switch planes at once and also coordinated with the airline's recent redesign and then-new blue/gray fleet paint job. It made me feel like changing planes was a highlight of the journey, like I was part of something that really worked, that my trip mattered enough for my planes to connect in such an impressive place. Hubs, with banks of flights arriving and departing virtually in unison, were still a relatively new thing then. Terminal One made me think United had not only found a way to make hubbing work, but transform it into an experience that put some of the lost magic back into air travel. It was something on par with Eero Saarinen's great "TWA Flight Center" built in the 1960s at New York's JFK Airport.

I've changed planes in Terminal One many times since, and also flown in and out to visit in-laws. And though I always enjoy passing through, over the years I've noticed a gradual erosion of many elements that made the place memorable. United Airlines itself has been in dire financial straits for much of the time, and I'm sure that's a factor. Knowing that, I guess we're fortunate that so much of architect Helmut Jahn's original conception actually still survives. But alas, this once-grand structure stands diminished, in some cases drastically, by changes that ironically act as a reflection of the reduced circumstances of Terminal One's patron.

I went through Terminal One on Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2010 and took a few photos that show how to ruin an airline terminal. Here goes.


Above is a view of a bank of Internet access kiosks topped by a promotional banner set up along the corridor on Concourse C. This serves to block the once-exciting views of aircraft, both close-up and out on the busy tarmac. Instead of the windows involving you with the action of one of the world's busiest airports, you are instead in just another shopping mall.


Above is a view of a 757 parked behind the kiosks. To get this image, I had to push my camera through a narrow opening and hope for the best. And so a building once designed to connect people with aircraft ready to carry them to the sky above now has all the impact of a bus station.


Above is another view of how retail kiosks have metastasized throughout the Terminal One's glass corridors, turning the place into more of a shopping mall than anything celebrating transportation or promoting the idea that United Airlines is different in any way from any other airline. Well, I suppose revenue is revenue, and if ways can be found for an airline terminal to generate it (especially for a financially troubled carrier), then whaddaya gonna do? It's just a shame it has to be done at the expense of ruining one of the building's distinctive elements.


While some kiosks block the view, others are just plain ugly. Don't these harmonize nicely with the terminal's blues and grays and red accents?


And if it's not kiosks, it's banners and billboards. Terminal One's impressive vistas are now spoiled by banners plastered everywhere. This one is particularly depressing, as it not only spoils the view to the outside, but also degrades the experience of the escalator ride down to the moving walkways.


Is this any different from the notorious Kodak billboard that defaced the interior of Grand Central Station for so many years? Wasn't it a cause for celebration when the Kodak thing was finally removed, helping Grand Central's original beauty come forth?


Back at O'Hare: Even worse are oversized video screens that now hang from the terminal's vaulted ceilings. These spew a constant stream of visual noise at passengers, replacing intentional majesty and dignity with random hype and tension. They cheapen any encounter with Terminal One just as much as another ubiquitous addition to the air travel experience...


The constantly blaring gate area televisions. Turn them off! I hate these things, which are now inescapable. It's like we have no reason to think or converse or read. Same with commercials at gas pumps. Please, please leave me in peace!


And right across from the blaring TV was one of the most uninviting Starbucks I've ever seen. How did this come about? The whole front is taken up by a billboard for another company; the store itself is accessible only through a narrow door with crash gates still in view at mid-day. It just looks creepy, on par with those big box pharmacy stores with large windows that are all blacked out. What's that all about?


Terminal One was built prior to the current level of passenger screening, but luckily the B Concourse was spacious enough to accommodate a big retrofit without too much trouble. There are some rough edges, however, such as this really, really ugly temporary wall and door that shout "We don't care!" to passersby. Hope they're removed soon.

Down below, the "Sky's the Limit" kinetic neon sculpture continues to wink on and off above passengers' heads, and is in surprisingly good shape after nearly 25 years. The new age Gershwin soundtrack is still pinging away, too. But a closer inspection reveals problems: some sections of the neon lights are stuck permanently on, while others (like this one) don't light anymore, diminishing the affect in the same way a broken tooth diminishes a smile. Get it fixed, United.


Here's another mystifying situation. For years, United used these bulky counters in the gate areas, which I always thought looked ugly and blocked the views. In recent years, the airline has installed a network of plasma screens that serve as the dispenser of all relevant info at each gate, eliminating the need for the bulky kiosks and their destination lists, etc. So why are the kiosk still there? Get rid of them, or if agents still need work areas, replace them with something minimal.

Despite all this, there is still plenty to admire about Terminal One. Check out this view of the connecting corridor linking Terminal One with the rest of O'Hare, gussied up not with marketing banners but colorful artwork that lends a festive touch. Nice!

I guess ultimately it'll take more than neglect (the roof was leaking in one gate area the day I passed through) and bad incremental decisions to do in Terminal One. Despite the metastasizing retail kiosks and visual noise and clutter, it's still one of the best examples I know of a for-profit corporation (well, allegedly for profit, in the case of United) investing in something that celebrates the experience they're selling.

Dogs and consciousness

Dogs, I think, are repositories of consciousness.

I believe that our sense of self-awareness, of being alive and knowing that, is the one magic thing we can point to about being human. It's our consciousness, and more specifically our self-consciousness, that makes us in some way sacred in terms of the cosmos. Whether or not we're alone in that regard, or part of a club of "intelligent" creatures that may or not be all that exclusive (and we may never find out), it's hard to say.

And dogs, I think, function as repositories of consciousness that's being stored and carried on through generations for some higher purpose later on. Right now, it's certainly underutilized: they scratch themselves, they chase things, they goof off. (So so a lot of people, too.) Perhaps all this reserve consciousness is being held back until it's needed for some unimaginable future purpose. Perhaps dogs are kept as man's best friend because we are somehow programmed to keep them close as a back-up reserve of consciousness for some higher purposes to come. Sort of like spare batteries.

I will someday write a piece about stray dogs and time travel that will employ this concept. In the meantime, I have to go feed the spare batteries.

If everyone gave me a penny...

The population of the United States is 300 million people. If everyone took a moment to send me just a penny, then I'd have $3 million. And that's enough to retire and live in comfort and not do anything useful for the rest of my life, and with enough to contribute generously to my favorite charities.

And would anyone really miss the penny? I doubt it. When we drop them, we don't even pick them up anymore. Clerks sneer when you ask for them in change. We regard them as orphans, tossing them into ubiquitous "Give Penny Take A Penny" cups, even as our nation professes to scorn socialism.

So send them to me.

I thought of this while pondering Kool-Aid, which was created in Hastings, Neb., not far from where I am right now. A fortune was created by little packets of powder that cost 10 cents each starting in 1927, later reduced to five cents a packet in the depths of the Great Depression. Tiny packet, tiny profit. But then comes the magic of volume. In business, Kool-Aid shows the power of high volume, even on a small price item. Starting in 1927, everyone really did give Edwin Perkins a penny, sometimes over and over again.

And in the realm of ideas, it shows how a notion, however small, can easily take hold and circulate and become powerful and widespread without really much effort at all. Something to think about.

Book of the Month Club

As I continue to deal with the idea of writing more, the arrival in today's mail of yet another fat and glossy catalog of books (all recently published, and all discounted something like 90 percent) inspired the following train of thought.

I found myself glancing through the offerings, open the catalog's pages at random, and reading the descriptions of each title, each of which was no more than one or two sentences. A lot of information to absorb, most of which was immediately forgotten by me, and which was of dubious worth anyway—after all, what's the likelihood that the people writing those blurbs actually read those books? And what's the likelihood I would ever find the time to read any of these. Not some or a few, but any, meaning one. Quite small.

And this reminded me of something I came across elsewhere recently: that every day, I am bombarded by maybe 25,000 bits of information of one kind or another, only five of which are perhaps truly worth knowing. And how easy is it to know which are the five I need to take seriously and incorporate into my conscience? Beats me.

Meanwhile, the same thing is going on around me in everyone, in every person, whether or not they realize it. And with so much information coming at us—with so many books to read, commercials to endure, conversations to follow, phone calls to answer, and so on—we can't help but be diverging from each other at a dizzying pace. Every day bedazzles us with more things that do not bring us together in any way, but rather drag us further into a confused separation from one another.

How much easier it was when we had only three television channels, plus PBS. In large numbers, we shared the same experiences and cultural reference points, be it Bill Cullen or the Dean Martin Show or Walter Cronkite reporting the news. The media and the information flow served to bring us together, to give us a sense of a shared experience, even if it wasn't always what we would have wanted to absorb right then and there. But it was enough, I guess, to be a part of something that you KNEW lots of other people were experiencing at the same time. It was the shared experience of the theater or the cinema, perhaps, only magnified many times.

Now we live in an age of hundreds of television channels and radio station, and that's not even considering the role the Internet plays in reshaping how we experience life together. Yes, the Internet has allowed groups of like-minded people to share things where before it was impossible. But I think cyber-sharing life is a poor substitute for the real thing, no matter how isolated you are...

Anyway, the point of all this is to imagine a future where this dynamic is so out of control, that a decision is made to severely restrict the amount and type of information and entertainment available for the good of the nation. Without a shared experience, we lose sight of common goals and standards that bring us together and provide a stable society. But if we all read the same books or watched the same television programs, we'd suddenly be awash in meaningful shared experiences.

It's the same principle as the Book of the Month Club. In order for that to work, everyone has to read the same book, right? If they don't, it wouldn't be a productive time, to say the least. So why is it any different outside the realm of the book club? Doesn't it make sense that the principle of the book club (all on the same page, so to speak) would apply to society in general, to the profit of everyone?

Well, it's a thought. And it needs work, too...

The Dandelion Theory of Life

I recently had lunch with an acquaintance who'd caught some bad breaks. He was down but not out, and was consoling himself in part with a phrase I often hear:

"Well, everything happens for a reason."

Does it really? That kind of thought can seem comforting in the face of otherwise inexplicable bad fortune. But it bothers me because I hear people saying it all the time, and I can't agree that it's an effective way to explain the complete and utter randomness and absurdity of life as I see it. Nor is it a way to explain any kind of fortune, either good and bad.

Everything happens for a reason? Then what was the reason my father died in a plane crash when I was four years old?

At the time, I was told by well-meaning relatives that God needed him for something more important. That's nice spiritual poetry, I suppose, but it's not a reason that I could understand, then or now. God has a reason, but other than that we got nothing, kid. Trying to relate to a God like that is like walking into an Advanced Particle Physics Class midway through the semester at Harvard University and expecting to get anything out of it.

Instead, I have my "dandelion" theory about life that I've been working at and nurturing all these years. It comes from the childhood experience of picking those white fluffy dandelion seed heads and blowing the seeds off so that their little natural parachutes carry them to wherever the wind takes them.

Some are lucky and find a good spot with just the right shade and water and soil to take root and grow into next year's dandelions. Others drift about and land on inhospitable places like rocks or parking lots or whatever, where they fail to take root at all and just crumble to dust.

And still others find themselves in fairly unpromising places: bad dirt, no sun, whatever. And yet they make a go of it, and perhaps get as far as producing a respectable yellow flower head, only to have it get eaten by a passing deer before it has a chance to turn into a seed head. (This process happens overnight, by the way. Life is like that, too.)

And that, it seems to me, is the condition that most of us face in our own lives. We are asked to do our best in imperfect conditions, and there's no guarantee that the expected results will happen.

Okay, so here's the context. Each spring, at least where I live, there are more than enough dandelions producing more than enough seed heads so that at least some seeds have a chance to be carried by their little natural parachutes to a place where conditions will be just right for them to go all the way in terms of fulfilling their destiny. But it's completely by chance, with no moral component: no seed has any chance of making any choices that make it more worthy than another. They all just drift about and then do the best they can.

So it's all about the numbers, really—with enough dandelions and enough seed heads, there's bound to be a few that turn out to be champions, at least in terms of what a dandelion is supposed to be. And in human life, given enough of us, there's bound to be a few of us that survive the traumas of childhood and adolescence and the economy and education and so many possible uninformed or bad decisions and personality traits, and in spite of it all we become the best bricklayer in town or the person who writes the Great American Novel.

Does any of it happen for a reason? Not that I can tell, though the utter randomness of life can certainly generate some surprising and unintended consequences. But does that make for an actual reason for things to happen? Is what happens to us tied to some kind of cosmic logic or fate? Only if we're prepared to make a "leap of faith," as they put it, which I can't bring myself to do.

Where does that leave this former altar boy? Well, instead of cathedrals and churches, perhaps casinos are a more appropriate place for worship. Stripped to their basics, they celebrate the same principles which seem to govern life and success and happiness and fulfillment. You might just get lucky. Plus there's low-priced drinks and food, which is nice, and in my book beats out the free wine and wafers I remember getting, one meager serving per visitor.

So, in terms of coping with life's realities, rather than bringing your children to some church and having them attend "Sunday school," wouldn't it instead be more instructive to bring them to places like the Mohegan Sun resort in Connecticut or to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and have them learn the ins and outs of blackjack and how to play the roulette wheel?

I don't know. But all of this leads me to a larger question of the consequences of a random world. If the world is fundamentally without sense, where no kind of "reason" really guides anything and we're all in a sort of cosmic pinball machine, then what do I use to guide my own actions and decisions and behavior and conduct?

This question forms the basic premise of 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' (1989), perhaps Woody Allen's best film, which depicts a world where bad deeds are not punished in any obvious ways, where justice is not done, and where an act as unthinkable as having another person murdered brings not consequences but prosperity. In such a world, what standard can people rely on to make their own decisions?

I can't answer that just yet, and perhaps will never be able to. It's really the ultimate paradox, isn't it? The more we seek the answer to such a question, the farther away the answer becomes. This is at the root of my appreciation of paradoxes as perhaps the most poetic expression of the life condition, especially those that happen accidentally, such as the fuel tanker truck by the side of the road because it ran out of gas. There's your spirituality, right there!

But I think good-naturedly dismissing the idea that everything happens for a reason, and instead looking at the example before us of dandelions and so many other natural processes all around us, is a good start at clearing the decks for a discussion that's honest, if ultimately incomplete.

Chinese restaurants reconsidered

One recent Saturday afternoon, I found myself the sole customer of the "China Taste" restaurant in Rockville, Conn. Located in a strip mall off Interstate 84, it's an old-style American-style Chinese restaurant heavy on the fried rice dishes. With 15 minutes left before lunch specials expired at 3 p.m., I took the path of least resistance and chose pork fried rice for $6; the teenage server, Li, returned from the kitchen with a gigantic mound of the stuff, plus egg drop soup and a bowl of crispy fried wontons.

Looking around, the place was well-worn and unpretentious and I somehow felt rather warm and cozy, like I was at home, surrounded by the usual clutter. A lot of the prep for the evening dinner hours was apparently being done out in the dining room: silverware cleaning, soy sauce refillings, etc. The placemat was one of those "year of the animal" things, but it covered the years only up to 2002 and no further. Somewhere there must be a warehouse full of these, I imagined.

And that got me thinking. How much of this place is really what you might find in China? Almost nothing, I figured: what I was seeing (and eating) was the sum of a century and a half of adaptation to American tastes and prejudices and habits, starting from the days in the 1860s when large numbers of Chinese laborers were brought to this country to work on the western part of the transcontinental railroad, and Chinatowns began springing up in places such as San Francisco, and eventually most cities of any size.

For all that time, the restaurant business (and the laundry business, for a long time) was a natural, but restaurants had to adapt to American tastes. Sure, some eateries in a Chinatown in, say, Boston or San Francisco could still be authentic due to the size of the Chinese customer base. But in a place like my hometown of Nashua, N.H., the one Chinese family running the local restaurant in the 1930s and 1940s (a guy named Sam, who sold my father his first car, I understand), the menu had to be adapted to suit local tastes. And so the whole experience gradually morphed into something of a caricature of what a Chinese restaurant was: MSG-laden meat-heavy dishes in places with weird decorations and traditions that had little or nothing to do with the real China. One example: fortune cookies, totally unheard of in China, and which all seem to come from someplace in Brooklyn. (Undoubtedly one of the last outposts of actual manufacturing in NYC.) Also, I just read that several staple ingredients in "American-style" Chinese food, such as onions, broccoli, and carrots, aren't even grown in China!

So I got to wondering. With the rise of the middle class in China, and with an increasing amount of disposable income there, wouldn't it be possible for American-style dining out to become popular in China? And wouldn't it be interesting if truly American food had to be modified to be appealing to local tastes? Over time, the whole thing would morph into a caricature of America, and it might say a lot of how we're perceived as a nation and as a people.

For instance, in terms of payment, instead of cash, payment at the new "American-style" restaurant could come in the form of temporary credit cards. As part of the experience, you'd pay by maxing out your credit cards, something commonly done here in the U.S.A., right? All part of the American experience, just like fortune cookies are Chinese!

The way things are going, with the United States running a ridiculously high trade surplus every year by importing everything from China, and with China quickly becoming rich and investing for the long-term in its infrastructure while we let ours rot, who's not to say that American citizens won't eventually be emigrating to China in hopes of a better quality of life?

Well, if it ever comes to that (and I'm just jokily supposing here, folks), then maybe we'll have the same thing there as we have here: American families will set up "authentic" restaurants in Shanghai, with dishes like southern pit barbecue and New England clam chowder, and soon they'll pop up all over the country, though outside the big cities we'll have to adjust the menus to accommodate local tastes: chicken feet in the clam chowder, for instance, or hot dogs with bok choy and bean sprouts, for instance.

And instead of fortune cookies, the end of each meal can come complete with a fake voting ballot or maybe a losing lottery ticket, both of which might be considered emblematic of the American experience.

And heck, if the restaurant thing doesn't work out, we can always try the laundry business.

I was stuck waiting the other day...

...at the vet's office and got to thinking how it's all about proportion.

Really. What we think of anything depends on where we're coming from as much as it does on the thing itself. Think about that. In art, would the Mona Lisa appear to be more or less impressive if it were hung in a gallery with wide-striped wallpaper? In life, would the pleasure I take in seeing my dog each evening be as intense if I had to bring her to work every day? Our appreciation of anything is not absolute, but dependent on circumstances.

I was thinking of this while looking at a pet publication that contained an ad that included a drawing of a sphinx, but in the shape of a dachshund. And I thought, what if someone actually went and built something like that? A thousand years ago, in the era of manual labor, it would be a major achievement, something to be contemplated and celebrated and discussed. But nowadays, with so much stuff all around us, would anyone really care? It would be just another distraction to think about for a moment and then be forgotten. And I wonder how much wonder we lose because of this. A hundred years ago, the idea of a manmade flying machine was miraculous, the culmination of centuries of dreaming. Today, when we fly on a plane, forget about wonder: we complain about the food and arriving five minutes late.

In terms of art and my life, the place I see this in close-up fashion is in creating improvised film scores for silent films. Some of these can be three hours long, and if you push too hard too soon with the music, you wind up with nowhere left to go. In real terms, if you ramp it up prematurely, what happens is that you begin to lose track of the detail in the music, and it all becomes mush, and you have nothing left to underscore any really big moments in the film that are bound to come later. It's important to always have something in reserve.

This is news to me because I am not blessed with an innate sense of balance or proportion. In childhood, a frequent criticism was "you don't know when to stop!" That was another way of saying, "Your sense of proportion is either greatly askew or completely missing." Some people have it, some don't. I recall the gravestone inscription of early television pioneer Ernie Kovacs: "Nothing in Moderation."

In terms of music, when I first began listening to classical music on LPs borrowed from the public library in my hometown of Nashua, N.H., I would always gravitate toward the fast and exciting movements of anything I was listening to. Beethoven's 7th? Great finale! Brahms' 1st? What an ending! At the time, I would have been overjoyed to find a symphony made up of four finales—after all, those had the best stuff, so why not stick with what works? (Well, what do you expect of a junior high student?) Later, I had a friend at college who would judge a musical comedy's worth based on its quantity of show-stoppers. By that standard, "Hello Dolly" was a work of genius: "Every tune a show-stopper!" he'd exclaim.

But I now know that slow movements are essential, not just on their own but also as a way to heighten the exciting stuff in other places. And I realize, too, that this is something I actually learned in another way at a very early age, but I'm only now putting the pieces together. I was maybe four years old, and my mother served me a hard-boiled egg standing up in a small egg cup. I tapped the shell and began peeling it off, putting bits of egg into my mouth. Yum! But then my mother shook a little salt on, and the next bite was DOUBLE YUM! So naturally, I figured the more salt you put on an egg, the better it would taste. (This is the same innocently logical part of me that used to say "fiveteen" instead of "fifteen," I'm told.) So I went and dumped half the salt shaker's contents on the egg. Greedily shoving the next spoonful in my mouth, I puckered and spit it out. Awful! And thus I learned, or should have learned, a little something about how the world works, and what role proportion needs to play in place of innocent logic.

The seeds of so much of what we need to know in life are planted in childhood. If we could just maintain a connection to them, we could be so much wiser.

But then I'm compelled to think it out further: if the essence of being human is to be imperfect, then wouldn't the ultimate celebration of our humanity be a work of art that throws this balance out in favor of a unique personal preference that completely disregards any sense of balance or symmetry? Something to think about.

Beyond books

I just came back from a visit to our local library in Bedford, N.H., where they're currently having one of those "sell the books no one wants" sales. The deal? Four hardcover books or six paperbacks for $1. (That's 16.6 cents per paperback. How do they make change?)

Many of the books for sale were large hefty tomes, including important recent works works of fiction by the likes of Tom Wolfe. Copies of "A Man in Full" (1998) and "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (2004) were both up for grabs: big books of hundreds of pages each, handsomely published in hardcover editions that cost $28.95 per copy when released.

And now here they are, just a few years after their debuts, unwanted by an institution whose traditional mission is the propagation of the written word, priced at 25 cents apiece and not selling. And in terms of their unwanted-ness, I include myself. I glanced at each of them, then put them back on the shelf.

Why? Well, I think it relates to good old-fashioned books and how their role in life, or at least in my life, is changing. The Wolfe novels, which should be cultural touchstones of my age, perhaps discussed and celebrated by all literate people, are instead irrelevant. They may contain all kinds of wisdom and truths, but it's all contained in a form that few people care about or respond to anymore.

Not that longish works of writing are obsolete. But they certainly aren't a mass medium anymore. And the Wolfe books got me thinking about how true this is my life, and must be for so many others.

Yes, I vaguely remember reading ABOUT each of them when they were published—how they were regarded as major accomplishments in the Dickensian style of novel, updated for our age. I recall hearing how each novel captured something important and majestic about our times, how each synthesized elements of modern life in a way that laid bare patterns heretofore unseen and told us a lot about ourselves and could perhaps inspire us to reflect on our evolving humanity. Perhaps. I remember reading how Wolfe labored hard to gather material for both books, doing extensive legwork (actually moving to Atlanta, I think, in the case of "A Man in Full") to give them the ring of truth. As a working journalist (as opposed to the other kind, quite common these days), I respected that.

And I remember all this because I actually read an earlier Wolfe novel, "Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987), that DID capture something important about the spirit of the mid-1980s in the part of the world I inhabit. And as a young person with literary and creative ambitions, I thought I would eventually get to a place where I would be capable of doing the same thing: creating something that captured my world on a large scale-not only captured it, but wrestled it to the ground and wrung out of it surprising truths and startling insights that might help readers, er, get more out of life.

Well, now it's more than 20 years later, and nothing of that sort has happened with me. And looking at Wolfe's subsequent novels sitting there on the library's "not wanted" shelf, it got me thinking. Never mind changing literary tastes and the pace of modern life and all the other reasons that traditional novels, no matter how amazing or well-crafted, generally aren't big news anymore. (Does anyone really care if Thomas Pynchon has a new book out?) In my case, even if I had been able to marshal my energies and discipline myself into creating something on that scale, it would have probably amounted to coals to Newcastle, which is a phrase I learned as an English major.

That's what occurred to me as I reshelved the Wolfe novels with a sigh and a shrug. Would be nice, but who has the time? I certainly don't-neither to read Wolfe's wonderful and important books, nor to compose anything of my own on such a scale. Does anyone? And so, what value can a book possess if it contains the wisdom of a lifetime, but is just too darned long for anyone to read?

It's not like books are disappearing. Even with the advent of reading devices such as the Kindle (and now the iPad), more actual books are published than ever before. It's just that books are no longer a way to reach a mass audience, unless you're Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling, which I am not.

For the rest of us, it's similar to what's happened with television in my lifetime. In the days of three networks, we all watched the same shows, which was a sort of shared cultural experience and creator of comment reference points. (Even if the show was Gilligan's Island.) Now there are so many channels, no one watches the same thing, so the shared experience has been diminished. Increasingly, we define ourselves in terms of groups with interested that are ever narrower, ever more specific. And the media we consume is less and less general, and more and more specific. I'm not sure where this will lead or what the impact of it will be. but it's how things seem to be. And anyway, it's nothing new. It's called entropy.

Well, the point is that Tom Wolfe's unread novels make me think it's time to try something new. Hoping to eventually be ready to create something on a large scale is a strategy that doesn't seem to hold much promise. In terms of books and media and communication, things are changing. And in terms of me, at this point what I might want to say may not work in that kind of environment anyway. Maybe there's a different way.

And books or no books, one thing I know is that for me, the process of writing is often a way to clarify my own thinking. (Not that this is much evidence of that so far.) For some time now, I've resisted putting much energy into all the new online communication tools (blogs, Facebook, whatever) for reasons of privacy, I guess, and also because it's just not a good idea to be too casually personal about anything on the Internet in the age of routine Google searches on job or loan applicants.

But enough. I'm 46, which means at this point if I ever need to go out and get a new job, I'll probably be on outer reaches of any candidate pool anyway, so whatever I post here likely won't be a factor. And also, I recently realized that the age of 46 was significant for three people I admire.

1.) The composer Charles Ives turned 46 in 1920, which was the year when a heart attack and diabetes and ill health finally caused him to essentially stop composing, though he lived until 1954.

2.) The writer Jerome David Salinger turned 46 in 1965, which was the year his final piece of published fiction, "Hapworth 16, 1924" appeared in the New Yorker, though he would lived all the way until January of this year.

3.) The writer Eric Blair, known more widely as George Orwell, was 46 in 1950, the year he ceased being active in a creative sense or any other sense, really, because that's the year he died.

Maybe all of this is a sign that it's time to get busy. Maybe it's finally time for the sap to pour, as William Styron's alter ego "Stingo" phrased it in "Sophie's Choice." (Hey, there's a book I DID read.) But what the hell do you pour sap on, anyway? I guess what he meant was that the sap would be the raw material that would be boiled and boiled to come up with some syrup.

Well, if by sap, he meant coming to terms with stuff that's important enough to actually write out for public consumption, then from the looks of things it's already started running.