(Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos by Flickr users woodleywonderworks and eyeliam)
A few weeks ago, popular recording star Kanye West gave an interview to Reuters, explaining among other things:
“‘Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed,’ West said. ‘I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.’
“‘I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,’ he said.”
This in spite of the fact that West’s mother, who died in 2007, was an English professor at Chicago State University. Indeed, in Time Magazine a few years earlier she compared her son to Walt Whitman (who himself, it should be remembered, had an ambivalent attitude toward books).
The occasion of the Reuter’s interview, however, is precisely the upcoming print publication of West’s collection of Kanye-isms “Thank You and You’re Welcome.” It will be 52 pages long, “some blank, others with just a few words — and offers his optimistic philosophy on life. One two-page section reads, “Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!” Another page reads “I hate the word hate!” Such nuggets might explain why Time granted the title “deconstructionist” to West: “West — who has a habit of beginning sentences with the preamble, ‘Rappers say this all the time,’ as if he were not one of the world’s most popular rappers but a kid deconstructing one — is quite bougie.” (“Bougie” signifies “middle class.”)
Contrast that effort with recent bibliophilic pieces by Vernon Klinkenborg, this one on reading books aloud and this one on rereading the same books.
The first one asserts, “But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words — and the pattern of the words — the reader really sees.” This may, in fact, explain the popularity of spoken prose and poetry by figures such as West, whose words in cold print may appear to exemplify the banality of the wise adolescent, but whose oration of them manages to electrify mass audiences. The difference is that while West sees the performance as an improvement over the written word, Klinkenborg regards it as a penetration into it.
In fact, West says that being a devoted nonreader actually helped him write his book, for he approached it with a “childlike purity.” For Klinkenborg, on the other hand, reading aloud makes books all the more important, not less.
“I read aloud to my writing students,” he says, “and when students read aloud to me I notice something odd. They are smart and literate, and most of them had parents who read to them as children. But when students read aloud at first, I notice that they are trying to read the meaning of the words. If the work is their own, they are usually trying to read the intention of the writer. It’s as though they’re reading what the words represent rather than the words themselves. What gets lost is the inner voice of the prose, the life of the language.”
West’s “childlike purity,” too, goes along with Klinkenborg’s celebration of books, not against it. In the piece on re-reading, he links repeated experiences of books precisely to childhood:
“The love of repetition seems to be ingrained in children. And it is certainly ingrained in the way children learn to read — witness the joyous and maddening love of hearing that same bedtime book read aloud all over again, word for word, inflection for inflection.”
That makes sense to me, captive as I am to a 4-year-old who demands successive re-readings of Curious George, Richard Scarry, Peter Rabbit, and Harry the Dirty Dog stories night after night after night.
Why, then, contrast books to the oral performance? Why let your success at oratory lead you into a “proud” dismissal of books?
