After watching this, being from Texas and all, the name that came foremost to my mind was “Texas A&M,” sure engineers create all the things we need but they sure as Hell don’t know what’s going on in the world of humanities, society, culture, arts, relationships and above all politics.
What we call “literature” is the arty part of writing, mostly fiction, mostly about new ideas, different places and human interaction. Rather than spending an hour or two with a TV documentary or a movie, spending a few weeks with a book – on average about 50 hours – finds one getting deeply into situations and characters and God Forbid, thinking. Reading literature has been shown to increase a person’s empathy, intellect, longevity and a good exercise to keep the brain from going slippery.
Which brings us to the best question to ask a Trump supporter (or a Palin). “What ya reading?”
Sometimes we find a classic we missed which was recently the case for me. An 800 page Dickens tome that has kept me busy for most of a month now. Martin Chuzzlewit or more specifically, “The Life and Times of Martin Chuzzlewit.” The book was very unpopular in the US after publication with about 200 pages of Dickens SMASHING this country after an early visit here. Overall the book is a humor book which is often hard to find in that time period. In this story everyone is a con man or con woman conning each other and everyone else, except for the milquetoast Mr Pinch. But when Martin Chuzzlewit arrives in American it hits home where everyone he meets in New York is Donald Trump while his movement West finds only fetid steaming stinking swamp of filth and mosquitoes filled with the likes of Duck Commander Phil Robertson. He never says where it is goes to find the swampland that Trump sold him, but a good guess would be Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana. What I liked best about the book was how it overflows with so much “So’s yer old lady!” Not done in a few words or even a sentence or two, but long wordy – laugh out loud – paragraphs, it helps to have a thesaurus nearby for those parts. An under appreciated gem. One also has to remember that Dickens published most all of his novels first as serialized “penny pamphlets” a chapter at a time, so they move right along.