If you dedicated your waking life to books, forsaking your spouse for Lady Chatterly, ingesting the affairs of bishops and actresses with your meals, and saving particularly satisfying soliloquies for outhouse meditations, you would read about 5,7-trillion words before your bloodshot eyes shut for good.
This figure translates, very roughly, into around 48 000 books. Or 500 if you limit yourself to Harry Potter, but then you’re not really reading so that doesn’t count.
One would hope then that, as you smugly breathe your last, some family killjoy doesn’t whisper into your ear that you have failed by a huge margin to read the number of books published in the United States in a single year.
If 60 000 new titles a year sounds terrifying, consider that they are the cream scooped off around three-quarters of a million manuscripts written and submitted annually in the country. It comes as no surprise that a poll conducted two years ago found that 81% of Americans believe they have a book in them.
But novelists and self-help quacks have nothing on poets. A poet is someone who writes poetry. And poetry is something that goes like this: ‘Our love was meant to be / I’m so sad that you’ve left / If only you’d call / Then I’d stop being sad.†At last count, Poetry.com had published more than a million poets, most of them compulsive, convulsive rhyme pimps, mainlining euphoria.
One should always be deeply suspicious of anyone who introduces themselves as a writer, poet or artist. Apart from being ignorant and vain, they are probably unemployed, very poor and therefore of no use to you. But at least hack writers and poets don’t have the audacity to call themselves ‘Mastersâ€, as do a great many artists.
Cruise Yahoo’s listings of artists and click ‘Mastersâ€. Instead of encountering long-dead Dutch or Spanish technicians, one meets Terry Allen, ‘a multidisciplined artist in the truest sense of the wordâ€. You know, the Terry Allen. And how can one forget 49-year-old Joe Coleman, who ‘is a man on a long, terrible fascinating journeyâ€? To refresh your memory, this Master is ‘a self-described ‘archeologist’, digging deep into the baffling roots of life, who looks long and hard, unflinchingly, into the churning bowels of his own soul … â€. Churning bowels pretty much sums it up.
Why the million poets? Why the thousands of Baby Boom Minnesota Masters? Why the 7 000 novels on Rosedog.com? Why did the writer of Redrose think it was a good idea to concoct a plot in which a 10-year-old hacker sends a virus to the prime minister of India before jumping off the 106th floor of a World Trade Centre tower on September 11? Have these people no shame?
Of course they don’t. It’s been nurtured out of them by parents, teachers, school programmes, psychologists, paint-by-numbers post-modernism. Show me a programme with the word ‘creative†in it and I’ll show you charlatans and egotists.
But perhaps the main culprits are high schools, where bad writers and Sunday painters encourage teenagers to express themselves. Teenagers should be given many things — daily lashings with wet bullrushes, castor oil, etcetera — but a forum in which they can inflict their self-absorbed resentment on the world and have it called ‘art†by adults, is not one of them.
These children, as eloquent as bacon rind, are given a glimpse of adult achievements and rewards and told no more. Their world view — that if it’s hard it’s not worth doing — is not crushed and they emerge as painters without having learned to look, and as writers who have never read.
We’ve read a book, the attitude seems to be, so why can’t we write one? We’ve seen a painting, so how hard could it be to daub one of our own, perhaps of that kitten over by the porcelain ducks? The same people would never assume that watching ER qualifies them as heart surgeons. Or that liking Chopin makes them concert pianists.
But the baffling hedge of painstaking study that still surrounds the sciences and formal music is long gone in the ‘creative†arts, torn down by its benefactors and scholars in their quest for acceptance and commercial relevance.
I’m OK, you’re OK. But being OK doesn’t mean we’re necessarily good at anything.