The Boob Tube and Books

     Streaming television for viewing.  Formidable books for reading.  Can you indulge in both and emerge cognitively unscarred?  Perhaps, but there are risks.  "I have of late lost [much of] my mirth" by miring myself in "Mad Men" while mustering through Middlemarch.  It's a guaranteed way to strain your sensibility capacitors. The viewing activity is shamefully addictive and alarming; I worry that my brain is rotting.  The reading enterprise is exhilarating because I am immersed in a complex of discourse and relationships scarce in contemporary literature.  In short, George Eliot's long novel is magnificent.  AMC's slick paean to 1960s avarice is a muddle.  It's the meretriciousness of "Mad Men" over against the majesty of Middlemarch.

     This summer and fall I'll be working on Middlemarch with two different groups of readers--joining a literary seminar in Toronto, and then teaching a Lifelong Learning class in my own bailiwick.  I don't expect "Mad Men" to come up with either group, but there is an indirect commonality between this famous novel and the television show.  "Mad Men" is littered with books that appear as cameos--at best.  Why?  Fandom frenzy is served by those who have tracked the titles.  (Just drop "books in 'Mad Men'" in Google and you'll find a slew of lists). Acolytes would have you believe that that there is an important link between the books shown in the hands of characters and the conflicts they face. That the books "reflect the characters." Hogwash.  Few of the characters in this bathetic soap opera are capable of inhabiting the ethos of many of the books they are seen with.  Draper with Dante's Inferno? 

Campbell with Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49?  Betty Draper with The Group?  Or the preposterousness of Grandpa Gene having Sally-as-a-child reading aloud from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

  I suspect that these "book cover pics" are an idle impulse by the show's creators to tone up the crass atmosphere of advertising by flashing titles, and occasionally giving a small number of frames to an exchange of banal remarks about this or that title.  For the most part they are best sellers of the day, but a few are literary rather than popular. For example, "Meditations in an Emergency," by Frank O'Hara. It’s actually not a book but a prose poem.  Obtain it, read it,  and then explain how O’Hara’s words and images illumine the character of dapper Don. The same effort could be (unwisely) applied to many other pairings of persons and titles throughout the series.

     The illusion here is that visual allusions to texts is evidence that actual reading is occuring or that thinking is taking place.  Books are not badges.  But in “Mad Men” they are treated as accoutrement to accent appearance and distract the viewer from the vacuity of the company.That’s unfortunate because the hollowness inside the outside of these mannequins is what I found most entertaining, often hilarious.  The books do not fit with that.  What the “creators” of “Mad Men” have compiled is an inapt and gratuitous bibliography.  Take no stock in it.  Dante, Dos Passos, O’Hara, McCarthy, Twain, and their peers are clamoring for escape from this cloister of clowns.  They need a higher class of home and shelf to hold them dear.