CRITICAL MASS: Jerome Weeks’ farewell column

LAST WEEK, Jerome Weeks accepted a buyout offer from The Dallas Morning News beginning Sept 15, rather than work in a severely reduced arts section. Staff employees were told they could write a farewell column but it would have to be OK’d by management first. At any rate, Jerome’s farewell column was refused, and thus far just one farewell column from the 111 people leaving the paper has appeared. Here is what he wrote.

It’s a little thing, but I’m looking forward to reading for idle pleasure again.

Readers have often told me that being a full-time book critic must be a dream job. And I agree. It’s practically a leisure-time activity. Let me take a moment here to put my feet up on my desk. Ahh.

Still, as Mark Twain observed, anything you’re not obliged to do is play. Anything else is work. And as a book journalist, one is obliged to race after the Media Now-Now-Now – what critic David Denby once called “information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.”

What’s more, book culture may seem a dwindling, quaint endeavor to advertisers in mad pursuit of illiterate teens and at a time when arts coverage in general is getting dumped or fragmented into a million Web sites. But there are hundreds of thousands more new books released per year than TV shows, sports programs, movies or CDs. For all the talk of the death of print, more people have access to more books now than at any time in history.

That’s amazing but it means keeping up is a full-time sprint. A book columnist must read in gross tonnage, read hastily in trains, planes and lunch lines and read books no one should bother with. One can endure a film or a concert for two hours; reading a pointless book can take days. Recall those dreaded high school assignments: A bad book can seem like a prison sentence.

I know, I know. You spend your time heroically putting out fires and saving lives in the ER. All of this reading doesn’t really sound like work to you. But it is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay researchers, law clerks, teachers or librarians.

OK, so we don’t pay them much. Which just shows how little we actually value reading. Critic Walter Kirn has observed that the novelist is “culturally invisible” today because his job offers few rewards to the big-dog male ego. The same is true of reading. Nowhere in films or TV do characters read — other than the “bookish girl” or the action hero, but only when he must desperately decipher the Sacred Inca Brain Codex for clues to foil the arch-fiend’s dastardly plot — a plot the “bookish girl” could have figured out long ago.

Still, for reviewers, one of the accidental delights of the job comes precisely from reading many of those books we’d normally use for attic insulation. It’s a central pleasure of art: discovery. Finding that what we couldn’t imagine happening in a book can not only happen but succeed, endure, excite.

Then there’s the joy of relaying this to readers. To re-live the thrill. And, of course, there’s the pleasure of irking some people, notably bloggers. Mustn’t forget that.

All of which keeps the neurons firing. Helps stave off Alzheimer’s, as the doctors advise. So for all of this and a paycheck, if little else, I’m grateful. I’ve been doing it, on and off, in academia and the media, since I wrote my first published newspaper review at 20.

On the third hand, turning such pleasures into a chore can warp a person. No, not warp them into the cliche of the curmudgeon-critic but give them a pained relationship to what they love. I read books the way I breathe, but lately, when another three-pound monster has landed on my desk, I’ve flinched.

So it’ll be a relief to read for pleasure again. One reason it’s particularly appealing these days is that it’s so counter-culture — so counter to our prevailing techno-bully-rapid-response-profit-margin mindset. It’s seditious fun being idle, being un-productive.

Let’s not fool ourselves. Publishing is an industry like any other, and a book is a commodity like any other. But reading is slow, it’s private, it’s non-electronic. Reading fiction is particularly suspect in our Get Ahead Nation. Traditionally, it has been a “woman’s pastime.” It’s not necessarily self-improving. For that matter, it’s often not necessary at all.

So yes, being a book columnist is one of the last, great gigs in the grumpy, panicked world of newspaperdom. But although print journalism and books are far from gone, this little corner of them is. Just now, there was room for my big feet on my desk because it’s been cleared off. The books have been boxed up, shipped out.

I’ve left one novel unpacked, though. I plan to read it on the train home, maybe share it with my daughter, Suzanna, because it looks like one she might enjoy. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll turn off this computer now.

You will no longer be able to:
E-mail jweeks@dallasnews.com