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Reviewer: Lloyd A. Conway
Lansing, MI
The author, a passionate practitioner of the teaching
arts in an inner-city classroom, has, amidst the ruins
of print-based culture, rediscovered how to connect
with the fullest possible range of a would-be reader's
senses. This is all the more timely, given what the
rising generation internalizes as the normal way of
information-processing. A. Bartlett Giamatti spotted
the trend in the 1980s, and noted in "Take Time for
Paradise," his ode to baseball, that the young were
even them mentally imaging things as if on a screen -
that their experiences with computers and video games
dramatically altered their basic perception of
knowledge transmission. (My son made the same
observation - he learns more from the Discovery and
History Channels than from text.)
Beyond that, the written word is not even what it
once was: the plague of Newspeak-style bland language
has all but extinguished the supple verve of good
English prose in everyday usage. Business, newspapers,
and textbooks, among other venues, are in the thrall
of dumbed-down, disposable writing of a most
forgettable kind. (Example: Compare a King James Bible
with the New International Version, and try to find
one memorable phrase in the latter that is not a
leftover from the former.)
Ms. Kirschenbaum passionately wants to rescue our
culture from irrelevance in the eyes of her students.
Despite what she reports as indifference from
academics more interested in pedigree than in the
power of ideas, she gathered the panoramic sweep of
how non-Gutenbergian cultures transmitted information
- in vivid color, shaped in every way imaginable, as
opposed to block text, with assistance from everything
that two-dimensional art can offer to stimulate the
brain (she discusses the science of that, too) to be
receptive to the meaning conveyed by the author.
Ms. Kirchenbaum re-discovered the importance of
color. In doing so, she stands in the center of a long
tradition, sidetracked by the limitations of
Gutenberg's printing press, but not entirely
forgotten. The author is probably correct in thinking
that black-on-white block text held sway for as long
as it did because of the near-monopoly that it had in
conveying printed information. The advent of
multi-media and desktop publishing means that A.)
Old-style text is not the only game in town, and B.)
One must ask how anyone used to high levels of
stimulation via television, the Internet, etc., can
otherwise be induced to use unexercised imagination to
make reading attractive.
The book is sprinkled with quotes from classic writers
- Horace, Mencius, Hugh of St. Victor, etc., and
experts in the field of graphic design, to bolster the
author's case. That case rests on foundations as old
as Plato: the preception of reality gained through
reading may be as imperfect as the shadows on the wall
in his famous analogy of the cave; using art and color
to enliven words can only help bring that image into
sharper focus, and thus the phantasms of memory when
the reader recalls it at a later date. In a
post-literate world, such writing serves such as
Gothic architecture once did for Christianity - a
sermon in stone. To use a secular example, Shakespeare
meant for his plays to be seen, not read; adding
something to black-on-white block text brings the
reader nearer to what the playwright wanted to convey,
in terms of total, felt meaning.
The power of Ms. Kirchenbaum's
message stayed with me as I read deeper into her
book: While watching, "My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding,"
I connected the Orthodox use of icons ("Written,"
not painted - every stroke had specific meaning
to the believer), incense, chanting, and candles
- all elements absent from American Protestant
Christianity, to the Eastern way of engaging all
the senses in a religious experience.
In closing, while Ms.
Kirschenbaum does not cite Thomas More, he wrote
in support of her ideas, when he said, as quoted
by Sister Miriam Joseph in her classic, "The Trivium"
- "Images are necessary books for the uneducated
and good books for the learned, too. For all words
be but images representing the things that the
writer or speaker conceives in his mind,... and
so conceived in the mind, is but an image representing
the very thing itself that a man thinks of."
What Ms. Kirchenbaum is
attempting is not a revolution, but a restoration,
reconnecting us with the timeless knowledge of
the ages. For that she deserves our approbation
and active support.-
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