Letting a Book Breathe

Now don't be suspicious or skeptical if I boast of progress in my de-internetting project by reading adulterous love triangles. Thanks to getting a library card from the Yuma library, I picked up the late-1940s movie, Anna Karenina, starring Vivian Leigh. She was good in the role and, let's face it, agreeable to look at. It served as inspiration for a rematch with Tolstoy's novel. It took about 40 pages for the main characters to start the soap opera, proper, after which I just rolled my eyes and put the book away. Ahh but wait. Maybe things are different when re-reading a book. 

Let's try to learn something from rewatching a movie. Years ago I learned the trick of focusing away from the center of the screen. Without any special effort, you probably would be focusing dead center, where the action is and the leading characters are. 

Perhaps this could work for re-reading a novel? For example I am merely skimming the main chapters in Anna, all ghastly soap operas, while slowly and carefully reading the "sub-plots," some of which foreshadow The Death of Ivan Ilyich, one of his later novels that is shorter and lacks a pukey romance or love triangle. There is also a marvelous scene outdoors on a farm when "Levin", Tolstoy's alter ego, is doing some strenuous farm work of the kind typically done by peasants and never by aristocrats, such as himself. (Part 3, Chapter 5.)

How that scene opened up the novel (!) and 'let it breathe,' as the DVD commentary tracks are fond of saying of movies that finally move from interior sets (or city-streets) to the countryside. And they are right. The audience really does start to suffocate when watching too many scenes inside a house, especially with the parlor-snakes going at each other.

If this is a general and valid principle, why do book-publishers give us novels with 700 pages of uninterrupted prose? Fiction is the worst case. At least History books try to alleviate the tedium by offering blocks of illustrations every few hundred pages. How generous of them! Usually the photographs are just portraits or group poses. 

The uninterrupted-prose-syndrome starts early in life. Children's books are nicely illustrated on almost every page, with the prose almost functioning as elongated captions of the illustrations. Children's encyclopedias are also nicely illustrated. That's about all I read as a child, and I still like article-length buckets of words, rather than giant holding tanks. Then you move on to grown-up "B" encyclopedias with lots of photographs, while more prestigious encyclopedias such as Britannica don't deign to illustrations.

Tabloid newspapers usually offer a lot of illustrations, while the New York Times does not. In so many ways, we are taught that tedious uninterrupted prose is the right way to be intellectually respectable. 

In the old days it was expensive to illustrate books. But in our day there are oceanic quantities of photographs at Picasa, Flickr, etc. I've never borrowed a photograph, from such places, that illustrates a point I was writing about. Why not? Just think of all those digital cameras, more every year, more pixels per photograph, cameras on the front and back of smart phones and tablets, etc. What is it all good for unless somebody uses them?

Publishers and media companies buy photographs from Getty Images. How nice it would be if amateurs' photos and paintings got used in blog posts and eBooks, rather than languish in graveyards on the internet.