Brian D. Buckley

In twenty years, teenagers won’t be reading books anymore. They won’t have time for anything longer than a text or a tweet. It’ll all be interactive, and novels will be as extinct as the stegosaurus.

Or at least, that’s what commentators and article-writers keep saying.

The logic apparently goes something like this: (1) Books used to be very popular. (2) Now they are less popular, and social media is growing exponentially. (3) This trend will continue, and soon books (and attention spans) will disappear.

What the would-be clairvoyants seem to miss, with astounding regularity, is this: Trends never continue unopposed. For every trend that goes mainstream, there’s a countertrend. For every new movement, there’s a backlash. That’s just what humans do.

The trend of more and more processed food, sprayed with chemicals, mass produced, cruel to animals, has spawned a countertrend of organic food, all natural, humanely raised.

Growing acceptance of science and rational thinking has fed a countermovement of anti-vaccine parents who think we never went to the moon.

The rise of pollution led to the rise of recycling.

The ubiquity of digital music has pushed younger generations back toward vinyl records.

Globalization has made us put up “Buy Local” signs.

Now, obviously some of these countertrends gather enough momentum to halt or reverse the initial trend, and some don’t. Some countertrends live on only as niches. Some wither away entirely.

But regardless, the blindness of so many trend-watchers to this simple, universal phenomenon – that growing momentum sparks growing resistance – is baffling.

In particular, if you ever catch yourself saying things like “Nobody does X anymore,” or “Everyone but me is obsessed with Y,” ask yourself – are you really that unique? Or maybe, just maybe, does your own opinion suggest that a whole lot of other people might feel the same way – maybe even enough to fuel a countermovement?

I’m not saying that trends never “stick” or that old institutions never die out. I’m just saying, you can only hear so many people complain that everyone else has stopped appreciating literature, before you start to think that this everyone else might not be as universal and unstoppable a force as we’re led to believe.

Don’t judge the young’uns too quick. They might surprise you, after all.

Item 1: We’re damn well going to Mars.

Elon Musk has vowed to get living, breathing humans on Mars within the next two decades, and President Obama has promised to fund the effort. It’s not gonna be a one-and-done deal, either. We’re going there to stay. Yes, please.

Item 2: Joss Whedon creates an anti-Trump PAC.

It’s true. The creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and the Avengers movie has formed a PAC called Save the Day to encourage people to vote, and to prevent the inauguration of America’s first openly stupid president.

For my third wish, can I have a chocolate chip cookie?

Editors love to criticize bad writing. It’s one of the perks of the job, like free coffee or a 401(k). But it’s true that a lot of this “bad writing” doesn’t really matter.

If a business document uses some puffed-up language or says “we will leverage our assets” … if a novel pours on needless adjectives like cheap cologne … if an email says “Steve will come to dinner with Molly and I” … well, aside from making my eyebrow twitch, it’s not the end of the world. Even misuse of “literally,” which is a genuine problem because it obscures meaning, is usually not a big problem.

But sometimes it’s different.

First, a little background. I volunteer several hours a week as a tutor. I work with adults who – because of difficult, often painful circumstances – never got a proper education. Usually they are working to get their GED, or high school diploma equivalent. The world looks different through their eyes. Tasks which may seem simple, like interpreting a map or using a formula, can be serious challenges.

Our program uses lots of materials for teaching. Here’s one: Core Skills in Social Studies from New Readers Press. It’s a GED prep book.

I want to punch this book in the face.

Here’s how Core Skills in Social Studies explains what a “region” is, in the section on geography:

Regions are a way to organize places on Earth. A region includes areas with a certain shared characteristic. Regions can reflect physical geography. For example, geographers may study climate regions with similar weather patterns. Or they may study landform regions, such as mountain ranges. Regions can also reflect human geography. Ethnic regions and language regions are both examples of this.

For me, that paragraph is merely boring. For the book’s target audience, it’s atrocious.

Think about who’s reading this. We’re talking about someone who doesn’t know what the word “region” means. Someone who is already struggling with basic concepts, and probably with literacy too. If you don’t understand “region,” how likely is it that you’ll understand “organize,” “characteristic,” “reflect” (in an abstract sense), “climate,” “landform,” and “ethnic”?

Do we really think that this clod of abstractions has made anything clearer? Do we seriously believe that someone’s going to read “areas with a certain shared characteristic” and think: Oh, that explains it!

If you don’t know what a region is, the focus should be on examples, not abstract explanations. And by “examples,” I don’t mean crap like “climate regions with similar weather patterns.” We’re talking about maps, so use pictures, for goodness’ sake. The book does have one picture example, but it should have a dozen more. Instead, it has a wall of text that’s worse than useless.

Why is it worse than useless? Because many of these students believe (and have been told over and over) that they are stupid, that anything they don’t understand is their fault. So when they read sentences like “Perceptual regions are also known as vernacular regions,” and don’t understand them, they actually blame themselves for the failings of these dumbass writers.

A lot of times, bad writing doesn’t matter. But sometimes, it matters a lot.

Trump: I’ve advocated three separate war crimes. My proposals would violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments, as well as the Geneva Convention. I’ve explicitly attacked religious freedom. Ronald Reagan, were he alive, would be horrified by my statements about torture. I’ve demonstrated virtually none of the Christian virtues, such as humility, compassion, forgiveness, or charity. My commitment to fiscal conservatism is tenuous at best. I have the emotional maturity of a three-year-old. If elected, I would be literally the least qualified U.S. president in history. And I say so many factually incorrect things that it’s hard to tell whether I’m lying on purpose or just detached from reality.

Republicans: Well, that’s okay.

Trump: Also, in 2005, I said some awful things about women.

Republicans: WHOA WHOA WHOA

• Not dead, not depressed, just busy.
• Betsy’s due date is September 30, so things could start moving any day now, any hour. We’ve got our hospital bags packed and ready, house clean, fingers twitching nervously. Our friends have taken to calling our Buckley-to-be “Roberto,” for no particular reason, while my mom calls him BSN, “Baby with the Secret Name.”
• Work on Crane Girl is continuing apace, which is like regular continuing, but pacier. Author Friend Ben Trube has been offering much-needed encouragement on this front. I had been doing lots of research and note-taking and plotting (which I still am), but he’s pushed me to get back into, you know, actually writing. The new draft is now over 9,000 words.

• On the Bible-reading front, Betsy and I are into the Gospel of Matthew, which feels far more profound and compassionate and elegant than either John or Mark. I had somehow gotten it into my head that Matthew was one of the less compelling gospels, which is clearly not true. I also discovered something about the Psalms that I really couldn’t believe I had never learned before – that probably deserves its own blog post.
• Lewis Carroll is mostly known as the author of the two Alice books. He is less known as the author of “The Hunting of the Snark,” which is also excellent. He is almost never known as the author of the two Sylvie and Bruno books, which is for the best. I’m about a dozen chapters into the first one, and it’s about 10% cool, 60% mediocre, and 30% awful. Have you ever said, “I’d like a version of Alice in Wonderland where Alice is replaced by an annoying pointless little boy who never does anything; and I’d like it to be a lot longer”? Me neither. But I’m reading the books because (1) Carroll fascinates me, and I’d like to know all about his work, even the less interesting parts, and (2) believe it or not, it’s research for Crane Girl.
• Other things I’ve been reading about lately include alchemy, mysticism, St. John of the Cross, Sylvia Plath, Robin Hood, etymology, and Russian fairy tales. Oh, and I read Edward Fitzgerald’s flawed but amazing translation of Farid ud-Din Attar’s twelfth-century Persian poem Bird Parliament (or “Conference of the Birds”). It’s an allegory for mysticism in the Islamic tradition (i.e., Sufism), and it’s amazingly open-minded for the time, going so far as to say that an idol-worshipper could have a truer faith in Allah than a Muslim, if that was the only way he knew.
• Trump is currently leading in Ohio, which is the kind of exciting news that makes me want to celebrate by shattering my sternum with a paperweight. I did finally receive the anti-Trump yard signs that I custom-designed and ordered, and currently there’s one in my front yard and (as of yesterday) one in my neighbor’s yard. This is in a neighborhood that’s otherwise exclusively Trump signs (not exaggerating). Betsy and I are considering a large donation somewhere to make a bigger impact, but we haven’t yet decided who it would go to, since we’re not extremely excited about donating to Hillary at the moment.
• Still editing. I also had a job recently summarizing – writing a summary of a nearly 200-page document. First time I’ve done anything like that, at least professionally. Pretty interesting and a nice change of pace.
• I just learned today – today – what “op-ed” means. I always thought it meant “opinion editorial,” that is, pretty much any editorial. But it actually means “opposite editorial,” that is, an editorial on the page opposite the paper’s staff editorial page, representing the opinion of an individual author, not necessarily aligned with the paper’s own editorial positions. Gaps in knowledge are a weird thing – it’s odd to think that I’m 31, and here’s a term I’ve heard most of my life, and I never actually knew what it meant. Makes you wonder what other gaps you still have.
• la la la la la