John Coltrane performing “My Favorite Things” with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums live in Belgium, 1965.

what is the mad men of novels?

Flowers and tributes outside Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Capitol Hill office

I just dropped out of a writing class because Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” is on the mandatory reading list. I read that book while getting my undergrad in creative writing almost 40 years ago, wrote a term paper about Woolf, and STILL couldn’t tell you much about what happened in Dalloway. In the past decade, I’ve tried no fewer than nine times to read it again. I just can’t. Yes, it was a seminal work 101 years ago when it was published. Yes, it captured stream of consciousness in a way literature never had before. Jumping from one thought to the next, interrupting a thought then going back to it in the next sentence — or even a dozen pages later — to reflect how our brains do that? Absolutely revolutionary at the time. But we are all too aware of how our stream of consciousness is fragmented now. That’s the lament of our age. It’s what we feel all day, every day, as we jump between the work we’re doing on screen — four tabs open in the browser for work, two for our social media feeds — to answer a text message on our phone, see an incoming notification about our Amazon delivery (two days late, what’s the point of paying for Prime anyway?), wonder if we should order DoorDash for lunch or pick it up ourselves, check our calendar (35 minutes to the next Zoom call), reply to that text (“Drinks tomorrow after work?” “Great! See you at 5:30”), peek at our Twitter feed to see if anyone’s commented on this morning’s post (why do people insist on turning everything into a political discussion? It was a photo of a cat, for crying out loud), then return to the task we were working on (DoorDash is too expensive, we’ll just grab lunch at the place downstairs, it’s Monday isn’t it? They usually do a big salad for the day’s special) until a new text comes in from our best friend who just finished bingeing the show we’re both watching but we haven’t seen the final episode yet and now it’s spoiled. That’s the kind of life we read to escape from, to make sense of, not to experience more of the same. That bouncing around, broken stream of consciousness is the source of our stress. It’s what’s killing us. I’m not signing up to learn how to write for a 1925 audience. I’m not trying to learn to tell stories that don’t take into account the pressures and the pain of the lives we lead now. To hold up as an example for would-be writers works that would never be published today is one of the greatest disservices you can do to writing students and to the field. It teaches that “good writing” must be difficult to read, that they are wrong to want literature to make sense, that reading must be painful and something they must force themselves to do, and that they should spend money and time enduring things that offer little insight of how to understand and live in this day and age. I am starting to suspect that literary people who don’t understand what the internet is like, what social media is like, what AI is and how to identify it, are hastening the downfall of the printed word. Yes, reading is a wonderful thing — but so is pulling your nose from a book long enough to understand the world you’re actually living in.