Just The FAQs: Slop-Culture

(NOTE: Many years ago I was a playwright. Improbably a few of my short plays ended up getting published. This is the third and final installment of a three-part series of posts intended to provide a bit of background and answer some potential questions you may have regarding these plays should you be from one of the handful of the college, high school or community theater troupes from across the country who stage these plays each year.)

(To those who are reading these posts without having read the plays, my apologies. These posts will make little sense. Please feel free to ignore them with my compliments.)

SLOP-CULTURE


What Was The Inspiration?

Here's the short and slightly less boring version of where this play came from:

In 1999 the Actors Theater of Louisville held their annual 10-minute play contest, and that year they had decided they wanted to stage a handful of 10-minute pieces organized around a central theme at the festival. That theme was "Life Under 30." They wanted plays by writers, directors and actors all under 30 years old. And while they'd liked the play I'd originally submitted for the contest, (Guys), they called and asked if I had any other 10-minute pieces that might fit their theme a little more snugly.

"Why of course I do," I told them enthusiastically. "Why, I've got the perfect play for that! I shall send it to you forthwith!"

And then I hung up the phone and started writing it.

Seriously? Same Day?

I know. It sounds glib, but it's 100% true.

It was written and in the mail the same day. (We sent things through the mail back then. "Mail" was a kind of text message that people printed out and hand delivered to each other.) Start to finish, including rewrites, probably three hours of work all in. And you can kind of tell, if I'm being honest.

Fortunately, I had already been noodling over the idea of my own cultural identity and what it meant to be part of Generation X. (Yes, I'm aware that I am, in fact, old.) I'd been considering maybe doing something full-length, but hadn't zeroed in on any kind of story, structure or characters yet. The call was exactly the kind of kick in the pants I needed to pull the trigger.

So, What's It About?

What had been nagging at me, what I was itching to explore, was the fact that I didn't really have much of a cultural identity of my own to speak of. At least not how I understood the term. I didn't have any strong family or ethnic traditions. When it came to music or art or religion or food or ... well, anything really ... there just wasn't much there that tied me to any "tribe."

So a lot of the history and point of view I give Danielle came straight out of me. I, too, was half Italian, but had no connection to Italy beyond knowing how to microwave a bowl of Beefaroni. I was raised on pop culture. Nothing but bad TV and fast food.

At first this was a pretty depressing thought, but as I worked through the play I realized that everybody has a cultural identity. You just might have to widen your gaze enough to actually recognize all of the components of it. It's not just about ethnicity or religion or family. It's all the specific influences -- the books, movies, TV, pop music, whatever -- that make you specifically and particularly you.

And nobody gets to pick theirs. That alchemy is quite beyond our control. The forces and influences that make us who we are just kind of happen.

And that, it seemed to me, was the real choice. Once you recognize the forces that make you who you are ... do you embrace them?

It's a little corny, but that was kind of a big personal realization for me.

A couple hours later I had a cultural identity and the play was in the mail.

What Does The Title Mean?

It's a play on "pop culture," of course. When you have an entire generation raised on bad TV, that bubbling stew of references and touchstones can get pretty muddled and, well, sloppy.

Today, in the age of social media and the Internet, none of this seems like an especially big deal, since we are now all composed of roiling pastiches of memes, dog videos and snapshots of celebrities' food. But back then things weren't nearly as decentralized and fragmented. Deciphering your own identity and finding your tribe was a lot harder.

The Characters, What Are Their Deals?

As I said earlier, much of the existential crisis that Danielle is going through was straight from my own point of view at the time. There was a longing there, a feeling that I was lost. I was missing this deep connection to something larger. I didn't know what it was, but I knew I didn't have it. It wasn't until I eventually I realized that I was already part of something that I felt the pieces click together. I just needed to embrace it. Yes, Danielle is a product of pop culture, and once she accepts that, her place in the world starts to make sense to her.

Cindy is essentially Danielle on the other side of that realization. She's already made peace with that question and is stronger for it. She's got her shit together.

As for Brian and Dylan ... every group of friends has the equivalent of those guys. The lovable dumbasses who seem to float through through life without getting any of it on their shoes. These guys never had the crisis that Danielle having because they've always accepted who they are and where they fit since day one. They don't just accept their slop culture roots, they revel in them.

Hang On, Isn't All This Blather WAY Too Ponderous And Navel-Gazy For What Is Essentially A Fluffy Little Sit-Com?

Yes. Yes, it is.


Do You Have Any Performance Advice?

Okay, nobody ever asks me this, but I'm going to answer it anyway.

Over lo these many years I have found that the "louder, faster, wackier" school of comedy tends not to work at all with my material. I find if you underplay the material, it tends to work better. Mugging and shouting and falling down won't add energy to your show, it just adds frenzy, which isn't the same thing and isn't funny. (To me, anyway.) When in doubt, deadpan. I have found that just tightening up the dialogue pacing and then playing the pauses is a much surer map to laughs.

Just my two cents.

(FYI: Just as a reminder, if you're interested in performing any of these plays, please check the Samuel French/Concord Theatricals website. I've helpfully linked to them in most of the places the play titles appear on this blog. Otherwise, start here:
https://www.concordtheatricals.com/a/5552/robb-badlam)



Till next we meet ...

Just the FAQs: Guys

(NOTE: Many years ago I was a playwright. Improbably a few of my short plays ended up getting published. This is the second installment of a three-part series of posts intended to provide a bit of background and answer some potential questions you may have regarding these plays should you be from one of the handful of the college, high school or community theater troupes from across the country who stage these plays each year.)

(To those who are reading these posts without having read the plays, my apologies. These posts will make little sense. Please feel free to ignore them with my compliments.)

GUYS

So ... here's the thing ... sometimes positions we stake out early in life don't age super well.

It turns out, in order to become "woke," you have to first have been asleep.

This, in a nutshell, is my relationship to my short play Guys . Turns out what I wanted to say in my mid-20s isn't at all what I'd like to say in my mid-40s.

Every piece of art is a time capsule of the moment of its creation. A bubble that preserves the creator's thought or emotion at its inception. Sometimes those bubbles help you float off toward enlightenment. And sometimes ... well, sometimes they're more like a fart in a crowded elevator.

This play, for me, is the second one. Kinda.

Are there a few clever jokes in this play? I guess? Is it super aggressive and didactic in making its point? No, it's frivolous and silly. But the whole thing is in service to normalizing something that today I find kind of gross.

At the time, 20-something me wanted to declaim that all guys objectified women and that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. "It's just the way guys are hard-wired," I reasoned back then. "There's nothing inherently sinister about it. It's Nature."

"MOST of us are harmless," I argued.


Sure, okay.

Looking back on this play as an adult, however, particularly in the wake of the stomach-churning revelations about the likes of Harvey Weinstein, or Louis CK, or our commander-in-chief, for that matter, today I find this play to be a little chunk of regrettable retrograde apologia.


Now you might read the play and find it totally harmless. Goofy fun. But chances are, if you do, you're probably a dude. If you're a woman, you're likely to read Guys and sigh heavily with recognition.

The play is essentially ten minutes of two hapless dudes gawking at a woman in the park who's just trying to eat her damn Chicken McNuggets in peace -- while they pontificate and navel-gaze about why dudes seem compelled to gawk at women in parks who are just trying to eat their damn Chicken McNuggets in peace.

Without realizing it, I'd pretty neatly encapsulated the concept of the "male gaze" then immediately tried to charmingly dismiss its effect on those upon whom it fell.

"These two guys are totally harmless," I argued. "So it's fine! They're not going to DO anything! Relax!"

It's telling that I specified in the stage directions that the woman not actually appear in the play. Instead, she exists off stage where the two male characters can see her but the audience cannot. At the time, I thought this was clever and theatrical. But looking at it through more mature eyes, that detail somehow makes it worse. Not only did I not give her the agency to respond, I didn't even grant her the dignity of existing at all.

Am I over-reacting? Entirely possible. I am prone to such behavior. I was drawn to the theater for a reason, after all.

Ultimately, there may not be much reason to flagellate myself over this perceived injustice done unto the Universe. In the end, the play may very well be silly and ignorable. But it does bother me that I once thought this way. It's embarrassing. A moral pebble in the shoe. (But then, I am a writer at heart so if a thing is worth thinking about, it's definitely worth over-thinking about.)

Point is, your mileage, as they say, may vary.


Um ... Were There Any Questions On This FAQ List?

Oh, right.

As for Frequently Asked Questions ... on this play, I don't really get many of those. Not enough happens over its ten minutes of run time for anyone to get confused. It's not exactly the building of the barricade in Les Mis. It's two guys sitting at a table, eating french fries and talking about boobs.

(FYI: Just as a reminder, if you're interested in performing any of these plays, please check the Samuel French/Concord Theatricals website. I've helpfully linked to them in most of the places the play titles appear on this blog. Otherwise, start here:
https://www.concordtheatricals.com/a/5552/robb-badlam)



Till next we meet ...

Just The FAQs

In another life, I was a playwright.

Went to a fancy school. Learned stuff. Got a shiny degree. The whole nine.

And while I ultimately didn't end up carving out a life for myself in the theater, when all was said and done I did have the good fortune to see a couple of my short plays published. A pair of ten-minute pieces titled Guys and Slop-Culture appear in a handful of compendiums (compendia?) including a couple of "acting editions" published by the Samuel French company (now Concord Theatricals).

Improbably, a few times a year those plays actually get produced in colleges and high schools and community theaters across the country.

While the proceeds from performance rights to a pair of ten-minute plays don't exactly add up to a Scrooge McDuckian treasure hoard (it's maybe good for a couple hundred bucks a year, tops) it's pretty cool that those plays are still out there in the world just doing their thing.

From time to time folks involved in some of those productions will even contact me with questions. Most often they're students who are either directing or acting in them.

Now, generally speaking, if someone takes the time and trouble to ask a question, I usually try to take the time to answer.

Sometimes the questions are about characters, sometimes they're about production logistics, sometimes they're about my background. But they tend to fall into a couple of broad categories.

(I mean, let's face it, these aren't thematically dense "works" that require a lot of probing analysis. They're pretty straight-forward comedic sketches. You dig too deeply into these, you're gonna fall out the bottom.)

In any event, I thought it might be helpful to post some of the more frequently asked questions here with my standard responses. So if you've found this blog because you're looking for information on these plays, hopefully this will save you a bit of time and hassle.

(I'll break these up into a couple of separate posts so they don't get too long and unwieldy. I'll do three: one for each play and one for more general questions. I'll also permalink them in the "Pages" section of the sidebar under "PLAYS" for easy access.)

All right, let's start with some GENERAL QUESTIONS. (Play-specific posts to follow on a bit later.)

Here goes:


Your play features a lot of pop culture references. But they're a little dated. Can you update your play with more current references?

There are two answers to this question - a legal one and a creative one. And unfortunately, they're both no.

First the legal answer:

When you pay for performance rights through Concord Theatricals, you're paying for the right to perform the play as published. That's the agreement you're signing. That's the contract you're entering into. That's what you're paying for -- the right to perform that specific text. And that agreement is between you and Concord. I'm not party to it.

Asking me to do rewrites (whether paid or unpaid) is a violation of that contract. And that's just not something I want to mess with.


Now the artistic/creative answer:

As far as I'm concerned, these plays are finished.

A play -- or any creative endeavor really -- is essentially a time capsule. It's a snapshot of the thoughts and feelings of the writer at the moment of its creation. And as far as I'm concerned that's exactly how it should stay. These plays were written at a very specific time in a very specific place and about very specific ideas.

Moreover, they were written by a very specific writer ... a writer who doesn't really exist anymore.

As a writer and as a human being I've changed a lot in the years since these pieces were published. The person I was at 26 is very different than the one I am at 46. I've learned, I've grown, I've matured. I'm not the same me that I used to be. Hopefully none of us are.

Does that mean I think these plays are perfect? Oh, good god no! But they are what they were intended to be. For better or worse. And I'm happy to let them be.

Because even if I was amenable to changing some of the references -- which again, let me stress for the record, I am not -- believe me, you wouldn't want me to. I'm not going to get your generation's touchstones right. I'm a middle-aged man who isn't even on Facebook. Do you really want my updated hot takes about the Macarena or According to Jim?

(You don't. You really, really don't.)

But if you really believe that the references in my work will leave your audience confused or disconnected from the characters ... that's a totally valid consideration.

So may I suggest ... and I mean this with all sincerity and respect ... that perhaps my play may not be the right one for you.

PLEASE don't read that as me being snippy and nasty! Every play has it's audience. They're like puzzle pieces, some fit with their audience and some don't. There's nothing wrong with that.

Here's what I know: If mine doesn't work for you, I am one million percent certain there are better, fresher, funnier plays out there that your audience will lap up like thirsty hounds.

I guarantee, that with a little more digging, you'll find the piece that works for you. There are tons of fantastic plays in the world, written by far more talented writers. Somewhere out there is the one for you and your audience. Somewhere out there is your puzzle piece.

It's a terrific opportunity explore and discover!  Have fun!

We call them "plays" for a reason, after all.


Okay, if you won't do it, can I update your play with more current references?

Again. No.

Reeeeally no.

As I said above, the play is the play. As far as I'm concerned, it is finished. It's in its final form. As its creator, I said everything I wanted to say with it.

It's done.

I understand when people ask this question that it comes from a genuine place.

I understand that you only want to show your audience the best possible time. I understand that the question isn't meant to be offensive ...

... Buuut it kind of is.

Okay, it's more than "kind of."

It's really not a cool thing to ask a writer.

So let's not even go there, okay?


Can I adapt your play into a short film?

I'm sorry this list seems to have gotten so negative, but I have to say again, no.

Unfortunately, those rights are not available.

Your contract with Samuel French covers only theatrical presentation, meaning a live performance in front of an audience. It does not cover the rights to adapt the play as a film. (Or YouTube video, or Vine, or TikTok or Virtual Neurographic Intra-Cranial Flo-Stream, or whatever Silicon Valley throws at us next.)

You can record your live performance, of course. There's nothing wrong with taping the live show. And I don't mind if you post that recording online. Provided you credit everyone properly. (Including me).

But if you want to film it like a movie ... that's a BIG no. That goes for any play, not just mine. If you take a play and make it into a movie without the proper rights and permissions you are violating U.S. copyright law. If you are not the holder of the copyright for that material, you can totally get sued. Even if you're just throwing it up on YouTube for fun and aren't making any money off of it.

So just be safe and don't do it.


Okay, that's enough negativity for now! As I said, I'll put up a couple of play-specific posts in the coming weeks that I promise will be much more positive!

(FYI: Just as a reminder, if you're interested in performing any of these plays, please check the Samuel French/Concord Theatricals website. I've helpfully linked to them in most of the places the play titles appear on this blog. Otherwise, start here:
https://www.concordtheatricals.com/a/5552/robb-badlam)



Till next we meet ...

Life Of Pie

As the old saying goes: Food is Life.

Well, kind of.

Okay, not always.

Yeah, sometimes it's the other thing.

till next we meet ...

Every Breath You Take

For the last two decades I haven’t wanted to write.

At all.

After spending the first 25 years of my life (not to mention an alarming amount of college and grad school tuition) attempting to hone that particular skill set, the idea of putting one word in front of the other had become unpleasant. Daunting. Difficult. Even painful.

Which was a little problematic, considering “Writer” was the box I had ticked on every "What I Want To Be When I Grow Up" questionnaire Life had ever handed me from as far back as I could remember.

I used to love it. A lot. There was nothing I enjoyed more than making up characters and having adventures with them.

But in my late 20s something happened. Something changed. Something I didn’t quite understand.

I just couldn’t do it anymore. The storytelling impulse – the storytelling compulsion, really – that had been with me since even before I could read - that impulse I’d taken for granted for so many years - had just vanished.

Evaporated.

It was gone.

The tank had run dry. The engine wouldn’t turn over.

I have spent the past two decades slogging through a sludgy mental torpor, unable to do the one thing I was ever marginally good at.

Through it all I never quite gave up. Out of bone-deep stubbornness, I somehow managed to drag four or five screenplays across - or within shouting distance of - the finish line.

But I really had to force it. It was like pushing rope. It was all I could do just to focus for half an hour at a time.

A total number of pages that should have taken me two years tops, ended up taking nearly twenty.

And, if I’m being honest, they weren't particularly good pages.

Writing had become hard work. Exhausting work. Impossible work. Work I couldn't even attempt unless I took multiple weeks off from my job and crammed myself to the gills with caffeine. And even then, the results were paltry, at best. What had once been a fire hose had slowed to an occasional drip.

So what changed?

I didn't know.

For years, whenever I was asked why I never tried to pursue much of a writing career, I would quip: “Graduate school cured my love of theater.”

Was it sardonic? Certainly. Clever? Maybe. But was it true?

Well, honestly it seemed to be. It felt true. My experience in grad school had gotten a little bumpy near the end, and in the years that followed, I just couldn’t motivate myself to write.

Correlation?

Seemed like it.

But, come on. It hadn't been that bumpy. And even if it had been, it shouldn’t have affected writing non-theater pieces, right?

Right?

But it did.

Whether it was prose, screenplays, shorts or even blog entries, I was still slamming headlong into the same problem. Writing in any form had become a Sisyphean chore. I just didn’t seem to have it in me anymore. My brain just wouldn't cooperate.

So what was the problem?

Had I just peaked early and burned out? Had I run out of stories worth telling?

In truth, the problem ended up being less metaphysical and more physical.

It turns out my brain really wasn't cooperating.

Because it was being strangled.

"My safe word is: 'Please Stop Strangling Me.'"

I’ve always been a snorer. This wasn’t news. Even as a little kid, I could rattle the windows at night. But apart from irritating a long string of roommates, family members, a fair number of neighbors, and certainly The Missus, I had never thought much about it. People snore. So what?

And as I slid from my 20s to my 30s and on into my 40s, a sedentary office job, a long commute, and the slowing metabolism of encroaching middle age all conspired to pack a considerable amount of extra meat onto my already stout frame. As I’ve detailed previously, I have never been slender. But in the last 20 years I’ve managed to swell pretty far above my natural weight class.

What I didn’t realize was, the snoring and that extra fat were just symptoms of a problem. A problem that was pretty much destroying me from the inside out.

It’s called Sleep Apnea, and it can totally kill you.

"Show me on the drawing where the death gets in."

It turns out, every time I went to sleep, my soft palate -- the fleshy bit in the back of the throat -- would collapse like a deflated bouncy castle and drape itself over my airway.

This was what was causing my snoring.

But the snoring wasn't the problem.

The problem was that it was starving my brain of oxygen all night.

Spoiler Alert: Your brain needs oxygen to live.

“This is where you dipped into R.E.M. state,” the doctor said, indicating a brief dip on the chart a few days following my sleep study. “You stayed there for less than a minute.”

“But it was a six hour test,” I said.

"Exactly."

“Is that why I don’t dream?”

“No,” he said. “You’re not dreaming because there are three more levels of sleep below R.E.M. That's where dreaming happens. And I don’t think you’ve been to any of those levels in years.”

“Huh.”

“According to this, you’re experiencing an apnea event about a hundred times an hour.”

“Which translates to ...”

“Almost every breath.”

“Huh.”


So what did it all mean?

Well, it meant that with nearly every breath, I was choking on my own throat.

It meant that every night my brain was being starved of oxygen.

It meant that my brain was never getting a chance to rest and recover.

It meant that my mind was being strangled for hours on end.

Every night.

For years.

Years.

And as he rattled off the symptoms, all the pieces started to fit. Constant physical exhaustion, extreme mental lethargy, weight gain, persistent mental fog, utter lack of short-term memory, shortened temper, complete loss of concentration ... check, check, check, check, check....

My brain, he said in so many words, was a tattered, wrung-out dishrag. It hadn’t been able to rest or recharge in nearly twenty years. Frankly, it was kind of miraculous that I’d managed to shamble through my life generally, let alone write what little I had.

I was essentially staggering through each day with the needle pinned below empty. Coasting on fumes. My brain was never getting the sleep it desperately needed to function.

Oh, and did I mention it can totally kill you. Sudden heart failure is fairly common with untreated apnea, as are strokes, and incidents of falling asleep at the wheel. Hypoxia, irregular heartbeat, and even diabetes are all linked strongly to it.

"Seriously. It's SO not good for you. As your doctor, I would recommend that you should probably stop having it."

So no, this wasn’t a case of snory chubster needing a few extra hours of shut-eye. This was severe oxygen deprivation to the brain. Staying in bed for a few extra hours on the weekend wasn’t going to help. Longer strangling sessions weren't the answer.

So ... what was?

Was there a treatment?

Could anything be done?


It's called a CPAP machine. And it just might be saving my life.


Every night I strap what looks like scuba gear onto my face and the machine blows air through a tube and up my nose - Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. The air pressure keeps my soft palate from collapsing over my airway and choking the life out of me while I sleep. It’s a little bit like a stadium with a fabric roof – the air pressure keeps the dome from caving in.

Sounds invasive and terrible, right?

How could a person possibly sleep in that get-up?

Well, it turns out, beautifully.

JUST LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL!!!

I love this goddamned thing.

LOVE.

IT.

Because, for starters, it’s not as invasive and terrible as it sounds. After some initial trouble with a bulky and unpleasant face mask, I was able to switch to a much smaller “nasal pillow” which plugs into my nostrils perfectly.

And I'm thrilled to report that it’s working!

In the months since I’ve started using it, my memory has snapped back, my mental acuity has returned, and my energy level has ticked steadily upward.

Most noticeably, my once horrifying caffeine problem has been eliminated entirely.

There was a time I needed FOUR TO SIX LITERS of Diet Pepsi a day. Just to function. (For those not in Europe at the moment, that’s nearly TWO GALLONS.) Each day. Just to drag my swollen carcass to work and back.

The sheer volume of soda I have consumed over the last two decades has surely done irreparable damage to every organ and bone in my body, but I am happy to report that since I started using this machine, I’ve cut caffeine out of my diet entirely. With no repercussions whatsoever. Unless you count the fact that I’m now saving about $4,000 a year by not needing to drown myself in an ocean of aspartame.

And that's not all. My mood has markedly brightened, my thinking is quicker, and my vision has even gotten a smidge better. I’ve even dropped about fifteen pounds without exercising. (Admittedly, fifteen is just a drop in the proverbial fat bucket, but it’s an encouraging start!)

But the biggest change I’ve noticed is that my concentration has come roaring back. Time was, the state some call “flow” was a fairly regular destination for me. Whether I was writing, reading, sculpting, model building, drawing … anything that required intense, focused attention ... I would slip down into a kind of concentration hole and emerge many hours later with the task completed and a back stiff from hunching.

I’ve started doing that again. Often without meaning to. And it’s fantastic.

And guess what else ...

Yup.

It started almost without my realizing it. One day on the train home from work – a time I used to be helpless to stop myself from nodding off – I just flipped open my laptop and started absently plinking away.

And before I knew it, a few weeks had passed and I was 70 pages deep into a new script.

And it was different this time. I wasn’t forcing it. I wasn't doing it because I felt an onerous sense of obligation to live up to a life choice I’d made four decades prior. Nor was it a guilty attempt to justify the life-crippling student loan debt I’m still trapped beneath.

No. This time I was writing because it was fun. Because I wanted to.

That’s it.

In fact, the thing I'm writing isn’t even something I could ever sell. It’s really just for me.

And that’s okay.

In fact, that's better than okay.

That's pretty goddamned great.





Till next we meet ...

Breaking: Summer Has Arrived

Ladies and gentlemen, could I please have your attention.

The Captain has turned off the "It's Not Summer Yet" sign.

You may now feel free to move about the season.

Thank you for choosing U.S. (h)Air.



... till next we meet.

Empathy Or The Devil

(My apologies in advance. This one's a bit more serious minded and thinky than my usual nonsense. Sorry. Occasionally I do get drawn in by the tractor beam of matters of actual import. It happens. I'm human. But rest assured, silliness will follow anon. Promise.)


As any writer will tell you ... if you want to write better, you have to read more.

But it's not just about picking up tips from other writers or honing the subtleties of narrative craft.

Yes. There are many, many things you can learn from reading that will help you develop your own literary voice or fine-tune your personal creative process.

But there's something else about the act of reading that's even more important.

Something not just for writers.

Something deeper.

Something primal.

Something I believe is pretty darn fundamental to our humanity.


And it's something that seems to be disappearing from our culture at an alarming rate.



Empathy.



We all know people who seem to have been born with an innate hypersensitivity to the plight of their fellow human. They have that rare ability to feel for others on a deep and meaningful level.

But those folks aren't very common.

For most of us empathy is a response that must be actively and regularly cultivated. It's not an autonomic response. It's a muscle that must be worked out regularly or it will atrophy. Use it or lose it.

And right now, as a culture, we don't seem to be using it.

I'm not a sociologist or an anthropologist and I don't have any hard data to back up this observation, but I don't think it's hugely controversial to suggest that over the last couple of decades we've grown darker and meaner as a culture.

I'm not saying that there is no more kindness in the world. Just watch the response after a hurricane or an earthquake and you will see people show their best and most generous selves.

No, I'm talking about everyday sympathy and understanding. That's what seems to be in shorter and shorter supply.

We don't seem willing to walk a mile in the other guy's shoes anymore. Indeed, we seem now to resent the very fact that the other guy even has shoes in the first place.

Consider the catastrophic state of disrepair of our political discourse. It seems like we've devolved on a societal level. There's a ravenous, Lord of the Flies bloodthirstiness to our culture now that I just don't remember us having when I was 25.

Maybe it's the haze of memory, but I seem to recall a time when we could disagree without utterly loathing one another.

Today we seem to have an all-or-nothing, scorched-earth, I-win/you-lose-and-your-descendants-shall-be-obliterated-from-history way of dealing with each other.

I don't know. Maybe nothing's changed. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention back then.

Or maybe that open hostility was always there, but we just couldn't see it because the technology didn't exist yet that would reveal it. (If you're like me, a cursory glance at virtually ANY Internet comment section fills you with aching despair.)

Or maybe this frothing geyser of hate is really only representative of a small number of monsters but the electronic bullhorn of social media makes them seem far louder and more numerous than they really are.

I don't know.

But I can say this: The kinds of viciousness, cruelty and screaming rage that's being vomited up so openly just sets me back on my heels. Just look at some of the monstrously racist responses we've seen to the Black Lives Matter movement ... or the wretched misogyny of GamerGate ... or the reprehensible pro-gun backlash to any mass shooting ... or the naked hatred driving the recent wave of harassing transphobic bathroom laws ... or ... or ... or ... or ...

Is this really who we are now?


As a culture, we are hemorrhaging empathy at an alarming rate.

Where did it go? Can we get it back? If so ... how?


Oh, and what the hell does any of this have to do with reading?


Well, I believe there has never been a better tool for building an empathetic response in humans than reading long-form fiction.

I know. It sounds weird, but stay with me.

Long-form fiction -- specifically the novel -- cultivates our capacity for empathy like nothing else. There is no other activity that forces you to plant yourself behind someone else's eyes -- and more importantly, inside their thoughts -- quite so fully as novel reading.

Roger Ebert once famously defined the movie as "a machine that generates empathy." And yes, under the best of circumstances, movies (and TV) are machines that can work beautifully.

But it's the unfortunate nature of an audio-visual medium that we must start on the outside of a character. Hopefully we find our way inside over the course of the next two hours, but there are no guarantees we'll make that connection. Importantly, with a novel we generally start inside a character's mind.

For me, the time spent with a movie or television episode is just too brief. Alternately, even a fast reader is going to spend a significantly larger chunk of time with a book. And the longer we stay, the longer we psychologically marinate in another point of view. The more time we spend submerged within the thoughts of someone else, the more likely we are to build an emotional bridge to their perspective.

But it's even more than that.

Our engagement with a movie is largely passive -- it happens on the screen whether we're paying attention or not. Sets were built, images were photographed, words were written and performances were given. It's a fait accompli. And it happens on its own schedule with or without our input. If we wander out to the lobby for some Twizzlers, the movie doesn't stop and wait for us.

But with a book, when we close the cover, the story stops. It waits for us to open it again. If we stop reading in the middle of a sentence, the story waits right there -- suspended -- until we read the next word.

With a book, we are the engine.

By reflexively filling in the spaces between the words with imagination, we create a large portion of the experience ourselves. Our brains provide the thousands of tiny details. What the characters look like, what they sound like ... and most importantly ... what they feel like.

We supply a large portion of the experience. The engagement is cooperative, it's active.

The writer may provide the road map, but we're the ones driving the car.

We engage more fully. And consequently, we end up connecting with written characters and their experiences far more deeply than their filmic counterparts. We blend our own psyches into them. They become part of us in a way no other art form seems to.

Whether we started off identifying with that character or not, by the end, we've filled in so many of their blanks with own personas that we are actually changed on a fundamental level by meeting them half way.

No, seriously. It literally changes us.

For real.

Recent research seems to suggest that novel-reading physically changes the structure of the brain.

Let me say that again, louder and in bigger print.

It physically changes your brain.


According to a fascinating recent study at Emory University:

Heightened connectivity in other parts of the brain suggested that readers may experience “embodied semantics,” a process in which brain connectivity during a thought-about action mirrors the connectivity that occurs during the actual action. For example, thinking about swimming can trigger the some of the same neural connections as physical swimming.

And you know what that sounds an awful lot like?



Empathy.


Is it a coincidence that the rise of the novel as a popular literary form approximately coincided with the Victorian era's Industrial Revolution? And is it coincidence that many of the most influential early novelists, like Charles Dickens, were known for their ability to sway public opinion with their deeply humane and compassionate stories about the plight of everyday people being ground up in the gears of a brutal, uncaring world?

I don't think so.

And is it a coincidence that we appear to be getting meaner and nastier as a culture at a time when we're just not reading novels like we used to?

I don't think so either.

Just look at book publishing today. Sales are shrinking and several publishing houses have been forced to merge or shutter entirely. If your book doesn't feature a love triangle of mopey supernatural teenagers swanning around a generic dystopia ... chances are nobody's reading it.

With the Internet and smart phones and social media demanding our attention ... we're consuming vast amounts of media, but we're doing it in a remarkably superficial, scattershot way.

We need to learn to concentrate again, to deep-dive, to focus.

140 characters at a time isn't going to get it done.

The Internet has brought people together like nothing else in human history. But electronic connectedness is not the same thing as human understanding.

Because if novel-reading does, in fact, change your brain, you can bet spending all day every day staring at Twitter on your phone does too. And those changes may not be quite as desirable.

Humanity isn't something we're born with. It's something we have to cultivate. Something we have to work at. It's a garden that needs constant tending.



So turn off this blog and go read a book.




Till next we meet ...