Kristianne Huntsberger and Greg Miller Preview, Reading and Bowie

I often say that one of the reasons David Bowie remains a compelling figure more than a decade after his death is that he left us something to do. I can think of few — if any— better examples of what I mean than The Bowie Bookclub podcast. The hosts of that show, Kristianne Huntsberger and Greg Miller, will be returning to my own show as guests for my weekly interview tomorrow.

So, what do I mean that The Bowie Book Club exemplifies what I mean by Bowie leaving us something to do? Well, Kristianne and Greg took Bowie’s list of 100 influential books, released in 2013, and turned it into a book club reading list. Ten years later, after reading through all 100 books, they have moved on into a list of books they thought Bowie either read, or at least should have read (!). That is something to do.

To some extent, Bowie provides an excuse for the book club. I find common ground with the idea of using Bowie as a connecting thread for disparate things. Long stretches of The Bowie Book Club don’t mention Bowie at all, though Kristianne and Greg always eventually make the connection and assign a song to match the theme of the show. In this very blog, I will often take a thin Bowie connection as an excuse to write about something seemingly (though not entirely) unrelated. Making the Bowie connection serves as an interesting thought exercise.

And thought is what reading is about. Several of my recent posts have made mention of the Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch about how we have entered into a post-literate age. This does not exactly mean that people can’t read, but that they don’t read books, magazines or newspapers. And by “people” Horowitch doesn’t mean all people. Instead, the world, or at least the US, is breaking down into a minority camp of those who read, are capable of critical thought and see the world through an empirical grounding, and those who receive information through, well, sound and vision, often with short attention spans, unregulated impulses, and a superstitious mindset.

This transition from a literate, rules-based civilization into a more savage period of shattered norms surprisingly cropped up in an unexpected context—The Odyssey. Though literacy per se was not a major plot point, Christopher Nolan’s version of Odysseus spent the movie lamenting how he ushered in a kind of dark ages by violating “Zeus’s Law” with the Trojan Horse trick. Almost as a punchline in one of the final spoken exchanges, he says to Penelope that the story (that we just watched) would be passed on through song, because “songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.”

Odysseus adds that he thinks civilization will eventually come back around. Of course, Odysseus and his contemporaries didn’t have to make decisions about nuclear weapons and climate change.

My mother was an English teacher, and, perhaps for that reason, I have always thought of reading as a virtue. In the interview tomorrow, Kristianne mentions that she sometimes reads at the expense of doing other things that she probably should do. That’s not exactly how she put it, but what she was describing is an uncommon problem. Horowitch relays what she was told by a Harvard educator that “some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge.” According to a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she reports, high school students regard the idea of reading for pleasure to be an alien practice. Horowitch repeatedly underscores the connection between reading (especially reading books) with cognition — “the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking.” She adds, “it’s difficult to see any advantages in that.”

This comports with a recent personal experience. I recently taught a college-level class last year, after being out of the classroom for 19 years. A full-time faculty member warned me that “they don’t read.” I took her to mean that the students didn’t read much. No, she meant what she said— they don’t read. Most of the students did not read their assignments. I don’t mean that they didn’t read what they were assigned to read— they didn’t even read the assignments themselves. They didn’t read my feedback. They didn’t read the obvious AI-produced products they attempted to turn in to me. I would sometimes tell the students that I was teaching the class in the first place because they would be in charge of the world that I’m going to die in. The result has made me much more anxious about that world.

Bowie surely would have been anxious, too. Actually, Bowie seemed to be an anxious guy in the world he actually inhabited. Many of his later albums shared two traits— they were very pessimistic, and they were loaded with literary references. Bowie challenged us to interpret his songs, especially as he got older. This is not to say that earlier songs were not also filled with literary references. Diamond Dogs (1974) was largely based on 1984. “Suffragette City” (1972) borrows language from A Clockwork Orange, a book Horowitch mentions as an example of one that a Harvard student was struggling to read. “The Width of a Circle”— from all the way back to 1970, mentions Kahlil Gibran.

Bowie’s way of giving us something to do is to include a lyric like that that is tough to make out in the first place. The reward for figuring it out is another puzzle. Who is Kahlil Gibran? And the answer to that leads to books, books of poetry, and probably specifically The Prophet. I do think there is a difference between these types of references in earlier Bowie songs and later songs. When Bowie was in his 20s, I’m guessing that there was a much better chance that his peers would have read 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and even The Prophet, which was trendy in the late 60s and early 70s even if less-well-known today. His later references, though are more cryptic. Take, for instance, a verse from “I’d Rather Be High” (2013):

Nabokov is sun-licked now
Upon the beach at Gruenewald
Brilliant and naked
Just the way that authors look

It turns out that this line is either a specific reference to Nabokov’s The Gift, or more sneakily, Otto Friedrich’s Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, which quotes from The Gift. I learned this by listening to The Bowie Book Club. Though, in fairness, I think they learned it from the great Bowie chronicler Chris O’Leary, what Kristianne and Greg did with this information is read The Gift and do a show episode about it.

I have not read The Gift, nor have I read Before the Deluge. There’s only a handful of books on Bowie’s list that I have happened to have read. Perhaps surprisingly, I am not especially motivated to read books from the list simply because they are on the list (a recent exception was The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov which was outstanding and will (hopefully) be the subject of a future show). That said, I don’t think Bowie’s later music can be fully appreciated without at least being aware of some of the literary references buried within his lyrics.

Bowie does affect my own reading in another way. Many of the guests I invite on to my show are authors, and in order to interview them, I feel like I really should read their books. But I want to read more than books for the show. So, I’m reading more now than I have since I was in my 20s. Reading begets reading.

The Bowie Book Club — as a book club— shows how reading, which in one sense is a solitary activity, enhances human connectivity. Books give Kristianne and Greg something to talk about. That’s what a book club is about. I’m not a member of a book club, but my wife and I often trade books and then, ya know, talk about them. Another recent Atlantic article, this one by Olga Khazan, reported that people are speaking fewer words, which is “another growing sign of isolation.” The culprit? Much as in the case of less reading, the culprit is “digital communication” (a phrase which kinda sounds like a euphemism).

As Horowitch reported pertaining to the decline of reading, Khazan reports, “when conversation skills get rusty, other cognitive processes might erode, too.” She quotes a psychologist who co-authored the study about people speaking fewer words, who explained, “many people struggle with their attention span…and that could be partly because we don’t have as many chances as we once did to try to follow along as someone tells a lengthy, complicated story. When so much communication happens digitally…we’re essentially outsourcing a lot of the way our brain works into a device.”

If this sounds familiar to Bowie fans, it is pretty close to the desired effect of Newspeak, the slimmed-down vocabulary of 1984, designed to dull critical thought and make the oppressed citizens of Oceania more compliant. Bowie fans would know that because, in order to understand Diamond Dogs, ya have to have read 1984. Anyway, reading gives us something to talk about and a vocabulary to use in the conversation. Since the language of books literally (yeah, literally) enters into our minds, the act of reading at least gives us the opportunity of empathy. Fleeting conversation— let alone text messages— let alone social media posts— doesn’t give us insight into someone else’s thought processes.

Bowie said (actually, I think he wrote), “My entire career, I’ve only really worked with the same subject matter…I’ve always chosen to write about things to do with isolation, abandonment, fear and anxiety.” Reading, and then writing was how he worked through these things. Not reading, and not talking does the opposite.

Wow. At this point you might think that the interview tomorrow is gonna be pretty heavy. It actually isn’t. Kristianne and Greg are easy conversationalists and this was one of the more fun interviews I’ve done. Their show works for people who like Bowie and people who like books— it helps but is not necessary to like both. But while our conversation is pretty breezy, thinking about it opened up a flood of weightier thoughts. Which is the kind of thing listening to Bowie does. And, too, reading books…