ELAYNE RIGGS: World Enough and Time
Everyone around my age seems to have a Twilight Zone episode that sticks with them the most. For me, it’s the Burgess Meredith-starring "Time Enough At Last," which title I always misremember as World Enough and Time. (Just my luck I’m about to become even more confused as that’s also the title of the new George Takei-starring Star Trek: New Frontiers episode debuting in two weeks.) It’s about an obsessive reader who’s delighted he finally has time to pursue his favorite hobby after improbably escaping a bomb that wipes out the rest of the populace, only to have his glasses fall off his face and break, fade to black.
It was one of those episodes for which I refused to suspend disbelief because I kept thinking of all the ways Meredith’s character could remedy his fate. What was preventing him from looking for new glasses? If the NYPL building was still standing I’ll bet some optometry places were still around. And after all, he had to go food-gathering to stay alive, he’d undoubtedly (and likely literally) bump into something. And bombs tend to fuse things into lenses anyway. All that aside, I refused to believe he totally couldn’t read without his glasses; my prescription is pretty strong and I’m to the point in life where, if I didn’t have bifocals, I’d have to remove my glasses to read. And eyesight has been known to improve without the use of glasses, by means of various exercises and–
Well anyway, my point is, I went over all these machinations in my head for years because I could see a lot of myself in that character. I love to read, always have. Got it from my mom (hi Mom!); Dad wasn’t big on reading, but she’s always taken to it, as have her sister and brother, from whom I learned to like all sorts of genre stuff from the Happy Hollisters mystery series to fantasy and science fiction to fairy tales to the very occasional non-fiction foray. Reading actively engages my mind like little else. Reading has always been the way I found out about life, about myself. Reading is dreaming using words (and pictures, if you’re talking about comics).
I’m never as happy as when I have time to catch up on my reading. This week, for instance, I’m on "enforced" vacation — meaning that, because I don’t get to use up my allotted vacation time when I want to (due to my boss requiring me to be at my post whenever he’s in the country), I wind up accumulating too many days to carry over into my next service year and must "use or lose" them before my anniversary (next Monday). As of the time I wrote this column I had no idea what I was going to do during this week other than read, read, and read some more.
And even then, there’s never time enough.
Part of the problem is how my job has changed my habits. I used to get a fair amount of reading done on the subway or bus to and from work. Since my boss relocated our office out of NYC three years ago, necessitating a car commute, most of that reading’s fallen by the wayside.
I resubscribe to a number of political monthlies every year, hoping that this will be the year I can catch up, and every few months I gather all the unread magazines into the recycle bin and shrug, "Well, at least I’ve contributed to the cause." Issue after issue of our local newsweekly piles up until Robin spreads some out for detritus when he cuts his hair and then they all get recycled as well. I’m perpetually behind in our Entertainment Weeklys and, of course, our DC comp and other comics boxes. Let’s not even talk about actual books; I don’t remember the last time I read one of those. I really want to reread the first six Harry Potter paperbacks I have before the paperback of Deathly Hallows comes out; good luck to that idea! I still haven’t read all the Oz books I’ve bought over the years; the last 4 or so are still in their shrink-wrapping.
As you can imagine, blog reading makes things even worse. In the demanding online world of New Content Daily, I can just barely keep up with all the blogs I follow, and have developed a sort of skimming method (thanks in large part to my site feed reader). When you compound my personal blog reading with the feeds I’ve set up for ComicMix, you begin to see why my news postings have fallen by the wayside, and why even some weekly columns get written last-minute. After all, I reason to myself, I have to read before I can write. (That is, by the way, one of the worst traps into which the modern online writer can fall. You will never finish reading everything you want to by the time you need to write something.)
Adriane Nash responded to my Left Behind essay of a couple weeks back by noting, "As someone involved a comics-related field like ComicMix and as the news editor to boot, one would think you get the point of getting there first, both as a fan and a journalist." At the time I responded that "I understand why other people think it’s important to ‘get there first,’ which is why ComicMix tries to provide timely information. I’m afraid I’m more of a purveyor than a consumer when it comes to that stuff." But in truth, I don’t know how people with full-time jobs, real-life schedules, even kids for cripes sakes, find the time to be "early adopters," what drives their need for constant immediacy. I suspect more consumers DVR their favorite TV shows for later viewing than let on, and I’m sure I’m not the only one with piles of unread paper throughout my home. Humans are born procrastinators, and when you’re talking about something as ephemeral and non-life-or-death as entertainment, I think it’s a safe bet that the vast majority of folks out there don’t grab stuff right away. We (the consuming public) are only being made to think they do, by we (in the media) who have a vested interest in promoting newness. (Mmm, bitten hand sure is tasty!)
Somewhere in the last few years entertainment purveyors hit a tipping point, where the bean-counters in charge so outweighed the creativity moguls that there’s no longer any abiding interest in telling the kind of story that will build its audience over time through word of mouth, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding — now the incentive is to go for the jugular, the big kill opening weekend, and nothing else. When I see this greedy mindset at work, my first though is usually, how bad is the actual story if they’re that leery of word-of-mouth advertising and opt for the viral marketing pre-opening buzz instead? Should we call this the Snakes on a Plane Syndrome, the Geico Caveman TV Premise Pre-Mess, the Countdown Crisis? When did talking about something months before it debuts pretty much replace waiting to discuss details until a couple weeks after it debuts out of deference to the non-lemmings among us? When did we as a culture start automatically assuming anyone who’s anyone has already Been There and Done That?
Y’all know what I think? It’s the narcissistic media so in love with the bright and shiny image it reflects at itself that it feels constant pressure to look new and sparkly. It knows that images is totally a surface product, but insists to others that it has a substantive personality underneath. And time and again, there’s no There There. Nothing’s designed to stand the test of time because the media tells us we live in a world where we don’t have enough time.
And because there’s so much out there with which to amuse ourselves to death, that observation rings so true that consumers buy all the rest of the hype.
I have a weird way of coping with entertainment overload. Over the last decade or so I have lost my ability to retain story details. That’s the other reason I want to reread Potter and Baum and so many others; I no longer remember much story detail between when I read the books and now. Same with blog posts; I have to save the ones I want to nominate for yearly awards. It is my blessing, it is my curse. It makes everything new again, but sometimes plays havoc with my cultural conversation. Fortunately, age excuses much. But it would be handy to retain more, because there’s so much I’ve yet to read that when I reread I almost feel like I’m depriving myself. And as I’m reading for pleasure, isn’t that a little silly?
Sometimes I think the drive to create entertainment is the only thing that cures the drive to consume it. But of course one needs time enough for that as well.
Elayne Riggs would like to find the time to be a better news editor for ComicMix. She also notes this is the second time it looks like she’s riffing off Denny O’Neil’s column name with her own, and assures you that both instances have been purely coincidental.