Too Fast For Fiction

When I was in high school my father, in an effort to improve my grades and possibly improve upon his own intellect, purchased a speed reading course. This was before the internet took over everything, so it must have come out of the back of a magazine. The tapes came in a large, black case, with a strange looking pair of men on the back cover. It was Howard Stephen Berg’s “Mega Speed Reading”, and the photos were of Berg and Kevin Trudeau, the Penn to Berg’s Teller, if I may sully the names of my favorite magicians by making such a comparison.

If you’ve ever suffered from insomnia, you’ve seen Trudeau playing the part of a budget Larry King on an infomercial set made out to look like an actual news program. I have insomnia, hence I’ve seen far too much of Kevin Trudeau. One commercial that comes to mind is a colon cleansing program, pushed by a man with the dubious name of Klee Irwin and a moustache that reminds me of when my daughter eats pudding.

Much of the course consisted of Berg boasting about his abilities, such as reading Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” in about three minutes and passing a test on Stern’s radio show. The basic method was sweeping your hands over the text and skimming, identifying important words, so on and so forth. The ink from some books would build-up on your hands, which brings to mind the song “Informer” by Snow and (yes, I looked it up) MC Shan:

Take me to the station, black up my hands
Trail me down 'cause I'm hanging with the Snowman

I handled the method alright, and read a few books using it, but it felt like sticking a beautiful dinner into a blender, hitting chop, and then sucking the juice with a straw. For example: the following quote from Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit:

A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking-match.

Those three sentences consist of 51 words. Berg claims to be able to read 25,000 words a minute, or about 416 words a second. That means that someone with Berg’s amazing ability would suck down that simile, given in a dialect, in a tenth of a second.

I love reading, and I wish I could do more of it. I used to spend entire days at the library or on a sunny lawn just plowing through hundreds of pages a day, getting pale when I was inside and red-skinned when I was out. Right now I’m blazing through John Steinbeck’s “The Moon Is Down”, a rich and moving fable from World War Two that was actually used as propaganda for the Allies, passed among the resistance, and banned by the Axis (the punishment for possessing a copy in Italy was death). Blazing for me is the expectation that I’ll be finishing it tonight, or about two days after buying it at the wonderful Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut.

If I was Berg, however, I’d be done with it in roughly a minute, minute and a half (it’s short, about 110 pages). I have a wife and kid and more kids on the way, a garden and writing and a day job, so my reading time is little now, but you know what? The minute or two or even three (or ten, if it’s Pynchon or certain Faulkner texts) it takes me to get through the back of one sheet and the front of another is a wonderful time, and I feel no desire to flap through it like I’m yanking sheets of toilet paper from a stubborn roll. Some things in life shouldn’t be galloped through to the end, and I’d like to think that fiction is one of them.

(Although I’d like to have all politicians trained to speed read. Then, maybe, if they actually read the laws they pass, they might not do so.)

Non sequitur: How my car's front passenger seat looks right now:

Autumn In June

It’s supposed to get up to seventy here in my little area of southern New England, but it’s felt like fifty-something all day, and I love it. With the rain and the cool air it’s more like autumn than summer. That’s good for me, as autumn has always been my favorite season. My idea of heaven is a never-ending October, with harvests and Halloween and all that good stuff. Tomorrow is my birthday, but summer can go to hell.

One way I get into the spirit of the season we’re not actually in is by checking out the best Halloween related website, Pumpkinrot. If I had the money to spare I know I’d have one of his horribly awesome pieces staring down at me, waiting for the moment when my eyes closed for just a second too long… from a lack of sleep, perhaps, or the moment before a sneeze…

Continuing with my bizarre dream theme, which is one I can’t get away from regardless of what I do (medication, no medication, alcohol, no alcohol, going to bed early, at a reasonable time, late, et cetera), my last night’s dream wasn’t quite frightening, just strange. My wife, daughter, and I were on a chairlift at an exaggeratedly large version of the mountains of my hometown, a ski resort in Vermont. We were all dressed for summer weather, but it was perfect skiing weather: snowy, cold, blue-grey skies. Also, we were alone, and saw no one else on the chairlift or on the trails.

We got to the top and they stopped the lift for us to get off, and we were ordered to go buy season passes at an office set up at the very peak of the mountain. How we got to ride up in the first place was never explained. We went inside, and were informed that the season passes were now only $3, instead of the $1099 they usually are. We get our pictures taken with the old Polaroid four-punch setup that hasn’t been used for at least a decade, decade and a half, and soon the hot laminated cards are on breakable chains around our necks.

Back outside, we discover that we now have the latest and greatest equipment laid out for us, so we suit up and ski off. My wife has never skied in her life, and my daughter isn’t even 2 years old yet. The rest of the dream was just us working our way down the slope, but never seeming to get to the bottom, as the mountain appeared to have been growing just as fast as we were descending.

Non sequitur: Reason #1 I hate people my age to my age minus ten years: