After learning about the Transcendentalists in the eleventh grade, I thought all writers were supposed to be decorated scholars, like Thoreau and Emerson, who went to Ivy League universities (or maybe they didn’t… I don’t actually know). I have followed a mildly impressive educational path: I attended Skidmore College, which is not an Ivy, but the tuition costs a whopping fifty thousand dollars, so it must be a good school, right?
The school spews out successful individuals each year—authors, actors, Jeopardy! champs. Come five years, I could be one of them. I could! The Oakland Arts Review just accepted one of my essays for publication, and I’ve written a play called Motherfucking Satan, beloved by my “Intro to Playwriting” professor and Facebook friends. But does that mean I know things? Does it mean I know whom we fought in World War II, or how banks work? Do I even need to know these things?
Unfortunately, acquiring knowledge requires me to pay attention and maybe even go out of my way to learn concepts, facts, and skills. I can have a gift for something, like oil painting or kickball, and use it to fuel success, but one often has to actively try to know things. Families either have to pay fifty thousand dollar tuition for their kid, or the kid has to have an innate passion for documentaries on Netflix in order to pass as cerebrally competent.
I get good enough grades. I’m a big fan of the solid B. If I get enough of those, nobody expects anything brilliant out of me. Bs are far enough away from As that you don’t feel like you’ve cheated yourself out of success, yet Bs are far enough away from Cs that you’re considered well above average (even though parents nowadays have deemed Cs the new Fs).
My point is: getting good grades is easy, but retaining knowledge is hard. The American school system makes it so students (and parents) only focus on the grades rather than the content learned. Often I think I know more about that which I’ve learned outside the classroom: relationships, sports, boybands.
(Really, I can tell you everything about the Jonas Brothers. Their full names are Nicholas Jerry Jonas, Joseph Adam Jonas, and Paul Kevin Jonas II. Nick’s favorite food is steak, and Joe’s is chicken cutlet. Joe’s favorite color is green. Kevin was born in 1987. I would state their childhood address, but the current owners don’t need another teenage girl collecting sentimental dirt from their backyard.)
The only history I know competently is anything Babe Ruth–related (because we all go through a Babe Ruth phase, right?). Upon my introduction into the baseball/softball universe, his was the name I heard the most; I had to know more about this “Great Bambino” character. Did he do more than just call his shot? Did he even do that? I checked out books from the library, fiction and nonfiction. My favorite was Babe & Me, a story about a kid who can travel through time via baseball card, but I learned the most when I did my third grade historical figure project on him. He started his baseball career at St. Mary’s reform school in Baltimore, from which evolved the Orioles. He was left handed (like me), wore the number three (like me), and played first base (like me). Oddly enough, for most of his life, he thought his birth date was February 7, 1894, when really it was February 6, 1895. I could go on spewing interesting facts about Babe Ruth, but I don’t want to show off too much and make my reader feel bad.
The “smart” things I do know about—grammar especially—I flaunt, and, by flaunt, I mean I make sure the room hears me groan when someone uses a hyphen in place of an em-dash. I flip tables when my peers use commas in place of semicolons (have they never been warned about comma splices?). Of course, I make the occasional grammatical error, and I have an existential crisis every time one is pointed out to me. Still, as a general rule, I assume that my writing is the most grammatically sound in the room.
I also tend to assume that I’m the only one in the room who hasn’t read The Great Gatsby or Jane Eyre or even Harry Potter. If anything, I milk the fact that I haven’t read most of the “classics,” poking fun at myself for having been Skidmore College’s least well-read English major. People ask me how a competent writer could hate reading, and I take it as a compliment. I blush—“I must be gifted, I guess”—but, when in-depth conversations about well-known novels ensue, I back into a corner, searching for someone with whom I can discuss sports and boybands.
If I feel so insecure about my lack of culture, why don’t I strap myself to a goddamn hammock, throw on my gently used reading glasses, and read the day away? The weather’s nice, and I have nothing better to do.
I could do that.
I should do that.
I just know that, if I ever tried to read these novels, it would go something like this:
I pick up the book, not knowing where to start, even though there is no other place to start other than the beginning. If the novel has a prologue, I flip past it. If the first chapter has an epigraph, I don’t read it. If somehow I make it to the meat of the novel, I pause every two pages to ask myself, “What the fuck did I just read?”—not because the content is disturbing or confusing but because I am dipping in and out of focus, sometimes following the plot, sometimes thinking things like: Do I have enough frozen pizzas to last me this weekend?
Why am I so good at grammar if I hate reading? I’ve come to realize that I am so good at grammar because I hate reading. In English class, I knew I struggled with literary analysis, not because I lacked insight, but because I lacked a passion for Mark Twain, so I had to make up for it in grammar. Besides, I have always known I wanted to write, which—one could argue—does not require my reading The Scarlet Letter or To Kill A Mockingbird. It does, however, require an understanding of punctuation and sentence structure.
But, given that policing grammar stems from the privilege of undergoing higher education, I worry that my intelligence is wasted on that which does not make the world a better place. Sure, I could save Grandma’s life by writing, “Let’s eat, Grandma” rather than “Let’s eat Grandma,” but I hardly think this scenario will present itself, mostly because my grandmother is already dead.
As a nonfiction writer, perhaps it makes sense that I was spoon-fed The White Album and Notes of a Native Son. Knowing I have use for reading these pieces increases my motivation to read them, but rarely am I sitting in bed, without anything to watch on Netflix, thinking, “I know! I’ll read some David Foster Wallace!”
Before spring vacation, I did check out Consider the Lobster from my school’s library, hoping it would help me feel productive over the week-long break and add to my repertoire of intellectual conversation points. I was running out of things to talk about with my boyfriend at the time, and he had been recommending it to me during the eighteen months we dated. Over spring break, I only read one of the ten essays in the book; I was dumped within forty-eight hours of returning to campus. For the sake of the anecdote, let’s assume that it was because my lack of reading skills.
The sad part, potentially sadder than the breakup, is the fact that I don’t remember the David Foster Wallace essay. In fact, I think I split my attention between two of them: the one about porn stars and the one about lobster. In the library, when a bypassing classmate of mine saw the book in my hand, he said, “You know, the first essay in there is about porn stars.” I figured the porn star essay would be a good place to start.
Now would be a great opportunity to give you my take on the porn star essay, but I don’t remember it, except that it either has the word “son” or “sun” in the title. Besides, I probably read four pages of it before jumping ahead to the lobster essay, because, considering it is the titular piece, it is more likely to come up in conversation among my peers. Though I don’t remember too much from this essay either, I do remember wondering how one man’s take on a lobster festival had gotten so popular.
Do you remember when I said I don’t know how banks work? I understand the general idea that they hold on to our money so muggers can’t snag our entire life’s savings in one go, but how does the bank benefit? What is a credit score? Is this how Alexander Hamilton wanted it?
(Should practical and cultural knowledge—banks and literature—come up in the same essay about knowing nothing? I think I may be projecting all my insecurities at once.) How does one do taxes? What is social security? How do you get insurance? Health insurance? Car insurance? What is a 401K? Where is this money my mom keeps telling me I have stowed away for graduate school? What is the point of graduate school if it won’t teach me how to pay a mortgage?
In the heat of my college career, perhaps I cared most about how to sound smart, but now that I have graduated, I fear I’ve wasted time not asking these questions, the answers of which might make me feel smart. So what are my options now?
I could learn about banks and live a financially stable life without having to grip my parents’ hands until they’ve decomposed, but I could still have absolutely no idea which countries were for and against Nazi Germany. I could learn about banks and Nazi Germany and still not have considered the lobster. Or I could learn about nothing, forfeiting knowledge to live with my parents forever and spend each night asking questions about credit scores, World War II, and David Foster Wallace over my mom’s meatloaf.
