Salon.com > David Shields

David Shields: Literature saved my life!

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 00:30:00 +0000

How literature has no chance whatsoever of saving my life anymore

Kurt Vonnegut: Contemporary writers who leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian writers misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

“Seattle’s downtown has the smoothness of a microchip,” Charles Mudede says. “All of its defining buildings—the Central Library, Columbia Tower, Union Square towers, its stadiums—are new and evoke the spirit of twenty-first century technology and market utopianism. If there’s any history here, it’s a history of the future. The city’s landmark, the Space Needle, doesn’t point to the past but always to tomorrow.”

Most new technologies appear to undergo three distinct phases. At first, the computer was so big and expensive that only national governments had the resources to build and operate one. Only the Army and a handful of universities had multi-room-sized computers. A little later, large corporations with substantial research budgets, such as IBM, developed computers. The computer made its way into midsized businesses and schools. Not until the late ’70s and early ’80s did the computer shrink enough in size and price to be widely available to individuals. Exactly the same pattern has played out with nylon, access to mass communication, access to high-quality printing, Humvees, GPS, the web, handheld wireless communications, etc., etc. (Over a longer timeline, something quite similar happened with international trade: at first, global interaction was possible only between nations, then between large companies, and only now can a private citizen get anything he wants manufactured by a Chinese factory and FedExed to his shop.)

Bob Knight, c’est moi

Wed, 27 Sep 2000 19:00:00 +0000

No, I've never hit a Puerto Rican policeman before practice at the Pan-American games; stuffed a fan from an opposing team in a garbage can; told Connie Chung, "I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it"; told women, "There's only two things you people are good for: having babies and frying bacon"; pretended to bullwhip my star player; waved used toilet paper in my players' faces to provide them with a metaphor for their poor play; tossed a chair across the court during a game; kicked my son -- a player on the team -- in the leg during another game; head-butted a player during yet another game; or choked another player during practice. But neither have I won three NCAA championships, twice been named coach of the year, coached the United States to an Olympic gold medal, won more than 700 college basketball games or had a higher graduation rate among my players than nearly any other Division I basketball coach.

Me? I remember being simultaneously a graduate student in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a patient in the university's equally renowned Speech Clinic, and being overwhelmed by the paradox that as an apprentice writer I was learning to manipulate words, but that as a stutterer I was at the mercy of them. How had my life come to this, I wondered, shuttling back and forth between two four-story brick buildings, two houses of language?

The guilty pleasures of Seattle

Thu, 01 Jun 2000 18:01:00 +0000

A few years ago a Seattle Times food critic said that there was an optimum number of French restaurants a city should have -- any less, and it wasn't a real city; too many, and there was something wrong about the place.

One can safely assume that Seattle now has too many French restaurants. Even a few years ago, after clear weather, you couldn't see smog for three days; now you can see it after one day. Eddie Bauer was once the brand name of choice, even for downtown businessmen; Tiffany's and Cartier are now in Pacific Place, Neiman-Marcus in the Westlake Center. Everyone downtown seems to be wearing designer eyewear, Italian shoes, expensive leather coats. Late-model SUVs ("I'm in touch with nature") and Volvos ("I'm intellectual") are ubiquitous, though very few Mercedes or BMWs, at least in the neighborhoods where I drive. A friend who was a successful potter was forced to give up his studio when the rent doubled, so he's now remodeling houses for millionaires half his age.