Anatomy of a lit major.

According to a recent study, there are other people, besides my family, who don't have TV. The researcher who conducted this study compares the "crunchy granola set" and the "religious right, ultraconservative," saying that these two groups are at extreme ends of the cultural continuum, and yet members of them tend to denigrate television in the same way.

What's funny about that is that we're a little crunchy, and also a little religious right. And, lo and behold, we haven't had cable for years. We seem to have no problem holding those in tandem; why can't we be countercultural and conservative?

The article also aptly identified the process I went through in my adolescence, having to deal with being out of the loop. Kids around ages 10 to 13 report feeling left out of conversations, they said, but by 14 or 15, they wear their ignorance as a badge of pride. So true.

People who eschew TV have more time, and they spend it more productively, they found. I know I spent it reading, which is an excellent segue into this excellent NY Times blog post on "Gateway Literature." It's something I've wondered about more than once: when did my insatiable appetite for Goosebumps and The Babysitter's Club turn into a passion for Austen, the Brontes, Dostoevsky, Agee, James, Thoreau, Hardy?

It might have been Jules Verne. Although he's not the loftiest figure in the literary pantheon, his adventure novels carried a more elevated sense of language, and more complex vocabulary and character development, than anything I had picked up before I wandered into the school library at lunch one day in sixth grade and checked out Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, just out of curiosity. I ended up reading, that year, almost everything he wrote. I remember being so tickled by this passage from Journey to the Center of the Earth that I read it out loud to my mom when she was driving me to school, though she wasn't particularly amused at the time. I don't exactly know why it was so funny then; maybe it was my first exposure to subtle humor:

My uncle was fifty years old; tall, thin, and wiry. Large spectacles hid, to a certain extent, his vast, round, and goggle eyes, while his nose was irreverently compared to a thin file. So much indeed did it resemble that useful article, that a compass was said in his presence to have made considerable N (nasal) derivation.