Screen Time: Take #1

I am a media-saturated comedian and writer who, like everyone else, spends more time looking at screens than doctors deem ‘healthy.’ This series will take stock of what I spent my precious attention on this week, and what I learned (if anything).

I regret to inform you that I’ve been reading James Joyce’s Ulysses on my phone. Here’s how it happened so you might avoid such a fate: I got the urge to reread it while I was reading (on my phone) an article by Sally Rooney about the hold the novel has on writers, readers, and critics. I was reading that article because I saw a viral tweet about the book that reminded me of a real-world interaction with my friend and coworker Chloe about Rooney’s article and how much she gained from reading it. Chloe is a poet who works with me in a bookstore in Oyster Bay. We often talk about books we love, but leading up to the end of the year, most of the staff were bemoaning how hard it is to read in the winter, not strictly because of a holiday schedule, but because, even though winter weather and shorter days should provide more time alone for reading, the opposite occurs. Much like exercising ironically gives a person more energy, time alone in darkness does not inspire me to read more. If anything, I got through much more during the summer when my social life was at full tilt. In 2023, I attempted to read 52 books in a year, and when I saw that I needed to finish 8 in December, I knew there was no hope.

In my seasonal affective-driven reading slump, when moving my eyes over the text of a page seemed utterly pointless, I was reminded of a book obsessed with anhedonia that I’ve had on my to-be-read pile since before I even learned what that word meant: Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf. I also read this book on my phone. Steppenwolf is about an intellectual named Harry who decides to kill himself at 50 unless something crucial changes in his life. For a sentiment as German as that, the book itself, complete with uncanny moments of someone handing the hero a biography of his own life and inviting him to a magic theater that’s “not for everybody. For madmen only!”, the book feels more Russian. After picking apart his existence cerebrally using a working theory that he is equal parts an intellectual and a wolf driven by animalistic drives, Harry finally decides to allow himself the satisfaction of a few earthly pleasures. He chooses sex, drugs, and Jazz. If you’re thinking about offing yourself, please consider getting really into one of those three activities first. And if you’re in a reading slump in winter, I’ve always found that Sherlock stories with their Watson narrations and eventual guaranteed punchlines always set me back on track. Certainly more than I felt after reading the somewhat indulgent reflections on Goethe and classical music as told by a middle-aged man contemplating leaving this Earth.

The reason I’m thinking again of Steppenwolf is because of Harry’s disdain for the radio. He is a man obsessed with hearing concerts played live, who hates the “last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art.” The radio is a sign of man’s acceptance of mediocrity. Pop music through crappy speakers. No, thank you. Mozart himself, however, in Harry’s dream, insists they listen to the “radio of life” despite it being a mere outline of what the music is meant to sound like. Even as the radio “disfigures’ Handel, Harry accepts. This sentiment in particular spoke to me, a man who recently got into vinyl and wants to ditch digital media altogether. More to the point of this essay, though, I see in Hesse’s book my own annoyance with how flat the world can seem when you view it through a phone. I incessantly look at TikToks and tweets about televised events. I read gossip about people I don’t know or care about. Even when the phone is simply burning a hole in my pocket, begging me to film or photograph a moment that could simply belong to the present me, no mediation required, it interferes with my consciousness.

None of these reflections have inspired me to throw my phone into a river. The imaginary Mozart in the novel convinces Harry to accept the literal and figurative radios in his life. Certainly, I, a person who uses all these screens to think and reflect on art and my own life, can accept that a flattened digital book read on my phone is still delivering the ideas and stories of the author who possibly once penned them on physical paper. My issue is with ignoring life for the sake of a phone. But it begs the question. Life involves phones now, whether you’re looking at yours right now or not. I’m not ready to leave the smartphone behind. Nay, I’m not even willing to leave it in another room while writing this.

Full disclosure: after a friend’s IRL recommendation, a stranger’s post showing up in my timeline about the article, and a personal reverence for Rooney’s fiction, I still have not finished reading her article about Ulysses. Other things came up. Texts, emails, my dog needing to go out. Or my wife asking a question I needed her to repeat because when she first asked me, I was reading either literary criticism or the captions on an Instagram reel of a comedian doing crowd work. Another reason I didn’t finish reading Rooney’s article is because the first few paragraphs re-whetted my appetite to read Joyce’s novel. We’re in the future Steve Jobs said we’d eventually get to where Shakespeare, Joyce, a dictionary, and an encyclopedia are literally at your fingertips. The computer can even talk which was his dream in 1984.

(Proof that we’re living in the future Jobs dreamed up: I thought for a moment I was misremembering this little vignette about the Mac talking to an audience, so I googled “Mac voice activation 1984.” What I found was not quite what I remembered from the Isaacson biography I read in 2011, so I checked the Libby app, found that it was available, borrowed it, searched the text for “Shakespeare” and wouldn’t you know it, there was an entire passage about Jobs wanting classic texts to be searchable and for users to have the ability to click a word and see its dictionary definition and synonyms. He let the computer introduce itself to hilariously raucous applause when viewed in 2024. But now, I can do what he dreamed and then some, even use my voice to ask my little pocket computer to look up everything without typing.)

What an incredible time to be alive (I’m so bored)!

Like everyone else with a smart device, I spend most of my time on it doom scrolling various social media apps, unsure what I want from my focused attention in the moment, like going into a bookstore to quixotically browse and find nothing of interest because every book is a slim volume of short opinion pieces that I’m irked exist at all. A sane person might put their phone and computer in another room while focusing on something “worthwhile.” But I say rather than ditching the tech altogether, why not embrace Jobs’ original vision for the phone? Instead of incessantly looking at porn, answering work emails when we’re off the clock, and googling “Paul Giamatti + net worth,” let’s use it to explore our intellectual curiosity. So I’m reading Ulysses on my phone.

There must be some Luddite professor who thinks you can only read Ulysses in print with the secondary sources and a dictionary and a notebook next to you in the brightly-lit noiseless cleanroom where they’d normally do medical experiments on drug safety but now serves as a private sensory deprivation chamber for readers for some reason. Or, maybe I just made up a guy in my head to get angry at, and no one cares how you enjoy reading. The thing about reading on your phone, though, is that it also has the internet, so that I, at 37, can google the word “parapet” for the 80th time in my life and only sort of remember what it is (a military wall. For all your military wall needs). Sometimes, you’ll even find that neither the dictionary nor Wikipedia can help you find one of Joyce’s words and you must rely on some .edu website to show you the path of clarity and understanding.

What’s strange is that I remember the text being far more difficult to understand in college than I find it now. I remembered it being opaque, especially the early Stephen sections. Maybe I’m a better reader now. Or maybe I’m not trying as hard to comprehend every last line of Greek and Latin uttered by Buck Mulligan. (Side note: I was looking for a job tutoring a few years ago, and one indignity I had to suffer was retaking the SATs as an adult. Mostly, it was easy. Mercifully, I did better than I had done as a 17-year-old, though I’m still contemplating if that makes me feel better or worse about my academic career.)

Catching the vibe, tone, theme, and character motivations is infinitely more rewarding in my reading life than thinking about structure, intellectual novelty, long old words or long new ones partially invented by the author. So, then, while Joyce is the Shakespeare of Modernist lit, inventing a new way to tell a story by soaking up what he knows about one of the first stories ever told, we’re left with something like a movie that scores a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 35% approval from the general audience. Like if Andy Warhol’s Empire was playing in the same theater as Barbie this year. I read Richard Ford in By The Book in the Times say it was a “professor’s novel” and it permitted me to dismiss it. But here I am writing about it again, trying to finish it.

All I want to say about the book is this: it is enjoyable. If you’re not trying so damn hard, it is a piece of fiction that scratches an itch. Possibly the same itch Infinite Jest scratched for me. That book is also a book that retells an old story while the result has almost nothing to do with its source material.

The phone takes so much of our attention, and I know that part of breaking the habit of mindlessly checking it is actively checking it. Setting times to use the phone, and then, even when using it, making sure it’s something I enjoy doing. Like reading Joyce instead of looking at a Twitter feed that was strictly about a Pop-Tarts stunt campaign at the end of a college football game (that deserved and received my precious attention for it might as well have been a piece of guerrilla theater). But maybe there’s more to life than engaging with brands on a billionaire’s website. If you disagree, tell it to Earth.

A while back, Sheila Heiti wrote a book I never read called How Should A Person Be? and I’m certain while it explores how a human should exist, it must also grapple with what a person should really know. In America, we love to know a trade, but as the bottom falls out of literally every job that exists (and with it, our dignity) it seems like a waste of time. So, what then? Current events? History? Is it important to know why the Marshall Plan led us to where we are now as the world’s police force when there’s nothing I can do about it besides think hard about who I vote for, and even then…? Should I study trivia like I’m about to audition for Jeopardy!?

Is knowing what Joyce was attempting to do with his fiction worth knowing? Is reading about me reading it worth your time?

I went down a fun Wikipedia rabbit hole this week after watching a documentary about De Palma. He talked about the movie The Untouchables and I remember liking it, but now I saw it through the lens of every other De Palma movie. The POV shots outside Malone’s window are nearly the same as the opening of Blow Out. The violence. Casting De Niro, an actor De Palma himself first discovered. Knowing all that, my appetite for knowing more about Eliot Ness was piqued. Did he really kill anyone? How much did the raids hurt Capone? And why was a beer named after him at Cleveland’s Great Lake’s Brewing Company, a brewery that stood mere blocks from my house in high school, and filled whole city blocks with the smell of yeast?

I found the answer: Eliot Ness lived and worked in Cleveland and before drinking too much and failing to win a mayoral candidacy, he unsuccessfully hunted a serial killer known as The Torso Murderer. The American “Jack the Ripper” who no one ever caught. That’s the movie I think we’d all like to see. True Detective, Season 4: drunk Eliot Ness can’t catch a serial killer. He died at 54 before his memoir The Untouchables was published. It’s a book I’d very much like to read.

Let me back up one more step. I watched the De Palma doc because I was talking to my dad about the movie Blow Out and how much I think he’d like it. I was only thinking about that movie again because I had read Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation (partly on my phone) last year and it read like a syllabus of great movies I should pay attention to if I ever wanted to make a worthwhile movie. While I was regurgitating praise for De Palma and talking about what he lifted from Hitchcock in Body Double and how Blow Out is a reference to Blow Up but with a little more time spent reflecting on the Zapruder film than Antonioni, my dad interrupted and asked: “wasn’t De Palma the one who made that Nicholas Cage movie with the long first shot?” Indeed, he did. It’s called Snake Eyes (1998).

If you often find yourself paralyzed when choosing what to stream next, you should hang out with my dad. On multiple occasions, we’ve spoken for ten seconds about a film or TV show or YouTube video, and within seconds, it’s up on a screen. He does not second-guess. And so, the day before Christmas Eve, I found myself enjoying De Palma’s ode to Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Rashomon. To me, the movie becomes a lot more entertaining the second the single-shot 11 minutes are over. There are shots from the hero’s POV that feel like a scene from a BioShock game, stories within stories, security camera footage telling the story right after seeing the local news coverage of the events outside the stadium on a similar tube TV, and visual references to Psycho. The list goes on.

What the hell does any of that have to do with Ulysses? Well, it’s also a lifting of its original premise, characters, and narrative stratagems from an old source: Homeric epic poetry. Joyce uses old and new techniques to bring an ancient story to the present day. By present day, I mean a hundred years ago. I’m not saying De Palma is the James Joyce of cinema, but I am saying I see a connection. That Joyce and De Palma took stories that were already there, that belongs to us all, and told them in a radical new way while nodding to the storytellers that came before them. At least, I think. I’m only 2% into Ulysses.

What I read this week:

Blake Butler’s harrowing memoir Molly about his late wife’s suicide. I don’t consider many books “brave” but the raw intensity he left on the page, how often he’s willing to share his anger, spite, and other less-than-pleasant feelings makes me believe he held nothing back. Stark. Devastating. Unnerving. Would only recommend reading if you’re currently feeling “OK.”

The first 5 chapters of The Marshall Plan

Ulysses (a few pages on my phone)

What I watched this week:

The Holdovers (2023)

The Untouchables (1987)

Paper Moon (1973)

Eraserhead (1977)

Where you can see me do stand-up this week:

We Have Fun — Wednesday, January 10th at 7:30 PM at Young Ethel’s

Mike Drucker And Theoretical Friends — Wednesday, January 10th at 9:00 PM at QED

Joke Folks — Tuesday, January 16th at 8:00 PM at Industry in Huntington, NY