In practicality, however, the humanities – as laid out by the National Endowment for the Humanities – make up the non-visual-art side of human thought. Literature and history, civics and government; the furtherance of society is built upon knowledge of the humanities. The mistakes of our forefathers and the insight of our peers, each mind creating a web of culture that guides us and keeps us interesting.

Nowhere, however, in the NEH’s definition is mention of technology and, more so, the culture of the Internet. Isn’t it time for that to change?

“Internet” and “Web” appear often, don’t get me wrong. They are used as a medium; often, they are simply nothing more than a method for distribution. Books are scanned and stored thanks to the Web, newsletters and meetings are set up over the Internet. Web culture is non-existant; instead, we see the culture of technology pushed to the side to make room for its tools, like buying an IKEA shelf for the allen wrench.

But there’s magic in that shelf. There’s more forward thinking civic dialogue, literature and true change being cultivated via the Internet than any traditional medium combined – a dialogue that consists not only of what we’re used to (Writing! Critique! Government!) but what we’re still discovering.

The web is more than a tool for cultural change – it is culture change ITSELF.

Full disclosure: I’m fortunate enough to serve on the South Dakota Humanities Council. What was once a council built on a history of retired professors and state authors has become younger, more in tune with technology and its tools. We’re slowly taking the next step, no longer content to rely only on the tools of technology, but with technology itself. The future holds discussions about what it means to be a South Dakotan today, in today’s terms, with today’s problems and today’s new ways of telling stories.

Your local humanities council is probably doing the same thing. But, unfortunately, those efforts often go unnoticed. Slashed budgets, public indifference and a multitude of distractions keep humanities councils – who are charged with protecting and celebrating the humanities in all of its forms – under the radar. So while we’re making changes, humanities boards are still struggling to move past the traditional author/scholar makeup and push into the future. Into considering web culture and content as important as novels about buffalo.

The representation of modern Internet culture is lacking. Where are you? Will you help?

If you read, you support the humanities. If you blog, you support the humanities. If you create web sites, or if you design beautiful products, or if you edit things, or if you take part in the consumption or creation of anything whatsoever on the Internet or via physical medium, you support the humanities. You support the process and history of technology, and you support the changing landscape of creative thought.

I, as a full-fledged member of an NEH-supported council board, thank you. And now, I challenge you to remember that the humanities are invaluable. They shape the fabric of our culture, and they deserve not just support, but complete appreciation and participation.

Regardless of the number of books you’ve written, or the number of Master’s dissertations you’ve given, or the number of historical texts you’ve memorized, the humanities are current. But it will take work to get them there – to stop looking to the past and begin pushing today’s agenda. Because the humanities aren’t just dusty books and the Venerable Bede.

The humanities are you.

There may be nothing more refreshing for someone who’s fallen off of the Reading Wagon than plowing through a 600-page graphic novel in a few hours, and certainly nothing more rewarding than doing it twice in a week. There’s this feeling of All Caps ACCOMPLISHMENT paired with All Caps RELIEF, like a baseball player hitting his way out of a slump.

That being said, I was initially concerned that my love for these two books – especially Craig Thompson’s Blankets, which was the first book I’d finished in months – is coincidental to the situation: I finally finished something of some heft, and the afterglow is hazing my rationality.

Thankfully, there’s a case against this: both books are fantastic.

Blankets’ heart-twanging, emo-without-being-tragic nature – it’s McSweeney’s without the pretention and twee – keeps popping up in my mind, much as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan continues to do. The power of the story resonates. The illustrations are burned into my brain. I am glad I was finally able to find a copy, and I don’t feel a bit of remorse in paying $20 for a book I rushed through and was finished with in three hours.

And Persepolis – itself not as much of a riveting narrative as much as a clear look at Iranian culture, personal growth and the fight for emotional freedom – gave me the kind of insight into foreign culture that I rarely stumble upon anymore. It is an intimate look at war, but it’s a look at war from the eyes of a child turned college student turned grown woman; the war itself becomes a character, not a focus, as Marjane pushes through life in spite of the constant bombings and prejudice.

I won’t pretend to be any kind of graphic novel connoisseur, but these two things are true: Blankets is a beautiful story framed by beautiful illustration, and Persepolis is an important story framed by important context.

Yeah. I’m pretty impressed, and not just with myself. For once.

But even more than that, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs was a guidebook for the geeky-but-not-quite legions of ironic thought: in essence, a rallying cry for those who found pleasure in debating the validity of Saved by the Bell’s influence simply because it was ironic to ever have considered Saved by the Bell influential at all.

Upon first read, I gave it two stars. A day later, I realized that I actually liked the book, and upgraded it to four.

I went into the book expecting to be annoyed by it. I was. And yet, I wasn’t. Because, let’s face it – those geeky-but-not-quite legions of ironic thought?

They’re my people. I’m probably one of them. *shudder*

Eating the Dinosaur, however, is different. It still follows the same patterns as Klosterman’s first essay collection, but it’s done in a way that’s both researched and filled with wisdom. These are no longer the essays of a college pop culture argument, but an almost Gladwell-ian look at the parts of pop culture that shape us.

Except that, unlike Malcolm Gladwell shaky attempts at the transitive property, Klosterman makes valid observations proven by common sense: The funniest shows are those without laugh tracks because we’re allowed to laugh for ourselves; voyeurism is natural and not at all creepy; football innovates specifically because it’s the most creative sport in the world.

It boils down to this: where Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs was a drunken romp through irrelevancy, Eating the Dinosaur is a buzzed discussion during after-work drinks.

Klosterman seems more grown up, is what I’m trying to get at. Thankfully. Because he’s better served that way.

Let’s say one of these guys is Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, an organization that seeks through the e-book format to make accessible all of the world’s greatest works, including some that – with permission – are still in copyright. While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and say the other guy is Michael Dirda, a Fullbright Fellowship recipient and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic.

(Let’s also say Marilyn Johnson, author and library stalwart, is there, representing the middle ground but unable to get a word in edgewise.)

Now, let’s sit back and wait for an answer we’ll never get.

Because neither of these men is interested in bridging the gap between the promise and accessibility of ebooks and the tangible joy and art of physical binding. Neither of these men is interested in discussing how Project Gutenberg offers limitless preservation of what used to be the fragile and time-consuming practice of book collecting, and neither is interested in discussing how a mix of both physical and e-books helps people rediscover the joys of reading.

Instead, both men want a pissing match.

E-books are awful, a slap in the face of literature, and you water down the process of literary experience by missing out on the feel and texture of the book itself.

Physical books are pointless, archaic, space-hogging and inefficient, and everyone should read books electronically because you can fit 30,000 on one disc.

It’s one or the other. Love it or leave it. If you’re not with ‘em, you’re against ‘em.

Now, let’s vent. Because after seeing the previous example, live, in person, at the Sioux Falls Orpheum, in front of hundreds of interested people attending the South Dakota Festival of Books, I came away feeling disgusted and disappointed, frustrated that the promise of what could have been a great discussion turned out to be a symposium on Michael Hart’s inability to look behind his own project and Michael Dirda’s weak attempts at playing the same game.

The real issue is how we use e-books to further literature and adapt with the times, understanding that even ancient scrolls were pushed out by the more efficient book format, and that was thousands of years ago. Books will never go away – Dirda’s point on the art and tangible feeling that comes with reading a physical book is right on – but we can’t be naive in thinking it’s the only way to read.

Not when so many people are living without access to physical books. Not when you can provide a book in seconds to a willing audience. And especially not when there is already a drop in literacy rates and willingness to let books OF ALL TYPES fall by the wayside.

Traditional books and their texture? They mean nothing unless someone reads them.

30,000 books on a disc, for free? THEY ALSO MEAN NOTHING UNLESS SOMEONE READS THEM.

Let’s pretend that the two sides sat down and discussed the future of reading. The future of publishing. The future of literature and writing and everything that goes along with it, because, let’s face it, the future of reading is also the future of education and the future of our countries and the future of the world.

Let’s pretend the only agenda brought into this panel was one of collaboration and innovation.

Don’t I wish that was the case.

That’s almost a year.

Now, before you take away my library card, hear me out. I HAVE been reading books. But I’ve also been starting a new job and learning to live with TWO kids and fixing a basement and discovering streaming Netflix and playing with new technology and doing all sort of other distracting things.

I’ve read books about basketball and about information architecture and about HTML5. I’ve read two collections of short stories from my McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern subscription. I’ve read about music and I’ve read about content strategy and I’ve read about writing itself.

But no real fiction. Nothing longer than a couple dozen pages.

The excuses, the excuses.

The truth is, I was exhausted with fiction. Though I missed it, I couldn’t get back into it. I forced the matter, I took it up with our library, and I wandered home wondering how I’d just checked out a John Steinbeck novella; primarily, wondering if I’d ever even open it, if I’d ever care again.

Of course I’d care. Because reading and literature are as much a part of my personality as try-too-hard sarcasm; my upbringing was framed by bookshelves, my preferences dictated by others’ words. And everything I loved about books peaked over two year’s worth of Steinbeck – I read The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and Tortilla Flat and Travels With Charley and fell in love with Salinas and Steinbeck and everything he stood for: great literature, themes and message that struck at the heart of human emotion.

The Red Pony, a novella from the early days of Steinbeck’s canon, fits under all three categories – great literature, great themes and a great message; a quick overview of the life cycle as viewed through the eyes of a young farm boy.

But, let’s be honest – I could gush about Steinbeck for hours, using as many fancy words as I could think of, filling my sentences with adjectives until they buckled under the strain. I won’t – you’re welcome – except to say The Red Pony, unlike Tortilla Flat and The Pearl (which are admittedly superior works) captures Steinbeck’s tendency toward realism and human suffering better than any of his other short works.

There is nothing complex about it. There’s a boy, a horse, and a family. There are two father figures who occupy the spectrum of understanding and tolerance. There’s the discovery of human fallacy, the reality of growing old, and the sacrifices of birth, all contributing to the slow coming of age of young Jody, a boy who really just wants a horse of his own.

Children do not come of age at once. Sure, Holden Caulfield immersed himself into the city and learned how to live as quickly as possible, but most children are exposed to life’s realities incrementally, coming to terms with death and life and the very existence of mortality not in one fell swoop, but through a series of occurrences. Sometimes they take a decade to unfold. Often, it’s even longer.

You could argue that, in this case, many of us are still struggling to come of age. We never really know if Jody reaches a solid point of understanding – like a short story, The Red Pony drops in and pulls out somewhere in the middle of the complete narrative – but we do know that he’s made progress, simply by the hints and symbols he leaves behind as we read.

That’s Steinbeck’s ultimate charm, I believe – this ability to tell a story through clues. Not through mystery, but through human nature; holding his cards to his chest, revealing only enough to win, throwing the rest away.

The Red Pony is fantastic. Coming from a Steinbeck fanatic, you probably shouldn’t expect anything less from me.

I guess that means I’m ready to start reading again.

It’s not necessarily true.

In my experience, Web developers aren’t maniacally protective of their knowledge, but simply frustrated that no one else is bothering to commiserate. When you show up with the ultimate in ignorance – like asking a CSS expert to help you get rid of spyware, or expecting a .Net developer to automatically help you purchase a digital SLR camera – you’re not facing arrogance.

You’re facing exhaustion. That expert? He or she is simply tired of being misunderstood.

If there’s one thing I’ve discovered over the past two months in Web development, it’s that Web developers want to talk about Web development. They want to share their secrets, often to the point that your eyes glaze over.

Ask a pointed question, though, and you’ll discover something even greater: the Web developer’s desire to spread knowledge. Which brings us to A List Apart’s first publication, HTML5 for Web Designers – a short and easy to digest primer on the changes being made through HTML’s newest iteration.

As a Web guy whose exposure to HTML and CSS has come exclusively from the routine hacking of free WordPress templates, HTML5 for Web Designers dives into the subject at my level – highlighting the changes and features of code that could change how the Web is organized and developed. Even better, it does so in a way that’s akin to the “spreading the gospel” model of Web talk – 100% devoted to letting the reader understand the code.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not going to make my mom understand Web development.

That being understood, it’s a wonderful look inside the mind of a development evangelist; Keith’s knowledge takes a 900-page slog of a standards guide and boils it down to the 80-some pages you’ll actually need to read.

Because, you see, developers don’t aim to make people feel dumb. At least, not as long as we’re willing to listen and make a concerted effort to understand.

It’s our inability to grasp the nuances of technology that’ll take care of that for us.

So today, with my head swimming in tests, my mind frozen from the air conditioning, I got up and walked there.

No premeditation. No purpose. With just a hunch, I stepped into the heat, turned right, and kept walking.

For the past year or so, I’ve completely fallen away from reading books; the stack beside my bed grew, stagnated, and is in danger of being killed off. I barely read at all, actually – outside of the Sunday New York Times, a handful of work-related books, a blog article or two, there’s nothing. My mind has been consumed with learning new skills and adapting to a second child and spending time with my family.

Reading has taken a back seat.

So, this walk? It quickly became a big deal.

Our library is cool and new and stocked with great books and at once I was reminded of why I was always attracted to it. You see, this is where I was supposed to be. On these shelves. Writing books and stories, looking to make it big; my words sheltering others from boredom, my thoughts absorbed by strangers. I started this blog to practice becoming a better writer. I volunteered for magazines – writing about reading, no less! – and weaseled my way into a writing job at an ad agency. I read fiction and non-fiction and short stories and massive tomes like it was a religion – both because I enjoyed it and because, as they say, better readers make better writers.

And then, I kind of stopped.

I still write. But I no longer read.

Instead, I found two things I enjoyed a lot more, and I’ve jumped into them with full abandon: being a dad, and working in Web.

But they don’t have to be exclusive.

The potential made me dizzy. Or maybe it was the heat. Whatever. All I know is that I walked into the library, wandered around for a few minutes, grabbed Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays and Steinbeck’s The Red Pony and made a promise to myself.

To stop making excuses. And to head back to my roots. Because while my path veered from becoming a writer, there’s no reason it ever should have stopped me from becoming a reader.

No, really. The water problems will be the biggest: flooding and hurricanes and levies and overpopulation on the remaining land. Technology will make everyone crazy and control the world and people won’t be able to think for themselves. Animals will die. Well, they’ll die faster. And Russian spies will pretend not to be spies while housing in buildings that are pretending to be older buildings.

What?

That’s the spectrum of Issue #32 of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The concept – because every McSweeney’s has a concept, even if that concept happens only to be “McSweeney’s-style short stories with indie sensibilities” – asks each writer to take stock of their location and look ahead 15 years to 2025, when apparently all hell is going to break loose.

According to the Issue #32 collective, here’s a sneak peek at the awful future:
• Do-it-yourself lakes become too salted
• A rising ocean turns a domed arena into the only livable space left in a city
• The two remaining seals of a nearly extinct species will be delivered far away and will probably not even make it through the week
• Cell phones turn everyone into experts, and the real experts will fight to be heard
• The Netherlands flood and everyone will die and everything will suck

Aside of a fantastic story by Anthony Doerr (“Memory Wall,” about a device that reaches in and saves memories for those slowly suffering from dementia), and Chris Adrian’s “The Black Square” (which delves into a cool hyper-local science fiction about a cultish black hole with a story no one understands), the general tone of the collection is simply a little too pessimistic.

No one had a happy outlook for the future – no one was convinced that things could be stable in 2025, let alone better. I don’t say this as a blind optimist – listen, I’ve read The Grapes of Wrath and The Road, and I understand that great works of fiction can be absolute downers – but as a person who expects more variety in a collection of stories from an imprint that’s known for off-beat stories.

It’s easy to look into the future and predict doom. It’s as simple as opening up the front page and figuring out what some fringe crazies are “sky-is-falling” about today.

But predicting happiness? Now that’s the kind of offbeat futurecast I’ve been looking for since, well, since forever, I guess.

I just don’t know that much about pop culture. I mean, I get the grand schemes. I understand the obvious jokes, and when it comes to music and Web memes and certain genres of television and film, I can hold my own. (And don’t get me started on professional wrestling, 90s video game culture or The Beatles/Pink Floyd. Seriously. You don’t have enough time.) Overall, I’d say I only get about 50% of pop culture references*.

So, when Bill Simmons talks at length about Hoosiers and Jersey Shore and The Bachelor and early 80s butt-rock videos, I’m at a loss. My frames of reference don’t fit. They’re barely even sturdy enough to hold glass, let alone a free exchange of chuckles.

This is the mindset I brought into Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, a self-proclaimed “low culture manifesto,” though – let’s be honest, here – the book’s filled with enough high-minded theories to make a stoned group of film majors giddy with argument. These essays aren’t low culture in thought as much as they use pop culture as a vehicle for explaining human nature.

I, for one, enjoyed it. But I fear not as much as most of my friends would.

The essays take the standard “Rob Gordon in High Fidelity” approach to things, using music and film and television situations as similes for how life plays out in real life. What Klosterman does differently – and it’s what drives me to seek out more of his writing – is that he doesn’t use pop culture as a crutch. Indeed, he does the opposite, deftly explaining how pop culture helps shape our life – through experience and, ultimately, disappointment – all while shaping life’s more complex issues in a way that dullards like myself can understand.

Klosterman explains: Romantic comedies set us up for an unrealistic look at real love; everyone in the real world can be boiled down to a Real World doppelganger; Star Wars is responsible for Generation X’s attitude (and Luke Skywalker is probably the first grunge slacker).

However, the best essays move away from high-minded manifesto and into true journalism. “Appetite for Replication” follows a professional Guns N’ Roses cover band on the road, exposing every musician’s need for acceptance and sheer love for the material. “I, Rock Chump” takes the cover band mentality and applies it to Klosterman himself, throwing him deep into a circle of True Music Reviewers (and utter bores) at a national conference.

It’s inspired, and while I felt the essays tried a little too hard upon first reading, I find myself going back to them, reassessing them post-read, appreciating them for what they were: thoughts on real life using the common language of pop culture. I said “whatever” as I read them, but that “whatever” hasn’t stopped me from wanting more Klosterman.

John Darnielle, like Klosterman, isn’t a True Music Reviewer. Instead, he’s simply an indie darling, the voice and guitar and piano of The Mountain Goats and author of a 33 1/3 book on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. A self-proclaimed metal maniac, Darnielle’s take on MoR moves away from the standard 33 1/3 review – thankfully, as I’m not sure how long I could handle a 100-page look at Ozzy Osbourne’s songwriting habits.

Instead, Darnielle goes back to metal’s roots. By which I mean, “the cassette players of young, angst-filled boys with a penchant for trouble.” This isn’t a review, it’s a love letter – written in the voice of Roger, a teenager thrown into a mental institute, forced to keep a journal and obstinately refusing to write about anything aside from his love for MoR and Black Sabbath in general.

It’s a pretty brilliant approach. Unfortunately, it’s also a short one. It’s by far the skinniest of the 33 1/3 books I’ve seen, and what should be a deep look into the heart of a confused teenage kid is truncated by the fact that the confused teenage kid is the one doing the talking. Sure, Darnielle captures the boy’s lack of emotional maturity, but it’s that same lack of emotional maturity that keeps us from seeing a little further inside.

Why Master of Reality? Why Black Sabbath? It’s explained as you’d expect: BECAUSE I THINK IT’S COOL BECAUSE YOU SUCK BECAUSE I HATE THE WORLD. And that’s about as far as the feelings get. Cool idea. But awkward execution.

That being said, both books took steps I couldn’t possibly attempt, co-opting the emotions of popular culture and parlaying them into an exploratory narrative of human nature. How does music play an important part in a locked-up kid’s psyche? How does Zach Morris represent America’s ability to suspend reality only when it’s convenient?

Don’t ask me. Let me finish this episode of Jersey Shore and I’ll let you know.

*This statistic = made up.

We do it because they comfort us. We repeat them because they’re familiar and awesome and part of what makes us, you know, US.

But we rarely do this with books.

Why?

Don’t say length. You can’t say length. Not when a season of Lost or House or whatever can last up to 24 hours straight through. Not when we listen to an album 30 times over a span of a few months, adding up to not hours, but DAYS of time. Not when we’ll wear the same after-work clothes day after day after day until, oh, man, seriously, let’s get those in the washing machine BUT THEN WHAT WOULD I HAVE TO WEAR WHILE I WATCHED SEASON THREE OF HOUSE FOR THE FIFTH TIME?

Length doesn’t work. Perception does, though.

Books seem long. Yet, despite their length, they also seem disposable, like a magazine, or a reality program. They’re commonly ingested and passed along without a second thought. They’re the worst combination for some people: drawn out and forgettable. (Those people, of course, are wrong, if you want my honest and totally unbiased and also totally right opinion.)

I can’t help it, though. I have comfort books. I have comfort books that mean more than any comfort food or comfort album or comfort television program. I have comfort books that are as far from comfortable in subject matter as you could imagine, yet still draw me in, time and time again, despite my need to finish whatever book is in need of finishing.

Though it’s unwieldy and awkward, the seventy billion pound monster that is The Beatles Anthology book is something I return to quarterly. Graphic novels with heady themes – think Jimmy Corrigan and both Maus books – seem to keep ending up in my hands. British travelogues like Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island or Theroux’s The Kingdom by the Sea are on the list, as are short stories like Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” or Dan Chaon’s “The Bees.”

After thinking about, I’d bet you probably have some comfort books too. And for those of you that don’t, why not?

Why not find yours right now? You’ve got time while those pajamas finish drying.