Samantha stops in front of a stately shelf in a somewhere-in- America Barnes and Noble, and reaches. She tilts a book into her hand the same way she’d maybe tilt a box of Triscuits towards her were she in the grocery store; she opens the book, flips past its title page, its dedication, its printer’s indicia; she begins to read the first few lines. Something had inspired her to take this book off the shelf, but before she’s through the first paragraph she’s already begun wondering what it was. Perhaps the careful arrangement of images and fonts on the cover, the feng shui utilized by the graphic designer, had caught her demographic eye? Perhaps the words on the book’s spine activated linguistic associations software’d into her brain, triggered complicated sequences of mental impulses which became the desire to know more, a desire which translated into an action, the action of reaching out and picking up the book? Something—what was it?—had inspired her to open the thing and start reading, but now she stares at the daunting gray page of text in front of her, and she can feel that inspiration (whatever its cause) beginning to degenerate; she has begun to tire of following the long chains of all those sentences (laid out in their meticulous lines, like rows of corn in a strange and dreary cornfield) and so at the conclusion of the first paragraph she closes the book, puts it back on the shelf, and turns her attention back to the surroundings of the bookstore.
It’s not that Samantha isn’t a reader. Yes, she was born in 1978, so it’s true that she has never known a time when TV was not ascendant, and, yes, it’s true that she was raised in rooms lit by TVs pulsating eyeball, and she had the normal sorts of comings-of-age that those raised by TV tend to have: at age three she learned Spanish and the basic shapes from the cuddly urbia of Sesame Street; at age eight she saw herself within the screen for the first time (news coverage of Santa making a parachute landing at the elementary school, the folks Betamaxed it); at age fourteen she saw her first penis, a hulking thing belonging to a porn star—she watched it ejaculate onto a gigantic labia, watched the flung semen progress through air with a geological slowness (her friend Susie had pressed the remote’s Fast-Forward and Pause buttons simultaneously to get Extra-Slow; the orgasm took almost five minutes to play out to the final dribble; and Samantha had watched the whole thing with, strangely, the identical transfixed fascination she’d felt when she’d watched flowers bloom and collapse in time-lapse sped-upness in Science class). So, yes, TV tinkered with her formative experiences, gave her rites of passage that she would not have had in a world with no TV, but the fabric of her attention, woven more tightly than that of many of her less-fortunate peers, stayed more-or-less intact through it all. If she were asked to fill in a circle on a questionnaire—Do you find reading: a) unpleasant b) somewhat unpleasant c) neither pleasant nor unpleasant d) somewhat pleasant e) very pleasant?—she would fill in the circle for e) completely and she would make her mark dark. And she wouldn’t be thinking of like Grisham and Grafton, either. She’s just out of college. She majored in Political Science and minored in Women’s Studies. She read Simone DeBeauvoir’s The Second Sex and found it e) very pleasant. She read Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy and found it e) very pleasant.