Thursday, March 13, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Goldberg: Dear Oprah

By Tod Goldberg

Dear Oprah,

Okay, now we're in a fight.

You might remember that last April you decided there weren't any more books worthy of your handsome little stamp, that writers across the land (or, at least, writers who wrote books about their screwed-up families, awful sexual and/or mental abuse and, of course, general racial injustice) just weren't cutting the literary mustard with you and therefore your great big fill-Costco-with-my-frothy-book club-picks mastodon was dead. At the time, I bemoaned in these very pages just how angry I was with you--not because you never dropped your scepter across my head, but because you, in effect, took a saber to the very writers you'd helped promote. Instead of promoting books and literacy (as your club was initially purported to be about), you opted to have Dr. Phil on every seven minutes to diagnose what was wrong with everyone and everything. (My diagnosis? Read a book, morons.)

Now, however, Doc Phil has his own show and it suddenly occurs to you, again, that books are cool! God bless the printing press! Someone wake up the women in their housecoats and slippers and tell them to run down to Barnes & Noble because there's a sticker on...Hamlet?!?

Oprah, Oprah, Oprah.

I understand that you want your viewers to be cultured and aware that the world existed before cable television, and I admire that. Believe me, I do. Yet, it still troubles me that your new club--which is called something like Books Written Before Toni Morrison Was Born--is going to focus solely on "classics," or at least what you deem to be classic. Your assertion that this book club was a "gift to yourself" after a 10-month hiatus, during which you discovered the works of Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Faulkner and Hemingway, sounds, well, a bit much. If you're going to share your own gift with everyone who happens to tune in to your program, wouldn't we all be better off with a slice of your empire (like your magazine, for instance) or just a small cash allotment? Giving America (and, really, the world) classic literature is a nice gesture, but it's a bit like giving George W. Bush a Speak-n-Spell: useful, but, sadly, useless.

The reason is this: While Shakespeare and Hemingway certainly have valid things to say about our current world order, they don't have to feed their families, don't have to scrounge for freelance jobs between books and, frankly, don't need your help selling books in the name of literacy. You must be aware that people in America have at least visited the notion of high school and college, which means many of them are well-versed in the canon of dead writers you shall be supporting. Sure, reading Hamlet in the 10th grade probably does not an Elizabethan scholar make, but it does give a fine entrance into the world of classic literature--an entrance a reader either chooses to embrace or disregard.

What the average reader does not encounter, however, is the chance to sample even a few of the 150,000 new books released each year, nor hear the author of one of the works discussing how it came to be. While I disagreed with many of your book club selections in the past--paging Billie Letts--I admired the fact that the selections were current and that real live writers got the chance to come on your show to talk about whatever topics your selected group of sweater-tied-over-their-shoulders readers wanted to talk about. And truth be told, Oprah, if there were ever a time when readers needed to hear contemporary voices discussing literature and the power of the word, the time would be now.

Take a look outside your window, Oprah. Down Michigan Avenue, what do you see? Do you see people scrambling for the knowledge of what to do when love's labor is lost? Or do you see people struggling beneath the weight of labor lost, of a time when the escape we require may well be found in a needle to inoculate us from the smallpox virus? Yes, yes, I know: You see all of those people. We are all your children, after all, but look closer, please. Why waste your time telling us to appreciate Steinbeck when we already do? Why not turn your eye toward Ian McEwan or William Gibson or Aimee Bender or Lee Barnes or Richard Ford or Tim O'Brien or Susan Straight or Scott Phillips or John Updike or...or...me, if you'd like. My point is this: There are writers alive today who read the classics and have most likely applied them to their own work and have been able to witness current reality for what it is, and have thus been able to interpret it for our reading pleasure or pain or simple education.

I love the classics as much as anyone, but if you really wanted to support the arts and literacy and give your viewers a taste of what lives outside that glowing box, you'd reconsider.

Sincerely,

Tod