Years ago-- for about thirty seconds-- I contemplated writing a book about the rise of the amateur . . . I was stupefied with the sheer mass of amateurism online: Soundcloud and Youtube and Ebay and all the online photography and blogging and art and animation and how to videos and Pinterest-type sites . . . and then the idea passed, but I was pleasantly surprised when I was browsing through the new non-fiction section at the library to see a book entitled
The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield; I always try to bring a couple of books home from the library that I did not intend to take out, as a way to fight the algorithmically-curated society in which we live, and while I rarely finished these, I read this one cover-to-cover; Merrifield is a socialist and the book is something of a manifesto . . . he sees modern life as a battle between a professional data-driven technocracy designed to make you a passive consumer-- if you've got the cash and/or credit-- and the possibility of amateurism . . . literally doing what you love; in his mind the bean-counters are winning, government has been captured by big business; public spaces have been sanitized; and the bottom-up, emergent nature of cities and towns has been eradicated (although he sees hope in countries like Greece, where things have fallen over the edge and anarchists and radicals occupy public/private spaces, similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement) and the main value and purpose of many people is their job, their career, even if it is meaningless, because we are identified by what we do professionally-- that is how we achieve our status (and our health insurance, in America) and Merrifield, slightly impractically, speaks of the happily unemployed and a new way to live; he seems to think there is no refuge for the amateur in any profession-- even in academia you must publish and publish, and the more you are cited, the more you succeed . . . I would beg to differ, being the ultimate amatuer, a high school teacher: I happily teach a course in Philosophy, of which I know nothing about, and a course in Shakespeare, though I'm an awful actor, and now I'm an amateur Rutgers Professor as well-- but I digress (so does Merrifield, personal anecdotes are scattered through the book) and so I'll get back to the review; Merrifield calls on his favorite books to help his case, as many of them are my favorites: Dostoevsky and his Underground Man, Laurence Sterne and Uncle Toby's Hobby Horse, Kafka's Trial and Castle . . . and this reminded me that I used to read much more radically, and lately I've been consuming a lot of economic stuff, trying to understand what the hell is going on when there is perhaps no way in to the bureaucratic technocracy and it's better to work at the micro-level, as Merrifield proposes, and that we all become political animals in whatever way we can, and influence whatever micro-milieu we can influence; I hope Merrifield reads this, as I think he'd be proud of my amateur spirit; I've stopped watching sports and now only play and coach them, and I've resisted the club/professional training route in youth sports, the "next level" so many parents are eager to achieve-- instead I'm coaching the kids in town, and I'm coaching them really well because I'm an amateur, not a professional, because I love it . . . nothing has made me prouder than the fact that my kids are competing with year-round tennis kids on Saturdays at the local racquet club, not because they're decent players-- which they are-- but because my brother and I taught them everything they know about tennis . . . they'd certainly be better if they took year-round lessons from professionals, but that would be costly and also ridiculous; I'm also making my own music and my own podcast, writing this blog, trying to stay abreast of town politics (at least at a sporting level) and generally trying to avoid consumer culture unless it has to do with one of my hobbies-- I feel the press of what Merrifield is talking about and it's easy to succumb, there's a lot of shows on Netflix and a lot of credit out there, and your job can consume you and then you feel good, in a sort of anesthetized way, but we all know that productivity is on the rise and college costs more and more-- which is why I've been hinting to my kids that if they really like something, they don't need to go to college to pursue it . . . college seems to be for smartish people who don't know exactly what they want to do, it's a great (but expensive) failsafe that leads you right into the technocracy, burdened with debt, ready to become a productive worker; this has been heavy, so I'll get out of here with one last idea from the book, which would be amazing and fun to drop on an aspiring actor; Merrifield mentions radical Polish director Grotowski, who calls theater with lights and a stage and props and costumes "rich theater" and this Polish auteur denigrates "rich theater" for aspiring to be film or television, then he makes a case for "poor theater," where actors become themselves in the scenes, no lights or settings, just an improvisation where you push the actor/spectator gap and the existential limits of the stage in a search for conflict with others . . . while I don't fully understand the theory, I would still love to "drop a Grotowski" on an actor (and if I remember, I'll do it to my friend Jack) when they are telling me about some performance they are in . . . I imagine I would say, "Oh so you're still doing rich theater? How antiquated and pathetic . . . Grotowski would so so disappointed in you."
