Are You Serious?

June 13, 2011
"We spend our days searching for a way to be serious," writes critic Siegel (Falling Upwards) in this shallow investigation of seriousness from its essential elements ("Attention, Purpose, and Continuity") and Renaissance roots to how it has been overtaken by our culture of surging silliness, frivolity, and the celebrity industry complex. It's a compelling argument, but it suffers from Siegel's own puzzling criteria and questionable quibbles (who would agree with him, for example, that John Updike has "become either a target of ridicule or been forgotten by literary culture altogether"?) and awkward prose (Marion Ettlinger, "Serious photographer of the Serious," whose "camera is to a writer what Pierce Brosnan is to an Omega watch"). Siegel covers a wide gamut of contemporary culture and politicsâGary Hart and George Steiner, Oprah and Irving Kristol, modern portraiture and the Tea Partyersâand he is sincere, but his knee-jerk criticisms ("Pixar is to contemporary seriousness what, in the late nineteenth century, Dickens was to literary seriousness") distract and disappoint.

June 1, 2011

An intriguing examination of the power and precision of words.

Culture critic Siegel (Against the Machine: How the Web is Reshaping Culture and Commerce—and Why It Matters, 2009, etc.) begins with a 1904 cartoon and ends with a discourse on today's political climate. Despite its title, this isn't really a "how-to" book, but rather a dissertation on the evolution of seriousness by both ordinary and extraordinary people. From Plato to John Stewart, Siegel traces the concept of seriousness throughout the ages. While retracing the lineage of seriousness is only marginally interesting, the author's frank and witty discussion about our modern linguistic habits provides much more entertainment. He takes particular umbrage with the ubiquity of "serious" as an intensifier (as in, "That girl is seriously hot"), or the insertion of "I mean" or "like" before a statement. The book reaches its zenith when the author—in all seriousness—breaks down the subtle nuances between using "seriously," (I'm seriously upset = I am calm and want you to listen to me) and "fucking" (I'm fucking upset = somebody's probably going to get hurt). Near the halfway point, the narrative settles into a long political simmer but still continues down the path of examining the broken poetry of words like "cool," "idea" and "truthiness." Siegel ends on a salient note, with a lucid interpretation of "hero."

A seriously serious investigation. Seriously.

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