Fast Food Reading Material

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I have a friend who never goes anywhere without reading material. I mean, I guess both of us have a lot of friends like that. But this one in particular, I never see her without a book of fiction or a book of poetry or a copy of The New Yorker.

Some people would say that she has a bibliophobia.

Ooh.

I mean, you don’t find that word in actual dictionaries, but people use it. Bibliophobia, wouldn’t that mean she’s afraid of not having a book then?

Yes, a-bibliophobia.

A-bibliophobia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And apparently this was the motivation behind a new effort by Jonathan Saffron For to get works by famous writers on packaging in the Chipotle restaurant chain. You read about this, right?

Yeah, sure.

He was eating fast food one day and realized that he had nothing to read. And he happened to have friends who worked at this corporation. And they came up with this deal where some really high-powered writers like Toni Morrison and Michael Lewis and Jonathan Safran Foer are now writing copy, like two minutes worth of copy that you might find on a soft drink cup.

And I don’t know. So literature in a new place. Literature in a new place.

Wouldn’t it be funny if you could go to bookstores of the future and they have a whole aisle of cups with books on them?

It’s the new medium.

Yeah.

Why go to Chipotle as my middleman? Why don’t I just want the cup?

That’s right.

Go directly to the copy. Yeah, I guess it’s like putting poetry on the subway. I didn’t go and actually try the food, but I read some of the works online and I think some work better than others. I mean, for example, I adore Toni Morrison’s writing, but I don’t really think it worked on the soft drink cup. Not on the cup. Yeah, I mean, because it was so dense and beautiful.

And I mean, there were great passages in it like, I saw a butterfly broken by the slam of a single raindrop on its wings fold and flutter as it hit a pool of water still fighting for the lift that is its nature. Now that’s gorgeous prose. Right. But on a cup in a quasi-Mexican restaurant with loud beats playing from the overhead music system.

Exactly. People talking on cell phones. And someone shouting in the kitchen and the kid over there screaming for more. Yeah. Yeah.

But maybe she brings civilization to a chaotic environment. A moment of peace, a respite.

Maybe. Maybe. I mean, her work is the kind of work that you just want to take and go off into a corner and read.

Well, I do that, too. I bring my phone everywhere, and I’ve got hundreds of books on there and tons of articles I’ve saved and, of course, email, the never-ending stream of email.

Yes.

But, you know, those days that you forget your phone somewhere, they’re tough to take.

Yeah, they are.

I’ll take a literature wherever I can get it.

Right.

I mean, sometimes the literature I see in public is in bathrooms. Here I sit, brokenhearted, and so forth. I won’t finish that, but I’m just saying I’ll read whatever I can.

Right. And it’s interesting to think about how the form dictates the content in that kind of situation and what really works.

I mean, that works on the bathroom wall, I suppose.

But there were a couple of things that I thought really worked on these particular soft drink cups. Like Jonathan Saffron Ford just asked a lot of provocative questions.

It was just one long stream of provocative questions like, what’s the kindest thing you almost did?

Very good conversation.

You know, while you’re munching.

It’s like a parlor game almost.

I love it.

I do appreciate that.

Yeah.

I mean, it beats going to the front of the store for the free publications like the penny savers and the whatever there, right?

I mean, sometimes those are great. Some of the local freebie pubs are like the alt-weeklies are worth grabbing and having to read.

My other favorite was they actually got Sarah Silverman to write for these soft drink cups. And one of them was, I always confuse NRA and NPR, totally different tote bags.

That’s awesome. It’s true.

Well, what do you read in the strangest of places and the weirdest of mediums?

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