Word Trucks Feed the Mind

I appreciate Robert S. Fogarty’s humorous but hard-hitting editorial in the newest issue of The Antioch Review, “Word Trucks: I and You; Here and There; This and That.” In this “nation of fads,” he writes, one is hard pressed to keep up with all of them.” Fogarty goes on to discuss the food truck phenomenon – how in his foreign travels he had been warned against eating from street vendors, and now, here in the US, those curbside eateries are all the rage. He muses, “Literary magazines have been in the food truck business for a long time, serving up a variety of dishes that were intended to stimulate the intellectural palate with ‘the best words in the best order.'” [Qtd Coleridge] While Nicholas Carr looks at “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” in his book The Shallows, quoting a Duke University instructor who says she can’t get students to read “whole books anymore,” Fogarty seems unshaken – his stronghold in the “word truck” realm has long been feeding hungry minds to satisfaction. “A heady meal,” he claims – “and it’s gluten free.”