On the seemingly interminable (10+ hours) flight back to Ireland from Arizona, I managed to finish Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s slim, amusing, and mercifully short novel, Television (translated by Jordan Stump). Its slight premise–in short, a man decides to stop watching television for good–had a certain appeal after three weeks’ exposure to U.S. TV. (It’s not really the programmes that are the problem with watching American TV–for example, I think ER is one of the best things on TV anywhere and I enjoy the slick guilty pleasures offered by the endlessly proliferating CSI franchise and its interchangeable technocrats–it’s the oceans of commercials that surround the stuff you actually want to watch that makes the experience so frustrating. What’s more, the dippy local news channels try to get their oar in by adding a newsbar at the bottom of the screen during the show. And what merits such an intrusion–a hijacked airliner? Carbombings in Iraq? No, it’s usually a goddamn brush fire out in the boondocks. All this means that if you want to watch American TV, it makes much more sense to watch it in Ireland.) To get back to Toussaint’s novel, the (unnamed?) narrator is spending the summer in Berlin on his own while his pregnant wife and son go on vacation in Italy. This separation is partly engineered to allow our milquetoast ‘hero’ to write a monograph on Titian entitled “The Paintbrush”. This title refers to a possibly apocryphal incident, mentioned in a short story by Alfred de Musset, when Emperor Charles V, the most powerful man of that time, visited the artist in his studio. Titian supposedly dropped his brush, which the Emperor bent down to retrieve. Toussaint’s academic sees this apparently trivial event as pivotal, symbolic, marking the elevation of the artist from mere artisan for hire to a figure that demands the respect of temporal powers.The problem, as the hero realizes, is that the real fun in undertaking a project is imagining it in its ideal, completed form as opposed to working on the inchoate, flawed real thing. Partly to shake himself out of his lassitude, he vows to stop wasting his time slumped on the couch–“as if caught up in some sordid intoxication”–in front of the box. But once he stops watching TV, he spends his freed-up time thinking about not watching TV (and not writing*). And his reflections on not watching TV leads him to recognize, during his low-key adventures around the German capital, as if for the first time, the grip television exerts on us all. In one funny, almost poignant scene, he looks at a block of flats in an unfamiliar neighbourhood and sees in the synchronized lights behind windows evidence that the people opposite are watching the same episode of Baywatch that is gurgling away on the set in the room behind him. It’s a fleeting image of anomie, offered up without a trace of portentousness.Toussaint’s characters don’t get up to much. (In another of his novels, one of them plans to spend the rest of his life in a bathtub.) But as Seinfeld, that advertiser’s dream, taught us, a show about nothing can be entertaining. And a novel about nothing, or rather a novel about not doing something, can be pretty diverting as well. In any case, as I said at the top of the post, it’s short, coming in at around 150 pages of reasonably large, widely spaced print. And sometimes, 150 pages seems the perfect length for a book, particularly when you’re 37,000 feet above Greenland.Here’s Toussaint on the appeal of thinking about, rather than working on, a project, and TV’s complicity in all of it:”[…]Once again, it seemed, I was discovering the truth of the rule, a rule I’d never explicitly formulated to myself, but whose veracity I’d quite often sensed in a vague sort of way, which was that the chances of seeing an idea through to completion are inversely proportional to the time you’ve spent talking about it beforehand. For the simple reason, it seemed to me, that if you’ve already extracted all the pleasure from the potential joys of a project before you’ve begun it, there remain, by the time you get down to it, only the miseries of the act of creation, its burdens, its labors.[…]Then, following the current of my thoughts, I quite naturally came to ask myself what role television might have played in the fact that people nowadays–entrepreneurs, artists, politicians–seemed to devote more time and energy to discussing their actions than to the actions themselves. Clearly television was not unimplicated in this very general sort of decline; but it then occurred to me that TV could be made still more injurious to artistic creation, for instance by airing programs on which artists would be invited to come and discuss their upcoming projects. Disdaining the works they’ve completed in order to focus on the ones they plan to create in the future, artists–the most fashionable ones to begin with, but the same principal could easily be expanded to cover all of them–would thus find in television an opportunity to exhaust all their latest project’s pleasures in advance, making its actual execution, and in the end artistic creation itself, perfectly unnecessary.”By the way, Toussaint is Belgian, not French, in case you made the same assumption I did. I got this snippet from a site with the slightly desperate title of C’est du belge! (It boosts, touchingly, that it’s “Le site le plus complet consacr� aux Belges c�l�bres et aux produits belges.”)*To be precise, not writing about Titian, AKA Tiziano Vecellio. Geddit?