Note to Michael of 2 Blowhards:
Michael I've long appreciated your thoughts on books, lit, the business of books vs hallowed vision of pure literature, et al. You're like the sausage maker at a convention of sausage aficionados. The aficionado can go on and on about the smells textures and succulence of various brands - but you're in the corner shouting - "but you should see how it's made!"

I respect your time in the sausage mills but I don’t understand what you are saying. Are you saying:
A) Our age is so rich in electronic gizmos that distraction rules the day and nobody reads books anymore -
B) Electronic gizmos themselves fulfill the need for artistic contact; needs that were previously filled by blocks of text in books –

??

You lose me even more when you compare literary books to popular TV shows, miniseries and movies. You say that young people now get their fiction-fix through a two-hour movie or sitcoms like “Friends” or (even more up-to-date) via web worlds like the Sims. What drives you to make such a silly comparison? What does “Moby Dick,” an intense, thoughtful exploration of life and death (and whales), have to do with a TV sitcom with its canned laugh tracks reliable inanity? Things in “Moby Dick” were made up and things in “Friends” were made up but points of intersection don’t go much beyond that. Do readers approach literary fiction just to get a hit of made up stuff – a fiction hit, as you say? Literary fiction delivers an intimacy - an interiority - that TV and movies – for all their made up stuff – do not deliver on. I’m sure your counterparts in first century Rome complained about the weekend crowds in the Coliseum compared to the small readership of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis”.

The quality lit that the publishing industry passes on to us today might not be that great but the need for it is not fake. And remember: language itself is a kind of technology. English has changed since Shakespeare's time and changed a lot since Chaucer's but we are still susceptible to its power in the hands of these writers. Will electronic gizmos obliterate language itself as a link between hearts and minds?

Posted by: Das on September 1, 2006 4:40 PM

Sorry - I didn't understand how the delay works in posting messages so I delivered up a variation on the theme of my questions to you Michael...

Posted by: Das on September 2, 2006 10:46 AM






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