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The post above was kind of grumpy, I concede. Most of my posts these days seem to be veiled complaining about my overall lack of time.
But on to more interesting topics. OH, BLOGGER! Guess I was not a minute too soon in my thoughts about moving Blogger to Wordpress.
12 comments:
I like to keep my old books. They make great sound-proofing!
I have given away about 200+ hardbacks this year...being stored in boxes (garage and attic) don't do anyone any good.
David Carr's, Is Google Making Us Stupid accurately describes what you're talking about
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
I sold hundreds of my books and gave away a couple hundred more earlier this year. Mostly because I'm moving into a smaller space, but also because I hadn't touched most of them in years.
Tell the truth? I haven't missed 'em. Got rid of my entire DVD and CD collection as well. If I want to watch something, I can generally find it on the intertubes.
So yeah, the intertubes are really re-shaping how I consume content, and it's invariably in smaller chunks than used to be the case.
@Mark, the book reviewed in _The Atlantic_ is "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr. I know, because it's sitting right next to me. It is one of the most terrifying-because-it's-true books around. All typospherians should read it (if capable) for self-validation.
Cheryl, you are not alone in recognizing the interweb's evil effects on one's long-term attention span. The good news (according to Nicholas Carr) is that we can regain our healthy brains through conscious effort... such as manual arts and typewriting.
MTC and Mark, in an acutely ironic move, I just downloaded The Shallows to my Windows phone Kindle app. Thanks for the recommendation.
Despite the fact that I am an avid reader, want no part of the Kindle epidemic, and love big huge novels, I don't know if the e-age has really "messed up" potential readers or not. I mean, good writing is intriguing whether it is in a long novel or in a short blog post, and there will always be people who enjoy reading one style of content/writing over another. I know plenty of people from the older generation --even some who don't surf the web or even use computers at all-- who don't read big long books just because they don't like to. One person in particular has a fairly short attention span by nature and uses no e-gadgets of any kind. I think we read how and what we want regardless of the "Age" we are in. Windy old-school novelists still have a place because there are people who like windy-old school novels, but there is definitely a need for a writing style that is cohesive with the age we are in now. That's one of the beauties of art -- it can and will always change depending on who is creating it, and there is always a place for damn near anything.
If you need a place to dump off books, by the way, the SnohomishWriter household is a willing and grateful collection facility. We love our bulky, stuffy, old-school books. :)
The best way to deal with fractured attention-span reading habits is to read three or four books on the go. Or maybe that's just my bad habit...
Gotta agree with snoho. Dickens is still wonderful. So's Mervyn Peake. Although I draw the line at Henry James.
Bikethru - odd, I'm reading James' Portrait of a Lady now. I want to see how far he can go to write about faint extremes of subjectivity. It's a lost world of fine particularity; or maybe it's a waste of time...
Rino - what struck me about Portrait was the character of the heroine. Madame Bovary is another example of a windy (to use Strike's apt description) Victorian novel with the same view: women as the "weaker vessel", giddy creatures at the mercy of their emotions without a logical thought in their pretty little heads. In 2011, that sounds abominably sexist, but at the time, it was commonplace. Just shows that things do improve (or maybe that men have just got better at dissembling).
Strike - hard to know how novel-length fiction can be presented for internet-length attention spans. Back to something like Dickens, who wrote his novels in instalments in periodicals? BTW talking of non-book book-reading, have you encountered archive.org, which has loads of books that are out of copyright? One of its reading options is something wittily called DjVu, which presents a facsimile of the book page on screen. I've used it to read Dracula (which you couldn't call a short book) on a PC, and it's not a bad way to read a book.
Late to the party, alas.
I would argue that there already people writing for those with living in fractured time, with too many demands on their attention; they;re writing TV shows!
The (rapidly fading) classic soaps are a good example of this. Among other things, they still bear their radio roots: you don;t even have to be watching to follow the action.
There are all manner of arguments to be had over literary merit and related matters but those shows in particular are written for an audience that can rarely listen with more than one ear.
Conversely, the old pulp mags are also well-suited to this situation, especially the ones that followed a particular character or group of characters. Formulaic they might've been, but you can set down a good ol' pulp for a week, pick it up where you left off and hardly miss a beat.
Translate those approaches to modern-day life and to the web or an e-reader and you'd be onto something
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