I originally had the title of this post referring to "literary snobs", but I prefer Book Wankers.
In the past few days, I've seen a few comments, on facebook pages and the like, which espouse the idea that books are the be-all and end-all of intellectualism. The idea that everyone should read, that reading automatically makes you a better, smarter person, that reading is the ultimate form of entertainment accessed only the intellectual elite, etc etc. Coupled, of course, with the idea that reading is rare, and that we ought to do something about the uncultured masses who are simply going about not-reading and playing on their smartphones all the time. Because, of course, smartphones are not a worthwhile use of anyone's time.
In the past few days, I've seen a few comments, on facebook pages and the like, which espouse the idea that books are the be-all and end-all of intellectualism. The idea that everyone should read, that reading automatically makes you a better, smarter person, that reading is the ultimate form of entertainment accessed only the intellectual elite, etc etc. Coupled, of course, with the idea that reading is rare, and that we ought to do something about the uncultured masses who are simply going about not-reading and playing on their smartphones all the time. Because, of course, smartphones are not a worthwhile use of anyone's time.
Quote: "What America needs to improve it's [sic] literacy rate and get people off their smart phones."
Fuck. Off. You pretentious little wanker.
Every form of media has its pros and cons. Reading is one of the oldest forms of narrative, after oral-storytelling, so, yes, it has a huge archive. That doesn't mean that other forms of narrative are less worthy.
Speaking of the massive archive of written narrative, a commonly cited statistic is that 90% of everything is dross. That's a made-up number, of course, but there is some truth in it. In the internet age, that's more apparent than ever, since now that 90% isn't as filtered. Anyone can upload anything they like, and 90% of it will be utter dross, like it always was.
An idea that comes up a lot, with music as well as literature, is that things are getting worse. No, they aren't. Things were always 90% terrible. It's just no one bothers to remember the 90% - they just let the 10% shine. Penny Dreadfuls were pretty popular, but no one worships those as Victorian literature. I can't be arsed to look up specific titles for this, but a lot of the music that's still popular from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, wasn't the only thing happening at the time. A lot of the music we still enjoy, that's heralded as classics, wasn't even the most popular at the time.
Anyway. Point I was making. Literature has a great deal of centuries of the 10% good stuff to look at. Other forms of media have things to offer too.
Films are the obvious one. You can present things in a visual format which you simply cannot gain the same effect with if you wrote them down. Take the film of Sweeney Todd, for instance. There was a wonderful moment, for me, when SPOILER Sweeney slit the beggar woman's throat, and her head was thrown back and shown in full light for the first time, and there was this moment of realisation that just hit like a tidal wave. Wouldn't have the same effect if someone had just written; "It was Lucy". SPOILER.
There's a scene in PS. I Love You, where the wife goes home after the funeral, calls her home phone, and listens to her dead husbands voice message over and over. That does happen in the book, sort of, but it had a completely wordless realisation in the film that worked perfectly. That's a scene that couldn't (and didn't) work that way in a book.
I've never studied film, and I usually watch them with my attention half on something else, so these aren't the best examples out there.
The Sweeney Todd example couldn't work in a play either; you need the close up on her face. Speaking of plays, I know there are some people out there who think that reading, for example, Romeo and Juliet, would be a much more intellectual experience than watching the Baz Luhrman film. Fuck off. It's a play, you're supposed to watch it. And with actual plays, rather than films of plays, there are a lot of things that can be done. I once saw a version of 1984 in which, during the two minute hate scene, the actors faced the audience and pelted us with foam balls. It was terrifying, and took us into the action in the way the book couldn't, and didn't.
The other thing about films (and plays, and graphic novels) is that they are collaborative, and there's a certain charm in that. The basic fact that a book is (normally) written by one person, while a film can have hundreds working on it? That makes a difference. Look at Labyrinth. The creators of Labyrinth were trying to tell at least four different stories there, and it comes out awesome (a love story, a coming of age story, a finding an heir story, a strange world fairy story, etc).
Speaking of graphic novels; yes, comic books can tell awesome stories too. Look at what Gaiman's done with them. A story told with panel visuals as well as speech and some narrative text is different from a book, and just as worthy of attention.
Then we have TV series. A lot of the same benefits as a film, but different. It's longer, but it's split into parts which means it has cliffhangers. The time element is a factor, too. You rarely spend more than two hours with a film, maybe as much as eight hours with a book. A TV show like Friends is a few hundred hours of narrative. You can do things with that sort of time span that you can't with a book.
Video games can make use of the time spent with them, too. You spend time with these characters. It's your effort that defeated that boss. It's your mind that's solving that puzzle. It's you who slowly revealed the story, through your actions, building it up layer by layer. There are wonderful narratives and experiences that are unique to the videogame format. Take Braid. A major theme of Braid is nostalgia, and that's embedded in the gameplay itself. It plays like Mario. And Tim, the main character of Braid, is nostalgic for his past, which, like that of the player, is likely to have included the Mario games. There's also the ending, which I won't spoil for you, but which I don't believe could be done nearly as effectively in any other format.
The other point I wanted to make, apart from the benefits of other forms of media, was about what you get from a narrative. I don't think that that's solely dependent on the creator. What you get from a piece of narrative - book, film, tv show, play, game - depends both on what the creator put in, and what you put in. I could skim my way through War and Peace and get less out of it than by spending a few hours playing Braid and being completely absorbed in thinking about it. That isn't to say that the people who worked on Braid are better or worse creators than Tolstoy; I'm just attempting to illustrate that you are a factor in what you get from a narrative just as much as the creator is. Maybe Dickens, or Austen, or any other writer you care to name is better at illustrating a point or an idea than another writer is; that doesn't mean any one person can't get the same concept and intellectual benefits from another writer, or a totally different form of narrative.
Finally, I wanted to talk about this idea that there's something wrong with people who don't fit your intellectual idea. And what I wanted to say was, fuck off.
All those people who go on about how no one else reads, and this is such a terrible, terrible thing? You are pretentious book wankers. People who don't enjoy the same forms of narrative as you are not stupid because of that fact. Reading isn't even a natural habit for human beings. We spend thousands of years coming back to the cave in the evening, looking at flickering lights and listening to oral narratives, which, in fact, is rather more like TV.
God. It reminds me of people who are like "you're in your early twenties! You should be out having fun!"
Again, fuck off. I am having fun. My form of fun does not often involve drinking and dancing till 3am (though I have done that on occasion and enjoyed it very much) and that fact doesn't mean there's something wrong with me. Like the fact that most other people in the world don't read 200+ books a year doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them. Sure, according to your (pretentious book-wanker) value system, the Lord High Ruler of intellectualism is the classic novel, and everyone should be reading it. Your value system is subjective.
Finally, to deal with the smart phones thing; I have both the Kobo and Kindle app on my iPhone. I also have a number of podcasts, including one in which various authors read New Yorker Fiction, and one with various Radio Dramas, as well as a few audio books. Smartphones and literature are not either/or. I didn't point this out earlier, because this answer ties into the idea of the Lord High Classic Novel.
Fuck. Off. You pretentious little wanker.
Every form of media has its pros and cons. Reading is one of the oldest forms of narrative, after oral-storytelling, so, yes, it has a huge archive. That doesn't mean that other forms of narrative are less worthy.
Speaking of the massive archive of written narrative, a commonly cited statistic is that 90% of everything is dross. That's a made-up number, of course, but there is some truth in it. In the internet age, that's more apparent than ever, since now that 90% isn't as filtered. Anyone can upload anything they like, and 90% of it will be utter dross, like it always was.
An idea that comes up a lot, with music as well as literature, is that things are getting worse. No, they aren't. Things were always 90% terrible. It's just no one bothers to remember the 90% - they just let the 10% shine. Penny Dreadfuls were pretty popular, but no one worships those as Victorian literature. I can't be arsed to look up specific titles for this, but a lot of the music that's still popular from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, wasn't the only thing happening at the time. A lot of the music we still enjoy, that's heralded as classics, wasn't even the most popular at the time.
Anyway. Point I was making. Literature has a great deal of centuries of the 10% good stuff to look at. Other forms of media have things to offer too.
Films are the obvious one. You can present things in a visual format which you simply cannot gain the same effect with if you wrote them down. Take the film of Sweeney Todd, for instance. There was a wonderful moment, for me, when SPOILER Sweeney slit the beggar woman's throat, and her head was thrown back and shown in full light for the first time, and there was this moment of realisation that just hit like a tidal wave. Wouldn't have the same effect if someone had just written; "It was Lucy". SPOILER.
There's a scene in PS. I Love You, where the wife goes home after the funeral, calls her home phone, and listens to her dead husbands voice message over and over. That does happen in the book, sort of, but it had a completely wordless realisation in the film that worked perfectly. That's a scene that couldn't (and didn't) work that way in a book.
I've never studied film, and I usually watch them with my attention half on something else, so these aren't the best examples out there.
The Sweeney Todd example couldn't work in a play either; you need the close up on her face. Speaking of plays, I know there are some people out there who think that reading, for example, Romeo and Juliet, would be a much more intellectual experience than watching the Baz Luhrman film. Fuck off. It's a play, you're supposed to watch it. And with actual plays, rather than films of plays, there are a lot of things that can be done. I once saw a version of 1984 in which, during the two minute hate scene, the actors faced the audience and pelted us with foam balls. It was terrifying, and took us into the action in the way the book couldn't, and didn't.
The other thing about films (and plays, and graphic novels) is that they are collaborative, and there's a certain charm in that. The basic fact that a book is (normally) written by one person, while a film can have hundreds working on it? That makes a difference. Look at Labyrinth. The creators of Labyrinth were trying to tell at least four different stories there, and it comes out awesome (a love story, a coming of age story, a finding an heir story, a strange world fairy story, etc).
Speaking of graphic novels; yes, comic books can tell awesome stories too. Look at what Gaiman's done with them. A story told with panel visuals as well as speech and some narrative text is different from a book, and just as worthy of attention.
Then we have TV series. A lot of the same benefits as a film, but different. It's longer, but it's split into parts which means it has cliffhangers. The time element is a factor, too. You rarely spend more than two hours with a film, maybe as much as eight hours with a book. A TV show like Friends is a few hundred hours of narrative. You can do things with that sort of time span that you can't with a book.
Video games can make use of the time spent with them, too. You spend time with these characters. It's your effort that defeated that boss. It's your mind that's solving that puzzle. It's you who slowly revealed the story, through your actions, building it up layer by layer. There are wonderful narratives and experiences that are unique to the videogame format. Take Braid. A major theme of Braid is nostalgia, and that's embedded in the gameplay itself. It plays like Mario. And Tim, the main character of Braid, is nostalgic for his past, which, like that of the player, is likely to have included the Mario games. There's also the ending, which I won't spoil for you, but which I don't believe could be done nearly as effectively in any other format.
The other point I wanted to make, apart from the benefits of other forms of media, was about what you get from a narrative. I don't think that that's solely dependent on the creator. What you get from a piece of narrative - book, film, tv show, play, game - depends both on what the creator put in, and what you put in. I could skim my way through War and Peace and get less out of it than by spending a few hours playing Braid and being completely absorbed in thinking about it. That isn't to say that the people who worked on Braid are better or worse creators than Tolstoy; I'm just attempting to illustrate that you are a factor in what you get from a narrative just as much as the creator is. Maybe Dickens, or Austen, or any other writer you care to name is better at illustrating a point or an idea than another writer is; that doesn't mean any one person can't get the same concept and intellectual benefits from another writer, or a totally different form of narrative.
Finally, I wanted to talk about this idea that there's something wrong with people who don't fit your intellectual idea. And what I wanted to say was, fuck off.
All those people who go on about how no one else reads, and this is such a terrible, terrible thing? You are pretentious book wankers. People who don't enjoy the same forms of narrative as you are not stupid because of that fact. Reading isn't even a natural habit for human beings. We spend thousands of years coming back to the cave in the evening, looking at flickering lights and listening to oral narratives, which, in fact, is rather more like TV.
God. It reminds me of people who are like "you're in your early twenties! You should be out having fun!"
Again, fuck off. I am having fun. My form of fun does not often involve drinking and dancing till 3am (though I have done that on occasion and enjoyed it very much) and that fact doesn't mean there's something wrong with me. Like the fact that most other people in the world don't read 200+ books a year doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them. Sure, according to your (pretentious book-wanker) value system, the Lord High Ruler of intellectualism is the classic novel, and everyone should be reading it. Your value system is subjective.
Finally, to deal with the smart phones thing; I have both the Kobo and Kindle app on my iPhone. I also have a number of podcasts, including one in which various authors read New Yorker Fiction, and one with various Radio Dramas, as well as a few audio books. Smartphones and literature are not either/or. I didn't point this out earlier, because this answer ties into the idea of the Lord High Classic Novel.
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