In case anybody finds it interesting...

[alexandraerin]

...here, with permission from the participants, is the conversation I referenced at the start of the preceding post. Some of my parts of it might seem like retread to the folks here since it is a rather well-worn topic with me.

The conversation is still ongoing but it's sort of moved on from this topic.

Sister:

Hey y'all,

I'm writing a speech about reading (enigma wrapped in a paradox with a side of puzzlement!)... and I was wondering if any of you have seen any articles/editorials/blogs lately about "what we read"... whether Americans are reading stupid books, what's wrong with publishing today, why we need to read more intelligent books, any critiques of popular reading or reading lists, etc. Anything?!

THANKS THANKS THANKS,
Yay brainy fam,
Sister

---

Brother:

The only things I've heard recently vis-a-vis reading is about eBooks--Amazon's Kindle, or Steve Jobs famously saying, "People don't read" (speaking about eBook readers prior to Apple's announcement of their tablet computer--which they are pushing as, among other things, an eBook reader).

Slightly less new but also top-of-mind, Tyler Cowen (economics professor, blogger, author) talks in his more recent book and a few interviews around the Internets about how the web hasn't so much destroyed reading, but changed it--people read fewer books and magazines, but follow longer-running narratives through blogs, e-mail, forums, and twitter. (The book is called "Create Your Own Economy"--it's much less self-helpy and much more Gladwellian social-science-for-the-masses than the title would imply).

In both of the above cases, I don't have one best source--seem to be a lot of short blog posts and news stories around. Google would be your friend.

A year or so ago, there was some news about Orion Books (others, including Barnes & Noble, have followed) publishing abridged versions of classic literature. (http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010065 is one link about it). There are several stories floating around of people saying this is sacrilige and defeating the purpose; NPR did a piece a year or so back about it (I'm not able to find it on NPR.org, but it may be available elsewhere) in which the man in charge of the Orion effort was saying something along the lines of, "At the core of Moby Dick is a story about a man hunting a whale; I've been trying to read the story for ten years," and saying that readers are not served by, for instance, the long treatise on whaling that Melville included in the book.

---

Me:

Tyler Cowen (economics professor, blogger, author) talks in his more recent book and a few interviews around the Internets about how the web hasn't so much destroyed reading, but changed it--people read fewer books and magazines, but follow longer-running narratives through blogs, e-mail, forums, and twitter

His ideas interest me and I wish to subscribe to his newsletter.

I wish I could think of something to send you, Sister, but I've been so immersed in running conversations about this topic that it's all just that--a conversation--in my head, rather than discrete sources. My personal opinion is that not only are people reading plenty but the state of the art of writing is increasing in its complexity. I think if you compare Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes or Poe's Dupin stories to a detective novel from the 30s and that to a modern mystery novel, the progression of sophistication is fairly obvious. It's not genre-specific, either. It's independent of quality. Twilight is a more sophisticated narrative than anything Shakespeare wrote... not because Smeyer is a genius or because Wshakes wasn't, but because he was constrained by the state of the art of the time. What we call "rich themes" and "subtle undertones" in the Bard's dramas are actually straightforward and even hamhanded by modern standards, they're only made obscure by the evolution of language.

Similar ideas (though I don't think specific to reading and writing) are addressed in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Berlin Johnson, which talks about how the media we're immersed in has steadily progressed in terms of narrative complexity. From kipedia: "In television, Johnson contrasts older shows like Dragnet to modern shows like The Sopranos. He asserts that the storyline complexity has increased dramatically, and even the best shows from 20 years ago would be regarded as quite primitive were they to air today." That's exactly the point I would make about literature. What was written for adults a century ago is most directly comparable to children's literature today. Something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies would be harder to pull off as seamlessly with a modern novel... it only works with Austen because to modern standards the story is so "sketched out" to begin with.

The state of the art marches on. Compare the literary style of the Old Testament, which was and is a book of stories, to the Homeric epics. Compare those epics to the dramas that came about when Greeks switched from solo recitation to the added complexity allowed by dramatic ensembles. Compare those to Shakespeare. (Compare Shakespeare to everyone just before Shakespeare!) Compare Shakespeare to a 19th century novel. Compare those to a 20th century novel. Compare those to a 21st century novel.

Actually, I have a blog post about this... http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/97596.html It references a book (and an online review of such) you can use to get the opposing viewpoint.

---

Brother:

Re: Cowen, www.marginalrevolution.com, in case you haven't already come across it. Has an RSS feed which picks up in Google Reader or equivalent.

---

Sister:

Hurrah! Thank you, family.

Brother & Alex (especially): because of the nature of my speech, I need to craft an argument of sorts... point out a problem (or phenomenon), its causes, and solutions (or implications).

What I'm thinking is something like....
1) the reading landscape has changed and this is how
2) this is why it has changed
3) here's how it will impact us (both benefits and limitations)

...including points like...
1) stats (how much we read & what we read), explain some trends (Internets, teen lit phenom? and fandom, gadgets like Kindle)
2) publishers and tech companies are catering to our techy-social culture
3) benefits: more accessible supporting materials for books, ongoing narrative/"storytelling" element of the modern reading process, social interaction/educational opportunities..... limitations: reading less actual material to spend more time with the peripheral stuff, to some this is the slow death of one of the last truly private activities [There is a different class of reader, though. They feel that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share. “The pursuit of reading,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “is carried on by private people.”]

What seems to be lacking in this outline is the causes. I could talk at length about how publishers are embracing technology to create consumer interaction, but that's pretty straightforward and predictable. We're inundated by that stuff. Are there any other causes that a speechy audience would be more interested to hear about/more surprised by?

THANKS THANKS THANKS
Sister

PS. Alex, I really appreciate your example of Wshakes. As an English major with Wshakes leaking out her ears (don't worry, I'm on pills for it), I'm relieved to hear something so frank about a classic.. Need to step back from the liberal arts mumbo jumbo now and then.

---

Me:

Sister,

Don't get me wrong, Wshakes is awesome... I'm serious about the difference between his stuff and the stuff that came even right before him. Read The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus and then read The Tempest. Don't do it the other way around... Faustus is barely readable on its own. If you try to get through it right after reading one of the Bard's most approachable works, you'll never make it.

I think a big part of the difference is that Billy, being more of an upstart than a Classically Educated Man Of The Theater, was more free to innovate and to incorporate from more sources than Marlowe. Faustus is a stock story full of stock characters. The Tempest could have been built from the same seed but dares to make use of people nobody'd ever heard of before and incorporates tangled plotlines and memorable characters that would have been more at home in the fluidly improvisational world of Commedia del'Arte than the world of drama as it existed at the time.

This goes to my theory about one of the causes: the ongoing democratization of art, as technology puts art and the means of its production into more hands. Innovation grows from people who Do It Wrong, which happens any time the castle gates get smashed down by barbarians. Shakespeare is an example of this. Chaucer threw out centuries of classical thought about composing works for a particular class or audience, some of this advice having been penned by St. Augustine of Hippo who, in his own autobiographies, had once rocked the classical world by writing a first person stream of consciousness. (See Thomas Cahill's How The Irish Saved Civilization for more on A-Hip and how he compared to his contemporaries who were Doing It Right.)

It's fashionable to observe how the interblag and self-publishing and all this technology means that uncultured people get to bombard us with unfiltered crap, but the increasing accessbility of literacy and means of publishing is what gave us Chaucer and Shakespeare and all the other innovators, back to Augustine and Aeschylus and the guy who carved out The Epic of Gilgamesh. People were certainly putting out crap during their eras, too. Cahill actually has a lot to say about how advances in writing spurred innovations in how language is used, in ...Irish.. and his work on the Greeks, Sailing The Wine Dark Sea.

To put it simply: when the Greeks put vowels in their alphabet, they made writing so easy that entertainers and common folk as well as priests and scribes could tell stories with it. Technology leads to democratization which leads to innovation.

I see internet publishing, blogs, and even Twitter as just a continuation of this. There isn't less writing and less reading going on, there's more of it... it's just being done by the wrong people and in the wrong way for it to register according to our traditional measurements, which are often based on things that were considered trash in their own days.

Do you mind if I excerpt from your parts of this conversation on my blog?

---

Mom:

a comment...every generation has come up against the "degradation" of literature. And survived. And managed to produce literary greats, along with the trash-writers (who are, in fact, also often very entertaining. Literature does not have to be enlightening...it can also have merit by merely entertaining.) The movers, shakers, and revolutionanizers Alex mentioned were slammed in their time for ruining literature by changing the format of literature, basically. (And in doing that, they made it more accessible to the masses. The Haves will always take pains to safeguard their position as "haves". Anything that might allow the Have Nots to suddenly "have" will be attacked and denigrated.) The Victorians lamented the cheapening of literature when books were published in serial form in magazines and newspapers, which actually allowed the rising middle class more access to books. They, and the next generation were horrified at the proliferation of "dime novels." Both of these forms of literature improved the affordability of reading, as well as increased the number of people reading...as do all the electronic forms available today. When I was a kid, the proliferation of comic books was deplored, especially when "Classics Illustrated" started publishing (these were comic book adaptations of all the traditional classics, like Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, etc.) Everyone was pretty sure that "today's youth" - meaning my generation - would grow up totally illiterate because we read nothing but comic books. Didn't happen.

One thing that I always find interesting is the notion that yesterday's youth was better educated, read more difficult books, knew more difficult math, etc. There is a kernel of truth in that, but what is usually ignored is that a much larger percentage of kids are educated today, and for longer, which will of course dilute the results. The student in the 1890's may have been reading Shakespeare at age 10...but that child was the exception, not the rule. And that child usually came from the upper class, so had all the advantages of wealth...including the time it took to read a book. The majority of 10 year olds were barely literate, and many were not actually going to school - a lot of them were working full time in factories, on the streets, or on the farms. In the Victorian era, many felt there was no need to learn much beyond elementary reading/writing/arithmatic since most kids would never have the opportunity to use additional education, nor would they ever have the leisure time to enjoy the arts, so what was the point of additional reading skills? Even when I was a kid, there were still a fair number of people dropping out of school as soon as they legally could. In my parent's generation, there were still quite a few people who quit school at the completion of 8th grade.

The link I provided previously was to an article that was quoting a study on reading...report was published in 2007, if that's recent enough you'll find there's a lot of statistics in there regarding reading. Here's the link to the pdf summary of the actual report:

http://www.arts.gov/research/ToRead_ExecSum.pdf

---

Me:

Mom,

I'm surprised there was any culture left for comics to ruin, after television got through with what radio hadn't destroyed.

Comments

[andy9306.livejournal.com]

This goes a long way to explain how you got as awesome as you are.