Careless Interpretation : The Diary of A Music-Junkie

"There are two ways to approach our cultural crossroads. You can either wring your hands and lament that literacy today has less to do with Wordsworth or Faulkner and more to do with "how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload".

Or you can… pick up a copy of Professor Pierre Bayard’s best selling How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Prof. Bayard, a 52-year-old professor of literature and a psychoanalyst, has gotten this far without ever having picked up Oliver Twist or finished Ulysses. …In his view, to engage with one book is to give the acquaintance of many others."

"Say what you will about Prof Bayard, he forces us to confront a paradox of our age. By one estimate, 27 novels are published every day in America. A new blog is created every second. We would appear to be in a midst of a full blown epidemic of graphomania. Surely we have never read, or written, so many words a day. Yet increasingly, we deal in atomised bits of information, the hors d’oeuvres of education. We read not in continuous narratives but by linkage, the movable type of the 21st century. Our appetites are gargantuan, our attention spans anorectic. Small wonder that trivia is enjoying a renaissance. We are very good on questions like why men fall asleep after sex and why penguin’s feet do not freeze.

Recently Ms Cathleen Black, president of Hearst Magazines, urged a group of publishing executives to think of their audience as consumers rather than readers. She’s on to something: Arguably the very definition of reading has changed. So Google asserts, in defending its rights to scan copyrighted materials. The process of digitizing books transformes them, the company contends, to something else; our engagement with the text is different when we call it up online. We are no longer reading. We are searching - a function that conveniently did not exist when the concept of copyright was established.

All of which sent us back to te king of content-free reading, the Ur-blogger. There was to be no tough sledding for this consumer, who never bit his nails over Aristotle. Among distracted readers he has no equal; as disjointed, derivative writers go, he is a man for our times. Five centuries ago, he pioneered Prof. Bayard’s reviewing technique: Leave the book under discussion unopened before you. Then write about yourself."

STACY SCHIFF

The writer is the author, most recently, of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, And The Birth of America

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Quotes to Reflect upon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.