Let's Get Retarded
Feb. 17th, 2007 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksJust so the Financial Times doesn't think that I spend my entire time bemoaning the stupidities spouted by 'experts' in the property or personal money sections, perhaps I should point out that the FT Magazine on Saturday often contains some hidden gems of articles that deserve a wider audience.
Since I have no doubt that the egos of all FT authors and the lawyers of all authors working for FT companies have Google Alerts on full blast, I shall mention that Susan Elderkin's piece on the excess of literature in today's magazine was a well-written article that should be compulsory reading (were that not a somewhat ironic observation) for all people thinking of writing a novel.
Factoid 1: About 10,000 new novels are published in English every year.
Factoid 2: Even if you did nothing but read all the time (and not stuff like this, but just the stuff available on Amazon.co.uk) it would take you 163 lifetimes to read all the stuff that is available.
In the perceptive words of Gabriel Zaid, "books are published at such a rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant".
I think the final word (given to Zaid in this article) sums up where I have gone wrong; and this relates to movies, plays, art galleries and many other things. He observes that it should not matter how up-to-date or cultured we feel (or, in my case, how ignorant I feel, because so much more is available in various media to be 'consumed'). Zaid conclude:
"What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive".
Fuck me, I thought, undergoing some kind of Damascene conversion. That's IT. That's where I've been going wrong.
The increased availability of what I call (and I use a technical term here) "stuff", has made the consumption of that stuff, the never-ending attempt to "keep up", more important than what the keeping up is really for.
Because, well, unless you are mentally slightly askew, part of the reason we consume culture (or non-culture) is to be able to relate better with other people. To do so is to be part of society rather than to consciously set yourself apart from it. It's why I read The Da Vinci Code. Unless you have illimitless self confidence or basically don't give a shit about being in touch with what other people are discussing, sometimes it's necessary to read, or watch, "stuff" that you might not have read or watched otherwise. That doesn't mean you go too far. I wouldn't watch soaps on TV, for example, even if everyone at work was discussing them (I would be more likely to change jobs). But I do keep up with football a little more than I might do if I were living on the west coast of Ireland. No man is an island.
But Zaid gets it right. All of this is a means, rather than an end. And that "means" is a means to seeing the world in a different way, to making you more alive. I should spend less time trying to "keep up" because keeping up is something I feel that I ought to do, and more time picking and choosing things which help me feel, help me see, and help me relate, in the real world. Fiction is fiction, and should not and cannot be a self-contained work. It must relate externally.
Since I have no doubt that the egos of all FT authors and the lawyers of all authors working for FT companies have Google Alerts on full blast, I shall mention that Susan Elderkin's piece on the excess of literature in today's magazine was a well-written article that should be compulsory reading (were that not a somewhat ironic observation) for all people thinking of writing a novel.
Factoid 1: About 10,000 new novels are published in English every year.
Factoid 2: Even if you did nothing but read all the time (and not stuff like this, but just the stuff available on Amazon.co.uk) it would take you 163 lifetimes to read all the stuff that is available.
In the perceptive words of Gabriel Zaid, "books are published at such a rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant".
I think the final word (given to Zaid in this article) sums up where I have gone wrong; and this relates to movies, plays, art galleries and many other things. He observes that it should not matter how up-to-date or cultured we feel (or, in my case, how ignorant I feel, because so much more is available in various media to be 'consumed'). Zaid conclude:
"What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive".
Fuck me, I thought, undergoing some kind of Damascene conversion. That's IT. That's where I've been going wrong.
The increased availability of what I call (and I use a technical term here) "stuff", has made the consumption of that stuff, the never-ending attempt to "keep up", more important than what the keeping up is really for.
Because, well, unless you are mentally slightly askew, part of the reason we consume culture (or non-culture) is to be able to relate better with other people. To do so is to be part of society rather than to consciously set yourself apart from it. It's why I read The Da Vinci Code. Unless you have illimitless self confidence or basically don't give a shit about being in touch with what other people are discussing, sometimes it's necessary to read, or watch, "stuff" that you might not have read or watched otherwise. That doesn't mean you go too far. I wouldn't watch soaps on TV, for example, even if everyone at work was discussing them (I would be more likely to change jobs). But I do keep up with football a little more than I might do if I were living on the west coast of Ireland. No man is an island.
But Zaid gets it right. All of this is a means, rather than an end. And that "means" is a means to seeing the world in a different way, to making you more alive. I should spend less time trying to "keep up" because keeping up is something I feel that I ought to do, and more time picking and choosing things which help me feel, help me see, and help me relate, in the real world. Fiction is fiction, and should not and cannot be a self-contained work. It must relate externally.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Shurely not
Date: 2007-02-17 06:25 pm (UTC)"What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive".
Surely Zaid means that the things we read should have an impact on the way we intersect with the world. If what you've read doesn't leave you altered, who needs it? It needn't be a big impact (and in the case of the Da Vinci code I would guess you were quadruple-tabling at the time, but it doesn't mean that you have to start reading stuff in order to relate to the world better. Surely that would mean repeatdely watching water-cooler television, chick-flick films (Music & Lyrics is really good btw) and reading Heat.
Re: Shurely not
Date: 2007-02-17 07:18 pm (UTC)Yes, I think that was what Zaid was trying to say, and in that I agreed with him. I became aware as I was typing that I was kind of tying a metaphorical knot for myself, but if I start going back and polishing the garbage that I churn out for my blog, then I am walking down a very dodgy path, so I decided to leave it as it was, albeit astoundingly imperfect and certainly not to my own satisfaction.
I tried to rescue myself by saying that you couldn't take the input too far, but I was trying to make the point that society tends to depend on some kind of common culture (even if I try to mix with a society that avoids The X-Factor, American Idol and other water-cooler TV) and so we recommend movies and books to each other so that we don't perpetually have conversations revolving around books that we have read as individuals (or TV shows we have seen) that no-one else has read/watched.
I think that it is this that some book clubs try to achieve. Rather than talking about The X-Factor, at least it gets them to talk about Sarah Waters. It's a step up, although not as big a step as one might wish for.
And Music & Lyrics is good? Hell, it was one of the few movies where the blurb at the Leicester Square Odeon had me saying "that is one film I definitely won't be going to watch".
I think that I was agreeing with Zaid that we should spend less time trying to keep up, and more time making use of the things which we do watch or read. However, for some reason, I'm horribly inarticulate today. A kind of "I'm all out of words"....
PJ
Re: Shurely not
Date: 2007-02-18 03:26 am (UTC)Ben
Liverpool
Re: Shurely not
Date: 2007-02-18 10:02 am (UTC)Music & Lyrics IS good. Julie (heavy Hugh Grant fancier) and I went to see it off the cuff in a cinema full of 14-19 year olds. It's utterly wasted on them because they only see one strand of the film - the straightforward romcom. But there is also a very loving pastiche of 80's Pop and the works of Wham! in particular. Jokes about the unutterable wet-ness of A Flock of Seagulls aren't really that meaningful when you're 16. It's also spendidly tart about the absurdities of the Britney/Christina generation are well-observed if heavy-handed. The only problem is that the average 16 year old watching the film won't realise that there are musical and stylistic jokes about sticking an Indian/rap break on the front of a song. They'll just think it's neat. This all does mean though that there were occasions when I was the only one laughing in the movie.
And damn it all, I actually do like Hugh Grant as a comic actor. The self-deprecating charm is just something that helps me find him funny. He's a sort of white Will Smith (who could play Hannibal Lecter and you'd still like him).
Interesting footnote: the music for the film was provided by the bass player from Fountains of Wayne (whose only claim to fame over here is the soft-porn video of the single Stacey's Mom). Oh and the plot is the most arrant tosh.
.
Re: Shurely not
Date: 2007-02-22 12:17 pm (UTC)Talking of whom, I saw "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" last night and enjoyed it immensely, as I do most Raymond Chandler homages. Of course Mrs. Fiendish hated it, as she does most smart-arse films where not much happens in a very stylish way; she's never seen a Coen brothers film she likes.
Thank God we met in the workplace as I suspect we'd never have got it together via computer dating.
John H.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-19 10:43 am (UTC)You should visit the west coast of Ireland some time, you'd probably be pleasantly(?) surprised at the passion a lot of people over here have for English football. Believe it or not, some of the pubs in the bigger villages have access to Sky sports now !
Having said that, I agree with what you're saying above.
By the way, a lot of my favourite bloggers have moved onto other pastures so I'm glad to see that you're still walking the walk. Keep writing.
All the best.
Kevin
ps - sorry for posting anonymously, I comment so infrequently (especially now Big Dave D has gone !) that it's just easier to do it this way.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-19 12:36 pm (UTC)Ah yes, perhaps the west coast of Ireland was not the best example. As I discovered when we walked into a pub in Belmullet in January, only to see a TV showing English football followed by English horseracing, it's clear that the Skyization of the world has had an impact.
I reckon that Blacksod (where I was not three weeks ago) is about as west coast of Ireland as you can get. Any further and I would have been in Bermuda, or Nova Scotia.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 01:09 am (UTC)There are vast sections of popular culture (all sport, most chart music, much TV, pulp fiction) with which I deliberately avoid wasting my time. I'm just not going to spend hours on entertainment that just leaves me empty and fails to uplift me.
We live in a world of material and information abundance; it's drinking from the fire-hose.
More power to you, Pete.