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Let's Get Retarded
Feb. 17th, 2007 01:24 pmJust 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.
