Posts by Jolisa
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
You know, I'm suddenly wondering where all the authors are (save Islander, of course)... Is there a parallel discussion somewhere, in which they are busy swapping stories about the declining quality -- and terrible rudeness! -- of readers these days?
In any case, I would like to buy them all a drink.
-
Like this.
Also, Airdrop Borges would be a great name for a band. (I imagine them opening for Jefferson Starship).
-
Isn’t that why I pay you people?
Not enough, apparently. Comrade.
I’m off to the emblazoner to get this bit on some sort of pennant:
“When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame”
And then what you need is some sort of over-sized ceremonial toasting fork with which to hoist your pennant aloft.
-
Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Fergus Barrowman,
more like a low murmur of disgruntlement
You're messing with my vulpine metaphor, but OK :-)
-
Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
True... but I think the spell that a really good novel casts is built up via a slow accumulation of attention over a long period, culminating (in my case at least) in a need to barricade myself behind a pile of pillows and/or a closed door as soon as I reach a point approximately 50 pp from the end.
Sometimes I don't manage to get up off the couch and go in search of full privacy when the end of a really good novel is urgently closing in on me. For such moments, I have trained the fellow inhabitants of the house (adult and child) to recognise that a pillow over my ears and a hand fiercely held up in a "STOP" position means "Please turn around, exit the room immediately and DO NOT even think of asking me any questions, especially questions about dinner, laundry, lost lego bits, or even 'oh hey, are you just about finished that book? what's happening?'. Unless someone is in mortal danger, and even then, go and find your father, unless you are the father, in which case you are in mortal danger if you do not turn around right now!"
They're very understanding, these days, although the training phase was not pretty. But reading the end of a novel properly is a very serious business.
Novel-reading: turning good mothers into bad ones since ages ago.
A short story, on the other hand, can be legitimately consumed in one hit behind a locked bathroom door, with nobody any the wiser.
-
Tamsin's William Morris link fixed.
Putting it in my diary for late 2012 :-) Did you make it in before it closed?
-
Useful -- if not compulsory -- reading at this point in the thread: Adam Gopnik's assessment of the various schools of thought on whether the internet is ruining, ah, I mean, changing, or simply enhancing our brains. A snippet:
... at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.
-
Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Fergus, reluctantly:
I have since the age of about nine been able to find a deeper kind of immersion, or empathetic extension, or loss of self, in reading long fiction... [But]the novel hasn’t been around all that long so it’s not impossible it’s on the way out...
Rob, poignantly:
For me, I think it's the horrible, joyous process of getting older ... I’m just not as hungry to be immersed.
Jackson, cheerfully:
[but] it seems to me ‘we’ are reading more than ever.
Hooray! See how the shaggy readers emerge from the shadows and into the clearing, in response to the editor/publisher's lonely howl of despair! We are not alone in this dark wood -- even as the distant rumbling machines threaten to turn it all into so many wood chips. Follow me, creatures of the night. We shall reclaim the forest and the trees! [puts on red riding cloak, makes sure wolf-whistle is in pocket...]
-
Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to BenWilson,
I also blame the blogosphere for stealing my reading time. A dialectic is 100 times more engaging to me than passive absorption of data, either in book or televized form.
+ 1 million, I suspect!
-
Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Islander,
You know what else was heartening: seeing so many kids in the pictures. The demographic shape of the place struck me as really beautiful, archetypally village-like. To mingle with the very young and the very old every day is an increasingly rare privilege in our nuclear-family-focussed society.