Michael Blowhard: Avoiding the Twinkly and Enticing
By Robert Nagle
Michael Blowhard gives an entertaining account on giving a book tour with his wife to promote an erotic novel. To justify the time and effort they spent turning these things into events, Blowhard faces facts:
Books are a really hard sell these days. The old culture of books is completely shot to hell. It’s gone, it’s all over, it ain’t coming back, period, paragraph, finito. Young people are able to read, of course. But book-reading plays a different role in their media-cosmos than it does in older people’s. Settling down with a book at the end of the evening? Hard to imagine why, when you might be surfing the web instead. Sinking into a lot of linearly-organized text? What’s appealing about that? Young people have so many media options, and so many of them are so twinkly and enticing, that books look drab by comparison. After all, they don’t glow, they don’t make noises, they don’t move, and you can’t click on ‘em. While oldies tend to think of books as one of the acmes of civilization and automatically accord them respect, younger people see books as the low end of the media ladder, something to play with only when the Nintendo is on the fritz.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I know. It is all us young people’s fault. We’ve ruined this beautiful world you’ve built for us, tarnished the great strides of insight, democracy, and peace you’ve made on this planet and now we are using our rock music and video-game induced violence to destroy everything you hold dear. Good thing the sea’s are going to flood the planet soon so you won’t have to watch us undo everything you’ve worked so hard for.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Bill writes:
It’s okay — that’s your job. It was my job, too, when I was your age, and as a child of the ’60s I think we did a pretty doggone good job of putting the ’50s to rest.
Keep up the good work.