Norman Mailer and E
Moderator’s note: The post below contains earlier material. - D.R.
Norman Mailer and e-books—what an unlikely mix of words. The image I most associate with Mailer, who died this morning at 84, is neither the feisty face nor the dark hair from his younger days. Nor the older Mailer I met decades ago as a newspaper reporter when he informally lectured at a small Ohio college, joshing with the students, assuring them that writers aren’t handsome enough to be actors or smart enough to be surgeons. Instead, it’s the green cover on my old hardback of The Naked and the Dead. A moment ago I wandered over to one of my favorite e-book stores online, stocking tens of thousands of titles; but I could find just four Mailer books: The Castle in the Forest, Oswald’s Tale, Harlot’s Ghost and Oh God. Yes, oh, God—the amnesia of technology!
Actually Mailer himself had a little of a techie in him. He studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard, after all, and he even made a quick stab at blogging for the Huffington Report. Luckily, however, I could locate only two posts. With only so much writing time left, he wisely focused on his natural form, the full-length narrative; and that in turn leads me to a warning Mailer accidentally made about the current direction of the Internet.
An alarum for the YouTube era
Mailer wasn’t beating up on the Net, as best I can reconstruct things, but rather on an old foe of his, televison. Still, we can easily extrapolate in the YouTube era—a time, too, when some high-tech-oriented educators and even certain librarians are downplaying novels and other narratives in favor of the practical and the quick lookup. Yes, we want reference material online, and even snippets, Updike notwithstanding, but let’s not kill off fiction. I’d recommend that the Gradgrinds and Babbitts pay close attention to the points Mailer made during a recent audio interview with Radio Open Source. Here’s an MP3 excerpt—yes, I do see a place for intelligent multimedia—and below I’ll serve up some of his comments for your screen:
“…Democracy depends upon enough people in that country being willing to read and learn, and learn from literature, and there’s no question in my mind that children are being discouraged from reading by the commercials they watch on TV all the time…When you’re a child, at least when I was a child, the love of narrative was so important to us. [If] someone started to tell a story or we’d be reading a book, the idea of what came next was so important that it really began to give us a sense of how to approach the world, which was the world is a narrative. And now the world is now longer a narrative to the child watching television. On the contrary. The world is a set of interruptions… stimulations and frustrations. That’s what it is for a child watching TV. They’re watching a show and boom the commercial comes in every five, seven or twelve minutes or whatever… It shatters the desire the desire to read. We become a nation where people read less and less as the decades go by.”
Gripe against TV commercials might apply to the Twitter, too
Notice? Although Mailer is attacking the usual TV commercials, much of he says might apply to Net-based media, if you consider all the interruptions in the Twitter vein. As I see it, the cure is more focus on narrative. Toward this goal, e-books have an important role to play—given all the possibilities that cheaper distribution and well-used interactivity can provide (constant interactivity can be just as disruptive as the commercials). But getting the best literature online isn’t enough. We also need narratives to be presented in context and tightly integrated with schools and libraries. There’ll never be another Mailer, but with luck, however, YouTube or not, maybe future generations can appreciate his better works.
Meanwhile, not to totally knock the Net, many parts of which I dearly love, especially Project Gutenberg, Manybooks.net, Feedbooks, and similar efforts. What’s more, I’m looking forward to a flood of digitized titles from publishers to augment the wares currently online at e-bookstores. So, no, it’s not as if people online will be entirely ignoring Mailer and the other greats. His Wikipedia item is already updated.
November 10th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
A set of interruptions seems to describe television programming and the currently evolving state of the web. It’s only a matter of time before television media outlets take over, placing large TV-style interstitial ads everywhere. But the real interruptions are more inherent in the medium of the web than they are on TV. We make our own interruptions happen, with bookmarks and RSS feeds and Twitter and IM and our multiple email accounts and Skype. We want more content, which means content outlets are less pressured to produce quality, and quality is relegated to the same soundbite status as everything else. Acordingly, we have less time, and thus longer works suffer in this medium. At Bookglutton, we know that people will move to reading books with their email, and we know that this means longer, older, less commercialized works will suffer in popularity. So will non-genre work. Anything difficult to categorize requires individual patience, because every individual needs to categorize before they appreciate. We think that allowing more granular attention to longer works will keep them in the public mind longer. Discussing something’s parts will sustain interest and focus much longer than praising or dismissing it as a whole. So while we utilize chat and topic-based pubsub to surround each book, we want people to be able to turn it off when they want. Which is better than muting the sound on a commercial.
Aaron Miller
bookglutton.com
November 10th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Thanks for your thoughtful message, Aaron. If we’re going to have interruptions, let as many of them as possible be book related! I heartily approve of your granular approach. You’re still serving the cause of narrative and adapting it to people’s habits. A long way from just frivolous Twitter stuff! Even Twitter has its place; I just don’t want to see it over done. (If this exchange serves as a plug for BG, then so much the better!)
David
November 11th, 2007 at 11:13 am
So Norman Mailer the youthful firebrand was transformed into an elderly curmudgeon complaining about the non-reading unthinking children of “today” who are exposed to the commercialized staccato stream of television. David Rothman sympathetically identifies two modern menaces to cohesive thought, namely Twitter and YouTube.
If only we could go back to the halcyon years of deep uninterrupted and ruminatory thought. What was the atmosphere like when tyro Mailer was preparing to cogitate profoundly? Consider this quote from Wilbur Schramm’s 1954 opus “The Process and Effects of Mass Communication”:
Mailer was born in 1923 and radio drama became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Of course, movies and newsreels antedate his birth. How did Mailer escape unscathed from the mind-numbing and debilitating effects of radio programs and newsreels?
I have been listening to complaints about the “short attention span” of the incorrigible young whippersnappers of this or that generation for decades so the remarks above are intended as a humorous retort. Admittedly television is more pervasive and immersive than newsreels. Looking forward there is another substantial difference between the “media” of today and the past. YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, and twitter often encourage participation instead of passivity.
Mailer proclaims that the “love of narrative was so important to us.” Yet, grand compelling narratives are not unique to the book format. Movie lovers embraced “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy with a run time of eleven hours in its fancy DVD edition. Television series such as “Babylon Five”, “24” and “Lost” have very long narrative arcs. The first series of “24” has a run time of 1152 minutes (19.2 hours) and that is considerably longer than most books when read as audio books.
November 11th, 2007 at 11:50 am
Garson, thanks. I agree with you that wonderful narrative can happen within videos. But it’s not the same kind of narrative. Nothing beats text for getting inside the characters’ heads, for example.
As for radio, it’s great at encouraging imagination.
Thanks,
David
January 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am
This is one of the better posts I’ve read about Mailer and his ideas since his death, and I hope it sparks a serious re-examination of his ideas. Mailer had said once that the internet was the “biggest waste of time since masturbation”, but given how much he liked to be on the spot and have his say on national political and cultural currents, it’s a safe bet that he would have been a blogger had the web been available to him. Mailer’s ideas about technology and commercial culture interfering with cohesive thinking isn’t without force; the consolidation of most of our media into the hands of very few corporate owners subjects all views to mere mouthfuls of caption ready mouthfuls . A counter view to the mainstream view is not allowed to have a second breath of air in this climate, and it is seems the purpose of the commercial interruptions in the discourse is not just to sell products but to distract an electorate as well. It’s a digital Roman Circus.