“Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so. Across the board, there wasn’t much considerable variation in the amount literature age groups read. Everyone is hanging out in the 39–49% range.” Is America in the midst of a literary recession? According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 2015 marked the first year in 33 cycles of research that the percentage of adults who read literature had dropped below 45% to a dismal 43%.
The Great (Literary) Depression
Billy Joel Gets Cold Feet
Could this be the start of a trend? HarperCollins paid the singer Billy Joel $3 million for a memoir back in 2008. Joel wrote The Book of Joel, the publisher edited it, and a June publication date was set. Last week, however, Joel abruptly backed out of the deal and apparently will return the portion of the advance he’s been paid. His reason? He told the Associated Press he “was not all that interested in talking about the past.”
William S. Burroughs’ Long Lost Graphic Novel
From Flavorwire: in 1970 William S. Burroughs teamed up with British cartoonist and painter Malcolm McNeill to “put together what they called a ‘Word/Image novel’ (the term ‘graphic novel’ had not yet been popularized) and shopped it to publishers. After seven years of trying to sell the new genre, Burroughs and McNeill gave up. Next year the work will finally see the light of day.”
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Literatura de Miami
Attention, Miami residents who also read The Millions, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins will be reading on April 1st in the 305. March 15th is the final day to buy tickets.
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Interview with David Bajo
An interview with the author David Bajo, on his new novel Panopticon: “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of privacy, especially how our society constantly seeks ways to invade it technologically, how we consistently undermine it by happily participating in digital omniscience, yet how we are outraged by the pain that technology and that desire sometimes cause.”
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Hey, Fleming Estate: I’m Available To Write One, Too
Any Human Heart author William Boyd has been tapped to write the newest James Bond novel, the Ian Fleming estate has announced. Just so we know what to expect: his favorite Bond installment was From Russia with Love.
“The heart belongs to the tide and the deep alone”
The upcoming Supreme Court decision on gay marriage is drawing a lot of attention. But what about the other ruling — the one aimed at grizzled old men? At The Onion, a report on Justice Alito’s recent decision, which tersely states that marriage is a pact between a man and the sea.
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“variation in the amount literature”
Perhaps the depression isn’t so much in reading as it is in readable materials?
Not only that, but my inbox is full or “watch this video”s–I’d guess 3-6 hours every day, because talking is faster/easier than typing, and bloggers/marketers think people like seeing faces enough to justify the extra bandwidth/buffering or posting a video rather than an audio.
“Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so.”
It’s wrong to fault the afflicted for their suffering, to be sure, but anyone who hasn’t noticed the alarming rate of ADMVDD (advanced disjunctive monosyllabic video-dependent dysphoria), among the young and youngish, must be too busy with Facebook to care. The problem with books being that they’re powered not by ads, or lithium ion batteries or Google… they’re powered by the Reader’s intellect… soooooo…. uh….. yeah. Perfect Storm meet Vicious Circle. Because where is the intellect supposed to come from in the first place… Snapchat?
I sent a two-paragraph email to an under-30 colleague earlier this year and he still jokingly refers to this wild breach of protocol as “War and Peace”. Whereas I can still quite vividly recall a value system in which the longer the letter one received in the post, the happier one was to receive the letter… and we measured length in pages, not paragraphs (or characters). There’s a joke about size in there somewhere…