“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
The Swamp of the Non-Reader
Jonathan Gourlay used to read all the time, then one day he stopped. “I knew that I had taken up residence in the swamp of the non-reader. Here is what life is like in that swamp.”
Let There Be
“LET THERE BE stress. Let the body respond to stress as it does to injury and infection. Let stress be a vulture that pecks at the mind and devours the body. This will make people less likely to be stressed. When they see stress wreak wrath upon the body, they will surely calm down a lot.” It seems the big problem with intelligent design is that it had a pretty sub-par peer review.
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Two Must Read Poets Converse
Eve Ewing recently released her debut poetry collection, Electric Arches, and we dubbed it one of our must-read poetry books last month. Year in Reading alum (and another Millions favorite) Kiese Laymon called her for a Guernica magazine interview and the result is a wonderful discussion on shea butter, Jordans, writing with young people as her primary audience and Assata Shakur as a literary inspiration.
Literary Threads
Literary-minded t-shirt purveyor Kafkacotton has a new t-shirt out. This one is a clever nod to Kerouac’s On the Road.
What’s Important
The Los Angeles Review of Books looks at a new history of K Records, the influential Olympia, WA-label that gave us Beat Happening, Modest Mouse, and Kurt Cobain’s arm tattoo.
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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…