There's a new effort afoot to get Oprah to bring back her (contemporary) book club. Thanks to the Happy Booker for the head's-up.
Several of our teachers and fellow former students have signed up. What do you think, Goats--good idea, bad idea, other?
4 comments:
I think that anything that popularizes reading is a good thing; perhaps that's naive? I mean, I think it would even be great if Paris Hilton were spotted reading, say, Daniel's collection. Okay, or anything besides Us magazine (which, n.b., I do love).
Perhaps our country of celebrity worshippers needs guidance from those whom they idolize, and perhaps that guidance would have some positive unintended consequences, like the stoking of our national imagination. Oh, yes - it all comes back to the reader-writer curve.
I concur. And I think that, generally speaking, Oprah has pretty good taste. Hell, anything it takes to get people reading more literary fiction is fine by me: plugs from talk show hosts, Pam Anderson's tits, straight to paperback -- whatever. We need all the help we can get.
I agree with Roper. I never understood the high brow harrumphing about the Book Club. Sure it's a writer's lottery, but generally speaking, she picks decent books. Like it or not, the Duchess of Chicago holds a huge amount of influence. Using that influence to encourage people to read, as SER said, is a good thing.
This is the one thing I really disagreed with Jonathan Franzen about. He has a valid point about writers not showing up with hat and hand and begging to be relevant. But if you want to make a living by writing, then you have to become part of the business of writing. You cannot separate the two IMHO. That doesn't mean you have to sell out or compromise your vision for commercial appeal. You just need to acknowledge that the business is a necessary and logical part of the enterprise. This means not only promoting your own writing, but promoting the writing/publishing industry as a whole. That's why I thought the Book Club was valuable.
Synthetic, I think the difference you're referring to is between creating and imagining, not between reading/enjoying and imagining. I don't think reading and enjoyment can occur without imagining - insert Frank's reader/writer curve here: the writer implies, the reader infers. And although I love certain television shows, I think TV and movies and video games are largely passive entertainment, in contrast to the active entertainment required by reading (the writer mentions a yellow car, but the reader fills in the exact look of the yellow car). And I think this is bad, in the end, not because we suffer from the delusion that writing alone will support us, but because the loss of the ability of the nation overall to be active imaginers (is that a word?) has consequences not just in the arts, but also in business, politics, and even things like preventing terrorism.
Reading spurs ideas, even if you can't write well yourself. I also can't write music, play music, or sing - at ALL - but listening to music obviously affects us in visceral (and even idea-generating) ways. We don't only like it because it's something we can't do.
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