A vase is a jug with a pretty picture

[Brian D. McCary]

> From: <jeremias at sover.net>
> Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 08:12:45 -0400
> The point being that literature may be losing it's voice in the national
> dialogue. If people no longer read books then the ideas and thoughts of
> authors will have no relevance to the lives of most people. Does this even
> matter?
> 

The authors who wish to influence the people will move on to other media.
Literature is a medium, and not an end.  It will probably never regain the
position it held before the mass possession of radio, movies, TV, and 
records.  I am sure that about the time the printing press became widely 
available, there were people who had concerns about the impact that the 
printing press would have on the oral tradition, as passed down through 
what we may think of as the tribal elders.  They were right; the oral 
tradition was altered drastically and, for the most part, abandoned (over 
a period of centuries) but ideas managed to flourish.  I am sure that thought
will survive the dumbing down of the reading audience and the accompanying
reaction of the publishing industry.

The wonderful thing about our grinder is that he is writing books which 
cannot be meaningfully written in another medium.  A Steven King novel or
a Tom Clancy novel may be successfully translated to the screen: these books
are really movies which got lost (sometimes only temporarily) on the way
to the cinema.  Big books are relished for their challenge, and their readers
enjoy wallowing and mucking their way through them, as is attested to by the
last dozen or so posts.  This same approach does not work well with movies
as they exist today.

If a potter takes months to create the perfect vase, he has used skills that
only those who have tried it or who have studied hundereds of vases can 
appreciate.  If he does so with the intent to communicate a difficult idea
to a few (instead of a simpler idea to the many), then the small audience
is not a tragedy, it is a testement to his skill.

Brian McCary