A finely crafted vase

[Peter Trachtenberg]

With due respect, I'd contest your statement that the current readership 
is as great as it ever was. Numerically, maybe yes, but as a proportion 
of the population, no. A century ago, ordinary middle-class people read 
(often aloud) for both edification and entertainment. The Bible and 
Shakespeare were part of the common spoken repertoire; people recited 
from them by heart. Just compare the letters of, say, officers in the 
Civil War with those of their counterparts in Vietnam. Which is not to 
say that our great-grandparents were smarter or more informed--just more 
literate. But literacy does determine intelligence, at least of a 
particular kind, a point made eloquently by Barry Sanders in his 
excellent "A IS FOR OX."

Also, although Pynchon enlists all the popular media--from radio serials 
to comic books, he is transcribing those media into language, giving us 
not the things but their verbal representations. This goes back to the 
GR, The Movie Item, which most of us seemed to think would be a mess. 
Pynchon is a language-artist, that is to say a writer, and his brilliance 
would I think be diminished if he were working in film or video.