M&D truthtelling, history & I.F. Stone(WAS Publisher's Weekly (fwd)

[Sojourner]

At 09:01 AM 8/15/97 -0400, Peter Giordano wrote:

>Well, maybe you should spend the next couple of weeks reading the collected
>works of Dianelle Steele - But from what you describe your are enamoured
>(sp) with the physiology of reading as much as the content (which is fine
>with me - I love to hold a book in my hands)
>

I don't care what the book is about, even "Romance novels", with predictable
plots and fill-in-the-blanks mentality, it is still a book, which means the
action
and characters take place SOLELY inside your brain, and even the most detailed
description does not fill in every blank, so your mind blooms and soars to
meet the gaps, it assigns the character to every voice, it creates the
image of
every body, it smells the scene, it walks inside the minds of the
characters, it
feels the heat of the sun on itself.  

Yes, there are crappy books and there are books which are of high quality
and of low quality.  But with every SINGLE book ever written EVER, you
take little scribbles of signs on a piece of paper and enter them into your
head
to make those words come alive.  

With TV and movies (not photography) the work is done for you.  All
you have to do is let it enter your consciousness.  You don't have to
understand the subtleties, the context, or the background.  You don't
need to even be able to read or communicate effectively.


>To relate this to Pynchon - How could one "get" GRAVITY'S RAINBOW without
>at least a passing experience with the films of the Marx Bros, CITIZEN
>KANE, or the work of Fritz Lang?
>

I find this highly insulting and elitist.  I am not familiar with any of the
above so I guess I don't "get" Gravity's Rainbow.