Fw: Fwd: Caleb Crain's Twilight of the Books

[Mark Kohut]

Another letter that won't get published..........(I've become that kind of guy)

Piece is interesting about a reading culture vs. an oral one, if flawed as I wrote below. (Or not, or in other ways?)

A-and the mysterious Pynchon is mentioned next to the mysterious Shakespeare.

Just FYI.  

But I would like p-listers to discuss, if interested. If time and interest.

MK




January 4, 2008
 
To the Editor:
 
I learned interesting things from Mr. Crain's piece. But his ending made me doubt many of his conclusions along the way.
 
This conclusion, for example:    
    "There is nothing like this connection in print. A feeling for a writer never touches the fact of the writer herself, unless 
     reader and writer happen to meet. In fact, from Shakespeare to Pynchon, the personalities of many writers have been 
     mysterious." 
is simply wrong as most who read with attention clearly know (as anyone who gets insight from Updike's or Wood's reviews in your magazine can see.) Many might even disagree with Mr. Crain's extreme examples, but very few writers of genius are so hidden and the lesser ones are often too transparent. 
 
In rereading, I think Mr. Crain's piece-length weakness is the hidden assumption that we are mostly passive in our visual and reading experience. But some 'critical thinking', some judgment against one's --and our culture's--experience, usually goes on and should--even if it is not the abstraction we label logic.  In the illiterate and oral cultures, not least. 

Sincerely, 
 
Mark Kohut
 


 
December 24, 2007
A Critic at Large
Twilight of the Books 
A CRITIC AT LARGE about the decline in reading. Since 1982, the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading. The results, first reported by the N.E.A . in 2004, are dispiriting. The percent of Americans who are reading creative literature is… 
by Caleb Crain 
 
 



-- 
Mark Kohut (& Associates)
63 Western Ave.
Jersey City, NJ 07307
646-519-1956
201-795-9388


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