AlexKeto.com

First a housekeeping item. I pulled the last entry which had the beginning of a book that I dreamed up for some literary contests because, well, it made me nervous. What made me nervous is the fact I'm not going to start writing the book until sometime this summer and then it will take whatever amount of time it takes to write but most certainly at least a year.

And, in her comments, Betsy Dornbusch came very close to figuring out the plot. Which could mean any number of things including the plot is simple, the opening was heavy handed or that she was awfully quick on the uptake. Or it could mean that pretty much the task of getting the plot out there quickly was done, particularly given the excerpt was 380 words or so.

But, I've noticed that I have a fairly eclectic group of folks stopping by with literary types as well as those who take a baleful interest in irasciable Bob Mugabe. And the thought of having the plot sitting around in public for 18 months suddenly isn't as appealing as it once was.

So that's why. Cicily Janus is, no doubt, relieved since now she doesn't have to fill out her comments.

There wasn't much chance of being bigfooted on the book but why risk it?

On to the topic at hand which is a group of three articles in today's Washington Post all saying, more or less, the same thing. People don't read books any longer. One article says this is the first crack in the foundation of American civilization, the second poo-poos the development saying communication has been changing for the past 100 years, and the third was just a crabby diatribe about how everyone other than the author of the article is a lummox.

But they all depend on the concept that Americans are reading less than before. Or that we were somehow much better before and now we've gone downhill. Somehow, I suspect there really were no halcyon days of yore when Ma and Pa MacBarker would pull out War and Peace on those snowy nights on the prairie while Jim Ba Boy and Little Emily happily chewed over James Joyce's Ulysses. Hell, if folks read as much as we are led to believe, there would be no Southern Gothic literary tradition to speak of. If you're writing Tobacco Road, it's pretty easy to make the characters believable if they are as ignorant as ants but if Pa is quoting poetry between swigs of moonshine, well, it just stands to reason that would happen in County Cork, Ireland, where they do those sorts of things and not the hardscrabble mountains of North Carolina.

This was a thought that seems to have crossed the mind of one of the article authors who did quote Ralph Waldo Emerson who lamented in 1837 "the mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Having let the cat out of the bag that Americans were largely illiterate nearly 200 years ago, the author spends the rest of article saying, yeah, well, things are worse than 20 years ago before computers became widespread.

These types of articles seem to pop up like mushrooms all over the place and usually they seem aimed at reassuring the writer, and the reader who also wrings their hands over the subject, that they are better than the average Joe on the street.

John Gardiner, the author of the books Grendel (very good) and On Becoming A Writer (also very good) seemed to hit the nail on the head when he said that writing and reading are aristocrat endeavors in that both require a fair amount of free time. Certainly this seems true when one considers that a bestseller is a book that sells 100,000 copies. This in a land of 300 million people. Or, doing the math, this would translate into sales to 1/30th of 1 % of the population. Not a lot but even reaching that mark is considered a huge accomplishment.