Sometimes the post just decides - for better or worse - to go its own sweet way

'Bye now,' says a friend, and I'm reminded that this expression sounds exactly the same as buy now, something that stores and online sites encourage you to do all the time. As if this might be your last opportunity ever to grab the bargain (which is often something you don't want or need).

It may be the last chance you'll have, of course...you might be dead of a heart attack before you get out of the store, or before you've finished closing off the tab on the browser. But that aside, there usually isn't the great imperative to get on and buy the thing now that the store would like you to think.

It's like those ads you see on TV which tell you that there's only ten minutes in which you can purchase a particular item. If you actually do ring up, you find there's a queue, and you hold on for fifteen minutes and find that the supposed ten minutes in which you were to buy the thing have gone, and yet, amazingly, the item is still well and truly available.

None of this has anything to do with percussion instruments. You're going to ask how I made that leap. Well, this is a postmodern blog, after all, and leaps which lack connection are commonplace here, as they should be. I've just been reading Terry Eagleton's How to Read Literature, and he informs us in there that postmodern writing is full of sudden shifts and disconnections. So accept that fact that I've made a sudden shift and disconnected, and you'll be all right again. You might have to go and get yourself a small sedative, but don't worry about that. You'll have noticed that now I've shifted from postmodernism to stream of consciousness anyway, and perhaps it's well and truly time to bring this post to a close.

If such a thing is possible in postmodern writing. Closure isn't what it's all about there. And how can there be an end to a stream of consciousness?

All too much for this time of the day, especially when you've been up since 5.30 am and busy ever since.

Eight out of ten ain't bad

Apparently the 'majority' of people pretend to have read classic books in order to appear more intelligent.  This is based on a survey of 2,000 people, it seems.  I can't say I've ever met people who claimed to do this...most admit quite happily that they couldn't finish such and such a 'classic' book, and give good reasons for not doing so. 

Here's the list of the top ten books people claimed to have read, but hadn't, in fact.

1 1984 by George Orwell (26%)
2 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (19%)
3 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (18%)
4 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (15%)
5 A Passage to India by EM Forster (12%)
6 Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (11%)
7 To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee (10%)
8 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (8%)
9 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (8%)
10 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (5%)
 I not only claim to have read but actually have read:1984, Great Expectations (twice), A Passage to India, Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. I've never got near Catcher in the Rye, for some reason, and I've tried twice to read War and Peace, and given up both times.

Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses, both by Joyce, didn't appear on the list, which is interesting, even though they're both touted as 'classics.' I've never bothered with the first, and couldn't get far into the second.  The movie didn't help to encourage me. And where's Moby Dick?  I've twice started this too - the second time I didn't even get as far through as the first.

Books vs e-books

Interesting set of tweets as recorded by a site called 40Key, about which I don't know a lot. They say on the site: 40k means ebooks. Here you can find:

* Thinking. Culture is going digital. Our essays will tell you stories about this shift. and
* Fiction. A sophisticated selection of stories and a lot of award-winning authors.

Plainly their focus is literature in many forms.

The post's subject is If Book Then: a Recap, which I'm sure makes sense, but don't quite ask me how.

The topic in discussion (I think*) is the advance of e-books and the retreat of real books and bookstores. Some of the comments are just a little scary, especially from someone who goes by the Twitter name of mikeshatzkin.

Mike Shatzkin says on Twitter that he's interested in publishing and digital change.

Make sure you read the Tweet list from the bottom up, otherwise it doesn't make a lot of sense...!

* My lack of understanding here is because Tweets on their own, or even in a bunch like this lot, often don't make enough sense - they lack a bit of context, one might say.

On the dark side

In yesterday's Otago Daily Times, James Dignan wrote:

There is a darkness within the Kiwi creative psyche which manifests in Gothic, magic realism and surrealist art. In cinematography, it has been well summarised as the "cinema of unease".

In the pictorial arts, it pervades the work of artists from Siddall and Pankhurst to Smillie and de Soto.

Since he's writing about an art exhibition (Seraphine Pick's) he doesn't follow this point through in the other arts. Nevertheless it's strongly seen in NZ writing, to the point where much NZ writing seems dour and gloomy and miserable. However, while it's true that there's a great deal of NZ writing that's gloomy, it's equally true that there is a good deal that's not. Why don't we hear more about that? Why does NZ literary criticism seem to focus on the dark side?

Buechner on Art

Some lines from Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark: a doubter's dictionary - from the section, 'Art.'

Literature, painting, music - the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

C S Lewis on seeing the world through other men's eyes

I'm grateful for Christianity at the Movies' e-letter for alerting me to the following quote, in which C S Lewis basically follows through on Paul's comments about being a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks (my rough paraphrase), and shows that the arts can help us understand (but not necessarily agree with) the mind that doesn't have a Christian worldview.
In his book, An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis writes, "We therefore delight to enter into other men's beliefs ... even though we think them untrue. And into their passions, though we think them depraved ... And also into their imaginations, though they lack all realism of content."

[Lewis is writing mostly in the context of reading books and poetry, but his thoughts on criticism apply just as well to film—or any art form, for that matter. He continues:] "This must not be understood as if I were making the literature of power once more into a department which existed to gratify our rational curiosity about other people's psychology. It is not a question of knowing (in that sense) at all. It is connaître not savoir; it is erleben; we become these other selves. Not only nor chiefly in order to see what they are like but in order to see what they see, to occupy, for a while, their seat in the great theatre, to use their spectacles and be made free of whatever insights, joys, terrors, wonders, or merriment those spectacles reveal ...

"This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. ... Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors." [Or, I might add, movie directors.] "We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less of a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. ... In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."