21st Century Literature discussion

A few short months ago, The New Yorker ran a post by Lee Siegel titled, "Is the News Replacing Literature?" In it, Siegel asserts that "you could be forgiven for feeling that literary art, as Trilling defined it, has been largely displaced by life—or, at least, by the pictures of life ceaselessly produced by the all-powerful media—as the realm in which we lose ourselves in a moral problem."

For those on phones and such who might not be able to readily access the link above, here is a key excerpt:

These days, the conventions of art seem quaint and tidy. Zadie Smith, borrowing the phrase from the novelist David Shields, has written about her “novel-nausea,” an impatience with literary artifice. Her frustration is shared by novelists from Tim Parks to Naipaul, Roth, and Munro, the last three of whom have given up writing fiction altogether. (It could also be why the autobiographical novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, which read like direct transcriptions of reality, are so popular. “Just the thought of fiction,” he writes, “just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous.”)

...In post-structuralism, the person speaking or acting—the “subject”—was immediately suspect, merely an unwitting, unreliable product of social, psychological, cultural, and linguistic forces beyond her control. It was the reader or spectator’s job to cut through the subject’s illusion of integrity and get to the forces that were manipulating her. Sound familiar? Hundreds of thousands of people, often on interminable commenting threads, are trying to “deconstruct” Farrow and Allen in order to put a finger on precisely how one or the other is being manipulated by a third party or by his or her own hidden motives. We are all post-structuralists now.

Thoughts?

Daniel, I read the article, and for me these observations stood out:

"There have been few, if any, events in American public life that match the ethical density of recent public controversies. This is hardly because life has become more ethically complicated. Rather, falling boundaries between private and public, an old morality increasingly muddled by new laws and new technology, and the dominance of a no-holds-barred media, have made moral conundrums that once never happened, or touched the lives of only a few people, the daily fare of millions....

The confusion created by these mounting, everyday enigmas is so impenetrable that it is difficult to say whether this trend of being incapable of moral closure is itself good or bad. On the one hand, we are now able to talk about injuries and abuses that were formerly swept under the rug. Twenty years ago, adults who, as children, had been sexually abused by Catholic priests, or were the young victims of Jerry Sandusky, would not have come forward, for fear of being accused of mendacity or mental illness. On the other hand, our conscientious parsing of particulars may lead us to miss the blazing forest for some smoldering trees. As we labor over our public enigmas, the country does not seem to be becoming more equal or more fair to people left behind. Perhaps, on some level, and in the face of social problems that are ultimately simple cases of gross injustice, we find these murky ethical situations gratifying, as if they offer us an excuse—human existence is just too complicated!—not to try to make meaningful changes in our public life."

What I've noted as a retired person is how MUCH time is being spent on the "news", whether from Fox or NPR. People are spending more time on facebook and using technological gadgets than they do with their own families (as a former teacher, I saw that happening with teens). It's the core of what Siegel means when he says: "our conscientious parsing of particulars may lead us to miss the blazing forest for some smoldering trees."

And the forests ARE blazing, while 24/7 access to the media feeds keep the public mind occupied with trivialities. My 45 year old son asked me why there hasn't been a revolution in this country on the part of the "have not's", and I replied that ostriches don't lead revolutions. With heads buried in facebook, texting, blogs, myriad internet sites--those "smoldering trees" are everywhere (witness the extensive obsession with Miley Cyrus's tongue).

Lionel Trilling was speaking of "deep thought"--an endangered species at this point. When I retired, I mentioned to the head of the math department that students seemed to be jet-skiing over the ocean of knowledge rather than scuba diving; he liked the metaphor. One of the best books on this subject, for me, is The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. At the risk of making a VERY long post, these are the quotes I saved and sent to my family--and reading the first one from page 7 gave me chills, since it was exactly what I'd pictured!

p. 7 “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy in a Jet Ski.”

p. 8 “For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly—like sewing your own shirts or butchering your own meat.”

p. 9 “Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, ‘I can’t get my students to read whole books anymore.’ Hayles teaches English; the students she’s talking about are students of literature.”

p. 10 “For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg’s printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it’s been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday’s mind.”

p. 50 “Because language is, for human beings, the primary vessel of conscious thought, particularly higher forms of thought, the technologies that restructure language tend to exert the strongest influence over our intellectual lives.”

p. 90 “The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.”

p. 91 “We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.”

p. 124 “The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schema.”

He uses the metaphor of filling a bathtub (long term memory) with a thimble (short term). Reading provides a steady drip from one faucet. “With the net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. . . . Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow.”

p. 126 ”Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”

p. 140 “…improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.”

pp. 152-176 He goes into the history of Google and its mission of efficiency as the key to intellectual progress. This is contrasted with the Transcendentalists who held that the only true enlightenment comes from “contemplation and introspection.”

p. 170 “It was once understood that the most effective filter of human thought is time.”

p. 171 “We no longer have the patience to await time’s slow and scrupulous winnowing.”

pp. 182-196 He concentrates on our two types of memory, long and short term. Moving memories from short to long term is called “consolidation”.

p. 193 “The key to memory consolidation us attentiveness….The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory.”

p. 194 “…the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted.”

pp. 194-195 “‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” said David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. ‘It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

p. 196 “The offloading of memory to external data banks doesn’t just threaten the depth and distinctiveness of the self. It threatens the depth and distinctiveness of the culture we all share.”

He discusses the effect of the natural world on our thinking, referring to a University of Michigan experiment in 2008.

p. 220 “Spending time in the natural world seems to be of vital importance to effective cognitive functioning.”

An excellent observation in the bolded text, Julia. Could we perhaps make an argument that literature encourages us to make meaningful changes precisely because we dissociate ourselves from the attendant baggage of reality?

Julia wrote: "...The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. At the risk of making a VERY long post, these are the quotes I saved and sent to my family..."

Enjoyed your response, Julia.

These two from Shallows caught my eye this morning:

p. 170 “It was once understood that the most effective filter of human thought is time.”

p. 171 “We no longer have the patience to await time’s slow and scrupulous winnowing.”

Many comments can be made about that pair, but the one I'll make this morning is that we are now dealing with a world in which ~7B people are alive, a fair number of them literate. That is a very different situation than historically, when the human population has fluctuated at around the order of 1.5B. Can we come to grips with the vastness and repercussions of that change within the scope of human rationality and its tools? I.e., I'm not convinced loss of patience is an adequate problem statement; its loss may be a necessity driven by a changed world, a loss that must be compensated by new ways.

I would agree with that, Daniel, depending on the definition of "reality". As I sit here at this computer, the "real" world is the river outside my window, and the geese swimming there, and the wind bending the trees. That natural "reality" is never "baggage" and will continue long after humans are gone. I know, speaking for myself, I need to spend much more time there. For me, only the literature which remains connected to the deeper truths of that natural reality and our place in it as humans can help me to make "meaningful changes".

It's the HUMAN-made baggage that we have to shed. Tad Williams, in Mountain of Black Glass said: "That’s modern life, isn’t it?….Our lives aren’t even about doing real things, most of the time. We think and talk about people we’ve never met, pretend to visit places we’ve never actually been, discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Hell, it’s the Imagination Age. We’re living in our own minds: No…really we’re living in other peoples’ minds."

Every day we are given 24 hours on this planet. Some must be spent in sleep and duties--so what we do with our "free" time identifies who we are. As McLuhan warned, someone wants to "buy" those precious hours, and it's easy to let them. Ortega y Gasset, Jose points out: "Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are."

Lily wrote: "Julia wrote: "...The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. At the risk of making a VERY long post, these are the quotes I saved and sent to my family...."

Lily, the world certainly has changed, and in all my Climate Change Coursera classes, those 7 billion will go to 9 billion almost certainly. My issue is with the "haves/have not's" of the world. This January, I was stunned by the release of this report:

"As the World Economic Forum begins in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam International has released a new report called, “Working for the Few,” that contains some startling statistics on what it calls the “growing tide of inequality.”

The report states:
•Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
•The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
•The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world. bold mine
•Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.
•The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.
•In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

Asserting that some economic inequality is necessary to foster growth, it also warns that extreme levels of wealth concentration “threaten to exclude hundreds of millions of people from realizing the benefits of their talents and hard work.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin...
http://www.theguardian.com/global-dev...

In addition:
"Ten countries – India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – account for almost three-quarters of the world's illiterate adults, according to the report. Globally, almost two-thirds of illiterate adults are women, a figure that has remained almost static since 1990."
http://www.theguardian.com/global-dev...

And so I go back to post 2, with the segment from Siegel: "As we labor over our public enigmas, the country does not seem to be becoming more equal or more fair to people left behind. Perhaps, on some level, and in the face of social problems that are ultimately simple cases of gross injustice, we find these murky ethical situations gratifying, as if they offer us an excuse—human existence is just too complicated!—not to try to make meaningful changes in our public life."

These vast problems call for a global awareness that simply isn't there in many cases. You say: "I'm not convinced loss of patience is an adequate problem statement; its loss may be a necessity driven by a changed world, a loss that must be compensated by new ways."

If the price of our changed and terribly unfair world is the loss of the time and patience for "deep thought", then the future will be very bleak. I still hold that literacy links to hope--that books can be a form of life preserver when they do what William Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The writer must leave no room "for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."

I believe we DO have such writers today--and that words have power to help us in terms of Faulkner's vision for writers. News can never replace literature as a life preserver for the human spirit, imho. Whether or not we grab that preserver is up to us who are lucky enough to be ABLE to read.

No simple answers to any of this--but at least, if we're asking the questions, we're not trapped in the shallows of focusing on those "smoldering trees".

Julia wrote: "If the price of our changed and terribly unfair world is the loss of the time and patience for "deep thought", then the future will be very bleak...."

The need for deep thought is a very different statement, Julia, than "awaiting time's slow and scrupulous winnowing." (Sidebar: the historic way of identifying literary classics, too.)

While there are certainly limitations and risks to new ways of deep thought arising out of multiple, diverse, simultaneous, and technology-aided innovation which often need rapid rather than slow winnowing, I'm only suggesting we must continue to find such means, rather than necessarily being able to depend upon patience and time.

I'll let others comment on the inequality statistics you cite. If I can enable one more person to understand and ponder the one simple fact of the change in demographics, that will suffice for me here -- 7B or greater human world population versus ~1.5B historically. (See Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in Our Lifetime -- or perhaps his later publications. I haven't kept pace with his work.)

I definitely agree to Lily about the change in population being an important point here. About the pace changing, that's also curious and I have been thinking about it for quite a while. For example.. I have tried watching shows from the 60's (Doctor Who fan.. trying to catch up..).. And I noticed that by today's standards - nothing is happening there. I had to watch it on 155% speed in order not to feel like I'm wasting my limited time and that I'm bored. And it wasn't hard to hear them talk faster. Really, 155% in the 60's seems the pace we have in movies today. Isn't that curious..?

I don't quite agree about the multitasking though. I have always been one to multitask (one of my funnest times was when I was talking to friends in my language, reading in Japanese at the same time and checking the dictionary, and also signing along to David Bowie in between). But I've never had a problem with focusing on a book deeply. If anything, that gives me more abilities to do so - for example, I can sit in the living room while my mom is watching some movie I don't care for in the least and read in the meantime.. At the same time spending time with my mom, cause I don't want to be all alone in another room, even if it's silent. I believe these multitasking abilities gave me a chance to learn to focus even better - but I don't know if it's true for everyone.

It is true though, that the quantity of info, the internet included, is teaching us to become distracted. I too face those problems - sometimes it gets annoying, when I was switching something on to read/do something, but got sidetracked on something else, and then I totally don't remember where I was going.. This happens more often now than it used to before. It's quite annoying.

When it comes to reading books though.. I don't agree to the fact that 'something has changed because of the media'. It hasn't. You have the misconception that before TV and internet, everyone read books. Nope. THEY DIDN'T. There was always a select group of book readers, even in Victorian times - there were people who read books, there were people who went hunting or chatting up attractive military men. Reading was always a very specific interest, and if anything, we have more readers now than before, because of bigger literacy. What bothers me more isn't how many people read or don't read, it's what they read, because if you look at the number of fluff books that are all repetitive, genre-based and paced to be like movies that are sold and bought.. I don't even know how people can read some of that useless waste of paper and ink (or pixels, I suppose, if we're talking ebook..), but they do read that, and they read that in bigger volume than actual thought-provoking stuff. None of us are sin-free of course, me neither, but I still like a stimulating read, even if I read something light sometimes as well. But I've spoken to people who KNOW that what they're reading is copy-paste repetitive stuff, and yet they say, I know, it's so totally true, but you shouldn't overthink things... That is to say, they want to be reading un-serious fluff and not be thinking about anything.
So it always comes down to your choice if you want to think or if you don't. If you'll let your mind be overflowing with what they show on the news (and probably invent half of it) or choose to not watch the news at all. At least that's what I do, but I find myself a minority even in my own home.

As for the 1% that Julia was talking about.. What scares me about that the most is that.. During Nazi times, the Jews were the 1%. Now we all know what happened there. Today's 1% might be more powerful and might not let this happen, but that won't stop the vast majority from feeling seething hate, and that never leads anywhere good.

I think I had further thoughts, but this is already long, and you guys have posted to much interesting material that it's just too much and I'm sure it'll resurface in later responses.

Daniel wrote: "...Her frustration is shared by novelists from Tim Parks to Naipaul, Roth, and Munro, the last three of whom have given up writing fiction altogether...."

Is the above statement true? Munro has talked about giving up writing, period. But her last book of stories was still classified as fiction, wasn't it? Aren't these more writers at the end of their careers than ones turning to non-fiction? Or am I just not au courant.

Evelina, one of your sentences really struck me: "So it always comes down to your choice if you want to think or if you don't." Great point--and again, it's that "choice" business.

And Lily, you really call me to "think" when you say: "While there are certainly limitations and risks to new ways of deep thought arising out of multiple, diverse, simultaneous, and technology-aided innovation which often need rapid rather than slow winnowing, I'm only suggesting we must continue to find such means, rather than necessarily being able to depend upon patience and time."

I just don't think we can "invent" any new way that will equal the enduring power of "patience and time." Carr's argument in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is that we're literally creating new synaptic patterns in our brains that are gearing toward shallower and faster thinking, and the media certainly encourages that type of thought.

But then I'm 73 and my heroes are Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Like them, I believe nature has rhythms that can help us as humans if we just keep its tempo. Yet here I am, sitting at my computer, rather than watching the sunrise over the river. I'm a good example of KNOWING how I should live but CHOOSING not to. Like Evelina, I will fast forward through parts of DVD's, and I enjoy the little "tidbits" of knowledge that the Internet can give (one of my friends calls that "collecting mental lint").

However, I do believe there are still thinkers who realize the value of synchronizing themselves to natural rhythms rather than human patterns. Gretel Ehrlich expresses this idea in The Solace of Open Spaces: “The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. "That "obtuse padding" is all around us, and I do think perhaps the developed countries' addiction to "busyness" is insulation against having to deal with those "difficult truths".

So Lily, I hope you're right--that perhaps humans can find a different "winnowing" process rather than patience and time. I'm just glad that some today still choose the longer process, allowing thoughts to percolate and distill into wisdom.

Julia wrote: "Like Evelina, I will fast forward through parts of DVD's, and I enjoy the little "tidbits" of knowledge that the Internet can give (one of my friends calls that "collecting mental lint")..."

I must comment on this: I didn't mean fast-forwarding :) there was no actual skipping involved. Just watching it all faster, with faster sound as well. You can do that on some (probably most) media players on the computer.

Oh, technopeasant here :-) I'm still using DVD's, which are becoming like the old 8-track music players. I fast forward what I call the "car chase" scenes (even if cars aren't actually involved)--the parts where lots of things get blown up. Seems almost obligatory in popular films.

I fast-forward films altogether (read: I don't really watch any :) with the exception of Doctor Who)

But I won't say anything more about this. Let's not turn the subject away :) I'm still waiting for awesome answers about this really interesting topic. Not so many people have noticed it, it seems, when it's really a good one.

Lily wrote: "Is the above statement true? Munro has talked about giving up writing, period. But her last book of stories was still classified as fiction, wasn't it? Aren't these more writers at the end of their careers than ones turning to non-fiction? Or am I just not au courant."

It's a curious statement, to be sure, and one that I too saw as writers at the end of their careers. I certainly haven't read similar complaints from these authors. Overstatement, perhaps?

In tandem with the Karl Ove Knausgård phenomenon, however, I can see it speaking to a blurred line between fiction and reality. Knausgaard's oeuvre is being marketed as fiction despite being an autobiography written in literary form. Was Dear Life perhaps autobiography disguised in fictional clothing?

I personally wonder whether Siegel is simply too in love with his own conclusion. He raises some really good points, but there are quite a few yawning gaps in the arguments.

Julia wrote: "Oh, technopeasant here :-) I'm still using DVD's, which are becoming like the old 8-track music players. I fast forward what I call the "car chase" scenes (even if cars aren't actually involved)--t..."

I can only fast-forward when I'm watching a movie by myself, but, oh, how I do love to skip the obligatory car chase scenes in paint-by-number movies!

Julia wrote: "So Lily, I hope you're right--that perhaps humans can find a different "winnowing" process rather than patience and time. I'm just glad that some today still choose the longer process, allowing thoughts to percolate and distill into wisdom. ..."

Julia -- the wisdom processes of time certainly will continue, they just aren't likely to be adequate in and of themselves to, for example, a) generate the innovation necessary to fuel the economies necessary to provide livelihoods to growing populations, b) avert environmental disasters, c)....

It isn't necessarily that individual efforts will speed considerably, but certainly that cooperative efforts can. (I am, in some ways, deeply heartened by the international efforts to find the missing Malaysian jetliner. May there be models of how to carry out international cooperation that can grow out of that sad, expensive effort, ala what has been learned by the coordination necessary for space exploration. I also hope that multiple faiths/non-faiths may be learning from each other as they find ways to support the families and friends of the victims.) It is a massive challenge for writers to bring such collective efforts to more general comprehension. It is perhaps easier to write about what goes wrong with such vast operations than what goes "right."

I read the article. I don't think the article does a very good job of explaining what it is comparing the "news" to, i.e., what exactly was Trilling's definition of literary art? But, what I gather from the article is that literary art used to be the way that complex moral issues were presented for consideration and now complex moral issues show up in what is now considered to be "news."

If that is somewhat close to the hypothesis presented by the article, I have to answer the question NO, news has not replacing literature. First, I don't buy the premise of the article. While today we are presented with the principals of juicy news publicly debating the merits of their positions, the issues are not new they are just more known. The general public seems to like to wallow in mud with the principals and argue.

But the issues are not new. And most of the news outlets do not present the stories in an unbiazed manner - the news they present is designed to highlight the unusual, the gore, the horror. In their need to fill the 24/7 news cycle, they toss out much that is irrelevant and perhaps untrue. In this sense, they are like the unreliable narrator in a book.

So, for me, the news cannot replace literature. Rather, it can provide siturations for the novelist to build on, in a more structured manner, that permits the reader to explore the issue.

Julie is right that it is hard to coverup instances of bad actions, but the news does not and cannot guide how those moral issues are examined. Literature can. The US internment of Japanese citizens saw, I believe, little news coverage. But the exploration of that topic in fiction in Snow Falling on Cedars was invaluable. If it happened today, we would still need the literature.

I find myself watching and listening to less and less "news" because it is so full of irrelevant crap that does not help me consider the underlying moral issues.

I agree, Linda--I've dropped my cable, and it's nice to avoid the "talking heads". It's possible to do my own research through sources I trust, rather than be hit by 15 second "sound bytes".

I like the way you say it: "So, for me, the news cannot replace literature. Rather, it can provide situations for the novelist to build on, in a more structured manner, that permits the reader to explore the issue."

Linda wrote: "The US internment of Japanese citizens saw, I believe, little news coverage. But the exploration of that topic in fiction in Snow Falling on Cedars was invaluable. If it happened today, we would still need the literature."

Oh, I like this. A great argument!

Surely, though, a journalist is duty-bound to report what(s)he believes to be the truth, even allowing for personal bias in the matter?
You could conceivably write a novel in which the assassination of Kennedy was a good thing. The journalist, however literate /literary they may be, (s)he is is reporting the "is", from their point of view. The author deals more with the "what if?" from the point of view that takes their fancy: their own, an alien's, a Basque man's or a Mongolian woman's.
I feel that the article deals more in aspects of the soap opera of our daily lives than the literary reading of them.

Not particularly profound, but here is a Guardian (British, Jonathan Jones) response to Siegel's article:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesi...

For Lee Siegel's oeuvre.

Pip wrote: "Surely, though, a journalist is duty-bound to report what(s)he believes to be the truth, even allowing for personal bias in the matter? ..."

Do you really think that's what happens..? Honest journalism is in its death throes right now.. Most news sources write/announce for popularity, a lot of that having nothing to do with truth. And nothing to do with what the writer of it thinks of as truth. They're just trying to make money. If you read the headlines sometimes, they don't even match some of the articles - rather, you'll open up an article and it won't contain anything as sensational as the headline which made you look at it in the first place. That's the mildest occasion too.

I know what you mean, Evelina, but I would argue that your examples are editorial rather than strictly journalistic questions.
There's an element of censorship in every single news report in the world, plus every paper has a house style which the journalist needs to respect if they're to be published - so you could say that "truth" is impossible to achieve in a news report and of course, you'd be right. But I think it is the striving despite these boundaries which differentiates a journalist from an author of fiction.

At the behest of our librarian, our book club read Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload by Bill Kovach. Publishers Weekly said:

"Veteran journalists Kovach and Rosenstiel (The Elements of Journalism) begin their intelligent and well-written guidebook by assuring readers this is not unfamiliar territory. The printing press, the telegraph, radio, and television were once just as unsettling and disruptive as today's Internet, blogs, and Twitter posts. But the rules have changed. The gatekeepers of information are disappearing. Everyone must become editors assuming the responsibility for testing evidence and checking sources presented in news stories, deciding what's important to know, and whether the material is reliable and complete. Utilizing a set of systemic questions that the authors label "the way of skeptical knowing," Kovach and Rosenstiel provide a roadmap for maintaining a steady course through our messy media landscape. As the authors entertainingly define and deconstruct the journalism of verification, assertion, affirmation, and interest group news, readers gain the analytical skills necessary for understanding this new terrain."

The strongest point for me in the book is the idea of our OWN responsibility in choosing our sources of information. Gone are the days when a Walter Cronkite would verify the news FOR us. Ever since the advent of 24/7 news coverage, the "blur" of information overload has become increasingly overwhelming.

I really like the last chapter, which stressed that we should first decide WHAT we want to have information about--and suddenly I was liberated from having to think of news as mainly political. The authors suggest that we should have a list of interests and hone in on deepening our knowledge about and appreciation of THOSE interests--rather than letting the bombardment of media choose for us.

I agree with Linda and Julia, I think. To me, the premise of the article is absolutely false, so the rest of it is rubbish. Complexity is not the measure of great art. Period, though we can admire the complexity of great art. News in current times is only complex because our culture is without moral norms.

The article does remind me that I need to spend far less time on these inane issues. The irony, by reading the article and commenting on the thread, I suppose I am defeating my own purpose. I do waste too much time.

Mea culpa as well, Carl--I'm off to read! :-)

@19Daniel wrote: "Linda wrote: 'The US internment of Japanese citizens saw, I believe, little news coverage. But the exploration of that topic in fiction in Snow Falling on Cedars was invaluable. If it happened today, we would still need the literature.'

Oh, I like this. A great argument!"

As I was storing some books today, I came across this from Michelle which reminded me of this discussion here on the relative value of books versus news:

"... The Winds of War gives a comprehensive background on the military and political situation in a much more engaging way than a non-fiction book could. It also paints a broader picture by looking at the situation on the ground in both Europe as well as America. Despite its gigantic heft, the book moves very fast. I was sad to turn the last page, although since we were only at Pearl Harbor, I knew we still had a ways to go...."

I do think we know that either fiction or news can sometimes be misleading. I struggle with what "modern classics" to bother reading sometimes when reviews tell me their positions may be outmoded or biased to the period in which they were written. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is such a book that comes to mind -- one's time might well be better spent reading more recent accounts, yet this is a book that has influenced that thinking of a broad number of people and may be of as much interest for that reason as for its accuracy. (These are cases where the tests of time may well apply.)

In the final paragraphs of Roberto Calasso's book length essay Literature and the Gods , he draws an analogy between literature and an Attic vase dating back to the Peloponnesian Wars, suggesting literature is a triangulation of three aspects, a talking head (which may be severed), a recording hand, and an overseeing and compelling divinity. I suspect that it is the last that it is hardest for journalism to obtain within its frantic deadlines.

Excerpt from text: (view spoiler)[
"Literature is never the product of a single subject. There are always at least three actors: the hand that writes, the voice that speaks, the god who watches over and compels. Not that they look very different; all three are young, all have thick, snaky hair. They might easily be taken for three manifestations of the same person. But that is hardly the point. We could call them the I, the Self, and the Divine. A continuous process of triangulation is at work between them. Every sentence, every form, is a variation within that force field. Hence the ambiguity of literature: because its point of view is incessantly shifting between these three extremes, without warning us, and sometimes without warning the author.....Was it a murder? Was it a sacrifice? It isn't clear, but the word will never cease to tell of it...."

After months, even years, of dipping into this text, I can finally claim to have read it, albeit not necessarily to have always understood! (hide spoiler)]

I just read this interesting article from The Atlantic, "Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers" by Scott Samuelson, Apr 29 2014: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/...

These paragraphs from the end of the article are powerful examples of the value of literature; Samuelson says:

"I recently got a letter from a former student, a factory worker, thanking me for introducing him to Schopenhauer. I was surprised, because I hadn’t assigned the German pessimist. The letter explained that I’d quoted some lines from Schopenhauer in class, and they’d sparked my student’s imagination. When he didn’t find what I’d quoted after reading all of volumes one and two of The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1, he started in on Parerga and Paralipomena, where he was eventually successful. Enclosing a short story that he’d recently written on a Schopenhauerian theme, he wrote me a long letter of thanks for inadvertently turning him on to a kindred mind.

Once, during a lecture I gave about the Stoics, who argue that with the proper spiritual discipline one can be truly free and happy even while being tortured, I looked up to see one of the students in tears. I recalled that her sister in Sudan had been recently imprisoned for challenging the local authorities. Through her tears my student was processing that her sister was likely seeking out a hard Stoic freedom as I was lecturing.

I once had a janitor compare his mystical experiences with those of the medieval Sufi al-Ghazali’s. I once had a student of redneck parents—his way of describing them—who read both parts of Don Quixote because I used the word “quixotic.” A mother who’d authorized for her crippled son a risky surgery that led to his death once asked me with tears in her eyes, “Is Kant right that the consequences of an action play no role in its moral worth?” A wayward veteran I once had in Basic Reasoning fell in love with formal logic and is now finishing law school at Berkeley.

The fire will always be sparked. Are we as a society going to fan it or try to extinguish it?"

Julia wrote: "I just read this interesting article from The Atlantic, "Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers" by Scott Samuelson, Apr 29 2014: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/......"

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." W. B. Yeats