My friend Alan Jacobs, the author of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, has released a new Kindle essay on his history as a reader. This is what I’ll be reading as I fly back to Sweden tomorrow. Or, at least at the bar at Heathrow during my layover.
In the Islamic community, Ahmad said, dispute centers around the religious sanctity of texts. “From a young age, we’re taught never to place other books above the Quran. The book itself must be revered because it contains the word of God.” But on an iPad, the Quran lies alongside “other digital content such as music and pictures.”
Kaunfer, for instance, believes that the current revolution is not so very different from the one that occurred some seventeen hundred years ago, when the Mishnah (the Jewish code of law), hitherto communicated orally, was first written down. Then, he said, memory took a blow, and it has taken another one with the coming of the handheld device. But this isn’t necessarily bad: “In many ways, pulling text out of one’s pocket is truer to the way Jews experienced text in ancient times, when they pulled it out of their heads.”
—“Screen Savers,” over at The New Yorker [via Paul]
Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, has an essay up at Mother Jones with the alarmist title “The Death of Fiction?”: he points out, to the surprise of nobody, I expect, that the magazine component of the fiction industry is in bad shape right now. He examines the systemic failure that brought us here: part of the problem is the over-supply of reading. The way that we find interesting writing has changed, and we can more easily find interesting content without reading literary journals than was possible twenty years ago. Another is the over-supply of writers: over the past two decades universities have rightly seen adding MFA programs as cash cows, as most students pay full price. When creative writing programs produce, as he suggests, 60,000 new writers a decade, this has the added benefit for the universities of creating a steady stream of writing instructors willing to serve as adjuncts; a huge supply of competition means that they don’t need to be paid very much. There’s a labor problem here: the universities have given their students the misleading idea that writing fiction can be a sustainable career when they have a better chance of supporting themselves by buying scratch tickets. It’s an unfortunate situation; when this is combined with the decline of paying outlets for fiction, it’s easy to project, as he suggests, the death of writing fiction as a paid pursuit.
It’s worth reading this in conjunction with a post on the Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog, which states the problem more baldly, pointing out an imbalance between readers and writers:
Here at VQR we currently have more than ten times as many submitters each year as we have subscribers. And there’s very, very little overlap. We know—we’ve checked. So there’s an ever-growing number of people writing and submitting fiction, but there’s an ever-dwindling number of people reading the best journals that publish it.
Underlying the series’ preference for writers appears to be…the belief that someone’s being a good writer makes her eo ipso a good reader—which is the same reasoning that undergirds most blurbs and MFA programs, and is both logically invalid and empirically false (trust me).
[David Foster Wallace in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007]
