Book Culture?

About a week ago, Morris Dickstein posted a transcript of his remarks given at a panel on “The Next Decade of Book Culture” from about a week prior. He covers a lot of the same old ground, laying out the same old facts, with about as much excitement as found in this very sentence. This isn’t to say that the ostensible death of “print media” is a good thing, just that we’ve been over it and over it and over it. Once it’s been discussed on Good Morning America, there’s little point in rehashing. For the most part, his analysis of the changes to book culture and the context that have brought them about, is solid.

Still, there’s a thinly veiled undercurrent of book reviewers collectively whining about the prevalence of the uneducated opinion in new, semi-permanent manifestations. It’s a little bit funny to watch. I understand their concern; the strand of horse hair holding Damocles’ sword aloft is being eroded by developments in material culture, threatening their relevance and income. Something so simple as barbed wire effectively eliminated the economic viability of being a cowboy. As a poet, I get it. There are more poets courting publication, more people reading poetry, but fewer culturally significant voices (of real merit, anyway). People are reading more, but there are more people writing and, frankly, most of them suck. I probably occupy that place for at least a few of the people that have read / heard my work. I don’t think our relationship with literature has changed terribly much, we’re just more exposed to it. Five minutes on a search engine can provide months of reading material, much of which is mediocre. The crap wasn’t quite so accessible, there were marginally fewer consumers of marginally more refined taste, and the opinions of the uninformed weren’t near so prevalent. The changes are significant enough to have an impact on the individual writer, but it’s mostly superficial and predicated on a short / selective memory.

What has changed is that the uninformed opinions of literature are no longer limited to conversation and private letters, but are cross-posted throughout the internet for any interested parties to read. I don’t feel that he makes this distinction clear enough, if at all. The disdain with which he refers to the democratization of literary critique strikes me as borne more of wounded pride than anything else. There has always been shit, and there has always been a bunch of academics ignoring it or gushing over it, vilifying the next generations’ classics. For example, while there’s a lot of garbage slam poetry, and a lot of justified debate as to the “soul” or whatever of slam, there’s too much awesome that was shat upon by ivory tower tools trying to maintain academia’s tight grip on poetry, the preservation of their increasingly conservative tastes. Sucks to lose your job, especially if the only other occupations available is teaching English composition and intro creative writing to undergraduates (I’ve already chosen that path, so there’s no disappointment for me). Still, as he touches on in his allusion to the tablets of Sinai, there’s a long history of the culture of literature.

The thing that really bugged me is his assertion that movies don’t constitute literature. This is predicated on an idealistic re-imagining of literary history, as if there isn’t at least a handful of forgotten mediocrity for every text that has stood the test of time, or at least is erroneously claimed to have done so. It’s predicated on arbitrary attachment to particular manifestations. Literature includes the oral tradition, tablets, hand-scribed tomes, leaflets, and traditionally printed books. It also includes film, video games, spoken word (including Tony Brown’s one-time readings: writing poems for one performance, then destroying the only physical copies on stage), and pretty much any act of expression seeking to use some form or medium to communicate something bigger (as in, crap fiction is about what happens within, but literature uses what happens to communicate something else, like The Old Man and the Sea as allegory for Jesus). Granted, most film isn’t very good, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t literature.

If these kind of logical holes and homeric nods are characteristic of the professional book reviewer, what are we really losing out on? There will always be uneducated crap and educated crap; at least these mostly marginal changes in book culture shake the foundations of that ivory tower. I’d rather decide for myself who has something worthwhile to say instead of being stuck with a self-important cabal of elitists that are just as off-the-mark as the rest of society.