Friday Front: Ursula K LeGuin on Books and Publishing
In this month’s Harper’s, Ursula K LeGuin asks a very good question: why are big corporations interested in literary publishing? Why don’t they leave it alone? Click through to Portico, below, to read more.
Midway through her essay, Ms LeGuin discusses the “alternatives” to reading.
Of course books are now only one of the “entertainment media,†but when it comes to delivering actual pleasure, they’re not a minor one. Look at the competition. Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet.
Ahem. I make no claim to creativity here at The Daily Blague. But I daresay I’m as literate and reflective as the run of good, published books. Ms LeGuin, you need to get out more!
