Sheila, it seems you don't read carefully. I was talking about the activities of Oprah's book club, the swinging camera shots of her audience, which consists mostly of women about your age, waving the books over their heads, thrilling to the hype of ... Steinbeck?
Why not thrilling to Steinbeck? It doesn’t seem stange to me, Steinbeck is great! It seems strange that in our society a bunch of people reading him seems strange!
This is a curious cultural phenomenon. I'm not content to say "all reading is good" and complacently leave it at that.
Ok. I don’t know why, but that’s ok.
Anyway, that phenomenon is what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about your teenage years. I'm not talking about your daughter. I never said that only middle-aged women read Steinbeck.
I am talking about the intersection of commerce and art. And one the one hand, Sheila, I agree with you. I want to live in a world where people read literature. And when millions of people are reading Steinbeck, that's good.
Ok, got it: intersection of commerce and art. You like that people read and that lots of people are reading Steinbeck.
On the other hand, I don't want to live in a world where a single media mogul can so pervasively influence literary trends, nor in a world where an entire demographic does what one person tells it to do.
That is a scary reality.
HOWEVER, if that is what you are really worried about (not literary elitism), it seems silly to worry about Oprah compared to the REAL power brokers out there who control such large portions of America’s media today that they ‘pervasively influence literary trends’ AND political trends, AND economic trends, AND moral trends etc! And they are not just influencing one demographic! Not only that, thanks to the FCC, these same people will now own even GREATER amounts of the media and have even greater influence because of the new change in the law. Now that is something to worry about.
Hell, The Disney Corp scares the crap out of me. Those guys make Oprah look like nothing. And talk about homogenizing and mass marketing literature and art! Look at what they did to The Hunchback of Notre Dame! These guys are criminal!
And you are worried about Oprah having too much influence? She just has one show, a web site, a few books and a charity organization.
I also don't want to live in a world where art is bowdlerized in shallow TV "discussions" ("It's a page turner!"; "It's like a movie!")
I understand that since you are such an intellectual, these ‘shallow’ discussions are at times tedious for you. Obviously the show is not for people as ‘deep’ as you.
Untill you can live in a world where everyone is as smart as you, you will have to put up with these things. I am sure Jehovah will take care of that in the new system!
with merchandise tie-ins (even if this raises money for charity, there's still something creepy about it, and it's that "something" I'm trying to understand).
I’m trying to understand, too.
I have similar reservations about Harry Potter. It's a franchise, but is it literature?
Yes, it is literature. Children’s literature.
Harold Bloom, portentous/pretentious ass that he is, might be asking the right questions. Are people reading for the right reasons?
Do tell: what are the wrong reasons for reading a novel? And who decides that?
Are they even reading for the reasons they think they're reading?
Well, since they are mostly ‘shallow’ people, probably not. Poor dears. I'm sure you know their motivations.
On the other hand, I've been to my share of graduate seminars, and I've seen great books disemboweled by the harsh scalpel of theory, in the hallowed name of "criticism." And I felt that was a disservice to art as well. Academia, with its descent into the exceedingly esoteric world of theory, isn't always doing what it should with literature, and in the wake of that failure, perhaps an Oprah-messiah is needed?
I think she obviously was a positive for just for getting people to read books again.
(Oh, and what is with all this religious language? ‘Oprah messiah’? Humm…perhaps my theory in my post above was correct!!)
Anyway, if you can stay in the context of these remarks, Sheila, you might have something useful to say in this discussion. I'd love for you to disagree with me, but I'd prefer the disagreement to be relevant.
How condicending and rude.
As you can (or can't, or won't) see, I'm not 100% against what Oprah's doing. I recognize that she may be filling a void. I'm obviously ambivalent about it, though.
Ambivalent. Got it.
Interesting comment, and it provokes a question: Do kids read these books because all of the merchandising compels them to
YES
,
or does the merchandising exist because the kids love to read these books
YES
(and not other books)?
No. Harry Potter just opened the door for my son. Now he is into other science fiction/space type books.
However, my complaint has been less about the way kids read these books, more about the way (some) adults read them.
As for the adults: I dunno. I read the first book and I liked it fine, but I don’t really care to go out and read the rest. So I can’t speak for those adults who you are talking about. I do know that people read lots of different things for different reasons. I don't think adults read Harry Potter for good enough reasons for you. I think they read it for fun.
As for encouraging people to read, the distinction has to be made that she encourages people to read the books she herself selects and endorses
What do you expect her to encourage people to read? Books she doesn’t select and doesn’t endorse?
I doubt that many of Oprah's viewers read without her at their side. This brush with celebrity -- the thrill of reading what Oprah has written and understanding it more or less as she has -- is the draw, more so than the literature itself.
Wow you can read the minds of all those people. Wow.
You have called the people who read books on Oprah’s book list middle-aged, Oprah-messiah followers who engage in shallow discussions of literature just so they can brush with Oprah’s celebrity. You say they would not read if Oprah didn’t tell them to. None of these statements have any basis in objective fact. You lump a great deal of people into one group. You have a bias. You have a prejudice. You are stereotyping, just as Sheila said you were. It is really annoying.
Or so I'd argue.
Yes, you do argue! So do I. (JW hang-over.)
And finally, Dedalus, you were incredibly rude to Shiela in that last post and were a real ….(no name calling allowed on this board, but you know what you were).
I'm sure you were just not thinking when you posted like that.
-LisaBObeesa
