{"id":1338,"date":"2014-06-15T19:01:03","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T02:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/?p=1338"},"modified":"2014-06-16T10:30:03","modified_gmt":"2014-06-16T17:30:03","slug":"on-cultural-pessimism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/06\/on-cultural-pessimism\/","title":{"rendered":"On cultural pessimism (updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"will<\/a>I have enjoyed many books by novelist and essayist Tim Parks (the novel Europa<\/em> my favorite). But I can’t agree with him in his latest piece<\/a> in the New York Review of Books<\/em>. He laments that in our busy lives, we don’t have time to absorb great, complex works of literature:<\/p>\n

Only yesterday a smart young Ph.D. student told me his supreme goal was to keep himself from checking his email more than once an hour, though he doubted he would achieve such iron discipline in the near future. At present it was more like every five to ten minutes. So when we read there are more breaks, ever more frequent stops and restarts, more input from elsewhere, fewer refuges where the mind can settle. It is not simply that one is interrupted; it is that one is actually\u00a0inclined<\/em>\u00a0to interruption. Hence more and more energy is required to stay in contact with a book, particularly something long and complex. …<\/p>\n

[H]ere is Dickens in a single sentence in\u00a0Our Mutual Friend<\/em>:<\/p>\n

“Having found out the clue to that great mystery how people can contrive to live beyond their means, and having over-jobbed his jobberies as legislator deputed to the Universe by the pure electors of Pocket-Breaches, it shall come to pass next week that Veneering will accept the Chiltern Hundreds, that the legal gentleman in Britannia\u2019s confidence will again accept the Pocket-Breaches Thousands, and that the Veneerings will retire to Calais, there to live on Mrs Veneering\u2019s diamonds (in which Mr Veneering, as a good husband, has from time to time invested considerable sums), and to relate to Neptune and others, how that, before Veneering retired from Parliament, the House of Commons was composed of himself and the six hundred and fifty-seven dearest and oldest friends he had in the world.”<\/p>\n

The passage comes toward the end of this eight-hundred-page novel. All kinds of previous references have to be kept in mind and some knowledge of the English parliamentary system and the jargon of the time is essential. Dickens is a world to immerse yourself in for periods of not less than half an hour, otherwise the mind will struggle to accustom itself to the aura of it all and the constant shift between different voices and rhetorical ploys.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But, as I’m sure Parks knows, those who read Our Mutual Friend<\/em> when it was first published had to do so by reading short, monthly excerpts published over a period of a year and a half. If readers in the 1860s could keep straight in their minds from month to month Veneering’s relationship with his fellow members of Parliament, surely we can too, even though we have to keep up with our email.<\/p>\n

The world is different than it used to be, and so is how we consume culture. When I took my first academic post, there was no internet, email, or desktop computers – we checked the post for mail, and walked to the library to find books and journals. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking cultural life was richer then, as we recall favorite books or records or reading rooms from the time fondly, and curse our current overbooked lives. It is possible to daydream about an imaginary time when we had the leisure to read a few hundred pages of Dickens in a sitting.<\/p>\n

A real danger is that some go a step further and believe that younger people today are not capable<\/em> of such rich cultural lives, that they have “the attention spans of mice<\/a>“, that they have “an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations<\/a>.” Parks continues:<\/p>\n

I will go out on a limb with a prediction: the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But on what grounds? It’s not my experience with contemporary literary fiction.<\/p>\n

The students I teach are mostly (though not exclusively) twenty-somethings. They don’t have the same cultural references I do, and it would be silly for me to lament that. My cultural life when I was their age was different. But I don’t want to jump to the conclusion my cultural life at that age was better<\/em>, that I read better books and listened to better music. \u00a0My students read books – different ones than I do, usually – \u00a0go to museums and concerts, and appreciate complexity in art. They – all of us – have more, and more affordable, access to great literature, music, film, theatre and visual art than any generation before. For all the things that might be wrong in our world there is at least that to celebrate. Some cultural optimism, please.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: An interesting collection of responses to the Tim Parks article, from The Guardian<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have enjoyed many books by novelist and essayist Tim Parks (the novel Europa my favorite). But I can’t agree with him in his latest piece in the New York Review of Books. He laments that in our busy lives, we don’t have time to absorb great, complex works of literature: Only yesterday a smart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1338","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-issues","8":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Students-reading-in-the-college-library.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3dIW5-lA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1050,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/02\/is-amazon-good-for-readers\/","url_meta":{"origin":1338,"position":0},"title":"Is Amazon good for readers?","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"February 14, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"I enjoyed George Packer's New Yorker article on Amazon, and recommend it. ArtsJournal's link to the story has the heading \"Is Amazon good for books? Not just publishers, but books themselves?\" The New Yorker's own sub-heading is \"Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?\" I find\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 2 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/02\/is-amazon-good-for-readers\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"good for this reader","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/amazon-warehouse-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/amazon-warehouse-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/amazon-warehouse-2.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/amazon-warehouse-2.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3683,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2024\/12\/on-owning-many-books\/","url_meta":{"origin":1338,"position":1},"title":"On owning many books","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"December 27, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"\"He [Gabriel Oak] also thought of plans for fetching his few utensils and books from Norcombe.\u00a0The Young Man\u2019s Best Companion,\u00a0The Farrier\u2019s Sure Guide,\u00a0The Veterinary Surgeon,\u00a0Paradise Lost,\u00a0The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress,\u00a0Robinson Crusoe, Ash\u2019s\u00a0Dictionary, and Walkingame\u2019s\u00a0Arithmetic, constituted his library; and though a limited series, it was one from which he had acquired more sound\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-6.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-6.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-6.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-6.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-6.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-6.png?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2148,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2016\/12\/childrens-books\/","url_meta":{"origin":1338,"position":2},"title":"Children’s books","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"December 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"It's an evergreen story: great books are removed from a school's library because a few parents have complained about their being unsuitable for children. 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