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Originally Posted by Pookie

I agree that books are just one form of media. But it's one that I feel more passionate about than any other, including music.

But my love of books is a personal thing, and I'm also in the lucky position of working with books every day, and so I talk about them every day with other people who love them as much as I do.

during the 70's/80's some european critics were discussing the "death of the novel" as well as the "death of the author" and other such crap. all of them have now come back to apologize for their asinine predictions of doom with which the literary establishment shot itself in the ass.

while there was a postmodern crisis of the novel, in retrospective it was nothing more than a fit of the hiccups. and while europe (and to some extent north america) was pull its hairs in despair, third-world writers were cranking out great works, and the underground (genres like say science fiction, which dead-air was reminding us of) was undergoing their own earth-shaking revolutions.

the era of experimentation and predictions of disintegration are over though, now again we value interesting characters, compelling plots, and good prose. one of the problems these days however is that most new novels seem to have been written in a hurry, in order to meet the deadlines of merchandising campaigns... that is perhaps why the novel matters less today than before. not that writers never wrote under pressure, but can you imagine another finnegan's wake being published these days?

...and another thing is the same old argument we've been having here about revolutions and what not. while there are still some "committed writers" who address social issues and the like, there is little hope these days that "art will change the world", and so the beautifully heroic pipe dream of revolutionizing the world by revolutionizing literature is all but lost.

however.... things change, times change, and the most interesting books usually come out of times of crisis. right now society is pretty stagnant, except perhaps for technology, and that is why the most interesting work of recent years is not in traditional fiction but in science fiction.

one last thing-- as a former member of a writing program, i think the problem with good writing (as well as other arts) is that the arts, in general, are now under the patronage of universities-- at least in america. which has brought on the most inbred, narcissistic, and self-cannibalizing cultural elite in... history? cookie-cutter fiction workshops, poets who only read other poets and teach other future poets, and the whole debacle that's being discussed in the arts thread. it is tricky because nowadays everyone who wants to become "an artist" has to follow the same cloned programs, be it the iowa writers workshop or some mfa in painting or what not. science fiction writers have stayed cleared of that, but since the "cyberpunk revolution" academia has been taking an interest in the genre and i don't know how long (or if in fact it's now in place) until we start getting "science fiction writing programs" that kill the creativity of the whole thing.

anyway, i was up all night & i'm a bit sleepy and tired so that's all of my contribution right now.