Refutations Considered Unnecessary

[Ray Dillinger]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Tim May wrote:

>It's not that I'm jaded, it's that there are TOO MANY DAMNED BOOKS 
>out there. I spend a lot of time in Borders and Bookshop Santa Cruz, 
>two very large and well-stocked bookstores in my town. (Declan can 
>confirm this, though he may not have seen the new Borders yet.) I 
>browse, in the classical sense, the New Books section most times I'm 
>in there. The turnover is incredible. The range of topics is 
>incredible, from climbings of an obscure peak in the Himalayas, to 
>what women want in their sociology classes, to what the AOL-Time 
>Warner deals means for prospects of peace on the Korean peninsula. 
>And, every month, new books on quantum weirdness, new books on online 
>privacy, new books on the history of the Web, etc. A flood of 
>writers, a flood of books. The topics get more specialized in the 
>same way Ph.D. theses have gotten so specialized. The grand 
>unifications are few and far between.

Something in the way you write that reminds me of my brother.  He 
watches Television.  He doesn't watch actual shows.  He flips to 
a random channel, watches it for 15-30 seconds, flips to another 
random channel, watches *that* for 15-30 seconds, repeat for hours...
He's not interested in actual shows, but he is fascinated by 
Television - what kind of images people compose, what kind of ads 
different channels have, choices in background music and how 
they've changed over years of soap operas, fashions in body type 
represented by shows of different eras, etc. It forms some kind 
of gestalt to him, some fairly sensible idea of how the filters 
on human experience are and how they've been changing. 

Me, it just drives bugfuck.

>Who reads this stuff?

The literate subsection of society has clearly become more 
diverse, during the same period in which the aliterate have 
become less so.  This is interesting.

>Very few current books actually are _important_. 

Perhaps true, but no two people have the same list.

>With the reported declines in reading amongst school children 
>(various reasons, from poor schooling to lots of other choices like 
>videos and games), and this explosion of titles, and with bookstores 
>bigger than they ever were when I was a kid....hmmmhhh, lots of 
>interesting forces about to collide.

Collided, I'd have said, in the last ten years.  It's just that 
we can't fully see the consequences yet. 

				Bear