"'They fix attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind, once accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study,' the Anglican priest Vicesimus Knox complained. Thomas Jefferson warned that once readers fell under the spell of novels—'this mass of trash'—they would lose patience for 'wholsome reading.' They’d suffer from 'bloated imagination, sickly judgement, and disgust toward all the real business of life.'"
Writes Daniel Immerwahr, in
"What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction? From the pianoforte to the smartphone, each wave of tech has sparked fears of brain rot. But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focussing on" (The New Yorker).
Who decides what's the right or wrong thing to pay attention to? Freedom of thought jumps to mind as the best answer to that question.
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Novels were the Rom-Coms of the 18th Century.
Who knew?
I’ve been disciplining myself to return to long form reading. It’s tough. I’ve read “The Power of Positive Thinking,” “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and “One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich.” In the case of “Man’s Search” I read along with an audiobook obviously narrated by an AI bot.
Every generation has worried about this is not the mic drop argument many think it is.
It means such worries were at least partially justified, right? Because here we are, where the scolds said we'd be.
If Jane Austen was transported into a Culver's, would she think that her order of a butter burger with a shake and cheese curds represented a form of junk or a miracle? Which of these?
In past few years, I've found it much more difficult to find a new-release "good-read" novel at our local library. Maybe that's the problem too.
Long novels were considered "Junk food" back in the 18th century and the early 19th. But by the mid 1800s they stopped being so. And by the early 20th century reading great novels was considered the mark of an educated person.
I understand what the man is saying. Its not the length its the subject matter. But you can only have so much intellectual engagement with a tweet or a instagram or whatever.
I've noticed that after 20 years of the internet, my ability to watch long movies in the theater is pretty much gone. Give me a DVD so I can skip. Sitting through a live TV show without a remote or multi-tasking is almost impossible. So it has affected me.
I read the NYT's yesterday, and I"m amazed at how badly written and skimpy it is. And I'm comparing it to the NYT's of 30 years ago. You cant blame that on Tik tok, you can blame it on the NYT's readership which was has declined in IQ just like the writers.
Audiobooks of long novels, which get listened to intermittently, prove that it doesn't matter if you read the whole thing. It's just stuff going along.
Irony in reporting.
In Jane Austen's own day, reading sermons was regarded as a proper and uplifting activity. The novel came into its own as religious faith declined. The novel also provided readers with "news" about what was going on in society. Now we have so many other "news" outlets that long "literary" novels seem redundant. If you follow the style pages of the NYT, you don't need a Charles Dickens or a Sinclair Lewis to describe the foibles of modern life. Today, the novel is something of a half-way house between non-fiction material (reportage, journalism, essays, history, biography, autobiography, memoirs, archival material) and the eventual film or television series.
David Shields' Reality Hunger is worth a look. Joseph Epstein's and Joseph Bottum's recent books on the death or decline of the novel also have something to say but could have said it with fewer words and pages.
I haven't read a piece of fiction since I was in undergrad. It was The Dream Of The Red Chamber by Cao XueQin, which though a piece of fiction is a classic. My career forced me pretty early to abandon anything that wasn't informationally relevant and a potential waste of time. I'm not saying fiction is a waste of time, but I am saying that it's less functionally relevant than almost anything else you could using your limited learning resources for.
Maybe I'll pick it up again in retirement.
Don't respond to trolls. Just read and learn, asshole.
Now it looks like you're talking to yourself, trying to get yourself off he internetz. Don't you look like a silly ass? Don't respond to trolls, she says. They always get deleted and ann doesn't want to do the work of deleting the assholes who respond, when she has told you not too...
Do you guys not listen to ann cuz she's a chick, or you just don't listen in general? Don't ask stupid ass questions then get all sore when somebody you consider a troll gives you an honest answer...
You DIDN't know that people on the East Coast waiting breathlessly for the magazine serials to learn of Dicken's Little Nell? Of course, it was their version of "rom coms". Everybody who went to college and read Dickens knows that dumbass.
Yes, get off the internet, visit your library and humble yourself. YOu might fucking learn something, even from a woman. Dumbass.
Anthony Powell, where are you now?
I recently picked up, then put down, a book I first thought was surepticiously written about me. "A man Without Qualities" goes 1750 pages so had i finished it would qualify me as a critic defier and one who can get through long novels. Alas, I should have tried Joyce, it would have been easier.
Define 'long.'
Books were quite expensive to produce back then; the printing press brought costs lower and lower from the 1500s forward. Only the middle and upper classes could afford books, and they were carefully managed. Pulp fiction (self-destructive acid paper) brought the costs down during the Victorian era. The market forked into highbrow literature and disposable "penny dreadfuls" (the popcorn/action entertainment of that era).
Note that Shakespeare's Globe Theater was on the seedy south side of the Thames too.
Jane Austen has a young female character (in a novel) say something like: books of history are evidently designed to torment children; novels are meant to amuse adults. Which is the higher art form?
The young man who will eventually marry her says: tormenting children? That is exactly what should be done with them.
We have probably all had too much Disney.
Publishers don't really like long novels rn, because buyers don't seem to like them, but maybe it's like music streaming, where there is such a back catalogue of really great music, that any mass audience for it is lost, so the stuff that gets produced for the short attention span kids doesn't bother taking in to account people with more sophisticated tastes. So the way it is today is that if a writer varies too much from the 300 page format they are set up to handle in terms of costs and price point, well, the editor who picks it is going to have some 'splaining to do to the publisher.
Personally, I have found that my attention span has become so shortened that I don't even mind watching movies with commercials anymore.
Hmmm. The New Yorker seems to be curiously oblivious as to which category they belong to.
There are certain categories of productive activity which absolutely require a long attention span, just as there are jobs that require physical strength. Attention span can be trained into a person, and sapped out of them. We can't leave *all* of the important work of our society to autists like Bill Gates. For this reason it's not unreasonable to decry and bemoan the shortening of attention spans. It's a national security issue, to use the popular justification du jour, but it's true.
My issue is with the authors of today’s ‘mass of trash’ writing longer and longer books. Agatha Christie was able to solve a crime in 200 pages. The latest JKRowling mystery is 960 pages long. Average mysteries now are in the 400 to 600 page range. Absurd.
What I see today is the loss of the ability to read and write altogether in younger people. That trend, if it continues, will be catastrophic.
Average mysteries now are in the 400 to 600 page range. Absurd.
Difference between destination reading and journey reading. If the author's prose is engaging, then longer books are better. If it is not, a shorter book is still a drudgery.
I read a lot of fiction when I was young, very little from about 25 to 55, but since then I've been mixing it up more.
“the loss of the ability to read and write altogether in younger people”
Take a look at the popular fantasy books that young people read. All at least 500 pages long and most are a part of a series. Young people read a lot. I can’t vouch for the writing abilities but there sure is a lot of fan fiction out there.
Joe Rogan has a three-hour show that’s popular. The attention-span maybe just needs some freedom of movement. Can listen to Joe while exercising, walking, driving, or laying down.
Wow! Someone else who read The Dream of the Red Chamber! I had never heard of it (downside of SB from MIT) but picked it up randomly at the Raven Bookstore in Harvard Square a few years ago.
The surface plot of Don Quixote is about how reading novels about knights has addled Quixote's brain. Published 1605.
Kids were (maybe still are, I don't know with the TERF wars) willing to read Harry Potter novels. The longest of those was over 900 pages. Give them something they want to read and they'll read.
"Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was blamed for a spate of suicides during the ‘reading fever’ of the 1700s."
It's always something the old people blame. Novels, music, radio, television, telephones, computers, smart phones, social media, Tik Tok.
But should a student be trained in the 8 factors of study, if they develop discipline of intellect and regulation of emotions to become educated, what is discovered is that most writing in this modern age is empty, especially if it is academic writing. Parse out the emotion and often there is no there there.
And text books are designed to do the hard work of study, they do the work for the student who in the past "discovered some of the closer relations that a topic bears to life; when he has supplemented the thought of the author; when he has determined the relative importance of different parts and given them a corresponding organization; when he has passed judgement on their soundness and general worth;" and just dump the student into rote memorization since they've not had to apply any real effort to the material beyond light reading.
IMO, the word processor has been bad for long-form writing. The burden of rewrites used to encourage brevity and tightness. Now most long books I read are flabby and would have been better 200 pages shorter.
I have to throw in that a lot of what is considered 'Classic Literature' does not exactly encourage younger people to read. I'll point to a piece Larry Correia wrote that covers just that.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2011/01/12/correia-on-the-classics/
Also, as was pointed out earlier, education in many schools is crap anymore, and a lot of kids CAN'T BLOODY READ WORTH A DAMN. And it's screwing them.
I watch one hour of fiction a day with my wife during dinner. The rest of my distraction is what I'm doing right now and YouTube - informational content only. Otherwise I'm outdoors working on some project.
I use to read novels every night after television and before bed and on weekends - sitting in my patio with a bowl of popcorn and a Cherry Pepsi or while sitting on the beach. I read the newspaper with my coffee. I watched the morning and evening news - now I never do.
Distraction is a part of life. All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy.
“If the author's prose is engaging, then longer books are better. “
1. I like authors and directors who are respectful of the reader’s time.
Heart of Darkness is 160 pages long. No need to pad it to impress the reader with the author’s abilities.
2. “The Guardian reported in 2015 that (according to a study of books on the New York Times bestseller list) the average novel had grown 25% longer in just the last 15 years!”
"Average mysteries now are in the 400 to 600 page range"
i THINK it was Heinlein who said short stories were the hardest to write.
of course, Heinlein's short stories are his best (IMHO)
I just started rereading collection "The Menace from Earth", and just finished 'The Year of the Jackpot' which made me cry (again)..
The Year of the Jackpot is about crazy times, like RIGHT NOW; and i was happily reading along.. TOTALLY forgetting the ending.. until.. THE END
"Wow! Someone else who read The Dream of the Red Chamber! I had never heard of it (downside of SB from MIT) but picked it up randomly at the Raven Bookstore in Harvard Square a few years ago."
I speak several languages, among them fluent Mandarin Chinese. It was an assignment to read it, The Peach Blossom Fan, Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, Journey To The West, and the Han dynasty Yue-Fu ("folk songs") in the original Chinese for my senior-level classical Chinese course.
Dream Of The Red Chamber was basically the final, and it was a doozy. Find a copy in the original Chinese and you'll know what I mean just by the thickness of it. It is a tome...I was lucky to average 2 pages a night!
At what point in our lives do we have/learn the ability to discern what requires our attention and what does not?
The internet is an extension of "...this common household object will kill you and your kids! more at 11...."
Is it younger people, though, buying? And is it younger people doing the reading?
“I thank God, we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both!”
~ Sir William Berkeley
(1606-1677), Royal Governor of Virginia
"I watched the morning and evening news - now I never do."
So, not watching as much fiction as you used to?
"Wish I could find a good book —to live in.
Wish I could find a good book.
'Cuz if I could find a real good book
I'd never have to come out and look at
What they've done to my song." - Popular song from the sixties.
I think that the article is about literary fiction, not genre fiction, which is a totally different animal. If you tell me you read three literary fiction novels a week, every week, I will doubt your word, or tell you that you should read slower, but if you are reading that many genre novels, I wouldn't doubt it for a second.
Heart of Darkness is a concept novel, with a story arc, and anything that detracts from that arc is distracting fill, but a lot of novels have heroes who don't change or learn anything meaningful from one novel to the next in the series and you can read these like popcorn and still get full dollar value from them for what you were after.
"The sort of “History” that was taught in Narnia under Miraz’s rule was duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exciting adventure story."
-- C.S. Lewis, 'Prince Caspian', 'Chronicles of Narnia'
I've read a lot of Chinese literature and poetry, but there's this one small poem that really stuck with me. It is from the 1st Han Dynasty YueFu ( "乐府"), 2200 years old, called The Song of the Prince of Lang-Ya ("琅琊王之歌"):
新买五尺刀
悬著中梁柱
一日三摩娑
剧于十五女
"I just bought a five-foot sword
From the central pillar I hang it
I stroke it three times a day
Better by far than a maid of fifteen."
Preach prince, who needs cute girls when you've got a brand new sword to play with!
The "early 20th century" when English didn't become a distinct discipline at colleges until about 1870. Rhetoric was taught, but literary theory was something to keep the scam going after the humanities researchers had slogged through all the old writings.
Then students of these English professors mindlessly took what they taught into the high schools which are generally a decade or so behind whatever in the current fashion in the campus English department.
Sounds like Natty Bumpoo from Last of the Mohicans with his long rifle he loved so well; he who preferred to gambol about in the woods with his Indian friend, the Big Serpent, who left his wife back at home, BTW, over accepting the offered hand of the beautiful woman he had just guided through a harrowing wilderness adventure.
I used to read fiction incessantly... Now I tend to read my book club's novel and that's it, at least with regard to new material - I still reread from time to time. When I consider the books I've read and enjoyed because of the authors writing style, I realize I don't tend to reread those; the ones I reread are the great stories. And I agree with gilbar about Heinlein's stories - often better than his novels. (I still enjoy the juvies, dated as they are; phrases from them are still top of mind for me.)
A long book the length of a short book. Or something like that.
“Is it younger people, though, buying? And is it younger people doing the reading”
Yes, it is definitely young people.
Definitely junk, based on the class of people she found there. Tasty, delicious, Wisconsin-bred junk -- so good and so, so bad.
Brain rot is real, but technology is entirely innocent and the Democrat-dominated education complex is entirely guilty.
I avoid brain rot by not focusing on reading The New Yorker.
"Thomas Jefferson warned that once readers fell under the spell of novels—'this mass of trash'—they would lose patience for 'wholsome reading.' "
Not sure when TJ made that statement, but I'm assuming he had in mind the 18th century novels -- Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Gulliver's Travels, Tom Jones, maybe even Tristram Shandy. (In one of the earlier catalogs of TJ's library, I saw that he had a copy of the works of Jonathan Swift, which he may even have read.) Those novels, and no doubt some others that have long since been forgotten by all but period specialists, certainly still 'cast a spell.' Swift intended his novel to be an indictment of existing arrangements in England. Very odd that TJ, so inventive and curious as to merit JFK's quip about him dining alone, would have found it and its genre more generally to be a 'mass of trash.'
Northanger Abbey, possibly?
Half the book is about the place of novels in society.
Sturgeon's Law no doubt applied even then
William Penn wrote "Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle". A different viewpoint saw Penn as railing against the laziness of reading when one should be bringing in the crop. He wrote several books on the subject.
"But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focussing on"
My browser is telling me that the problem may be how we are spelling "focusing."
But that quote sounds like the usual practice of taking a cliche or a truism, flipping it on its head and acting like one has said something profound and original that isn't a tired cliche. It also sounds like it's a distinction without much of a difference. "Not being able to focus" and "not focusing on the right things" have been different ways of making the same objection for a long time.
I wonder what TJ would have thought about the 13 volume “Wheel of Time” fantasy series…
Dickens, at least, wrote episodes. I had the impression many such "classics" were serialized in magazines, and so were not 1000 page novels as such, but more like soap opera stories, hooking you on the characters and dumping them into one situation after another. Pickwickian. How long an attention span does one need to finish this week's or this month's installment, and feel committed to buy next week's?
""Although today’s critics rue our inability to get through long novels..."
Critics rue everything, by definition. (That's why they're critics.)
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