Yesterday:
My granddaughter told me over the phone she was going to
eat muffins –
her mother was just baking them.
She said this in perfect German;
I answered in perfect English,
and she got bored.
I read the papers and
I went into the garden,
where I trimmed shrubs and
helped cut hedges,
including the wire of the electric hedge cutter.
The wire needed a big black plaster.
The sun was out, it was mild, not raining at all.
And I took off my jumper and
the shrubs had grown really thick and fearsome over the wet summer.
So they needed a saw to cut through.
I also read the book reviews in the papers,
including the one in the Independent:
about the future of books and reading and
about people who no longer read books.
About e-books and print on demand, but
it was the ’not-reading-people’ that twirled through my mind.
25% of British people have not read a single
book last year.
Does that include babies and young people?
And people who cannot read or write?
What does that say about the education
system?
And then this view:
Will books exist in 50 years time?
Answer:
Definitely, but they will also be just one of the many ways we experience art
I feel quite cynical about the cloak of preciousness that’s been
woven around the novel: it’s such a recent medium –
we’ve only had it a few hundred years and yet you often
hear people say
We’ve always had novels
And I?
I dislike this self righteous verdict about
‘the cynical cloak of preciousness’
I love books.
I love words and sentences and paragraphs.
and how they can evoke worlds and emotions
that no other medium can.
Tomorrow:
I will post my review on Coetzee.
Definitely.
What can one say, a great use of “words”. Enjoyed as usual.
By: oeuvreopinion on September 15, 2008
at 2:27 pm
And did R. trim the hedges properly, then?
By: Ario on September 15, 2008
at 4:46 pm
oevreo: glad you enjoyed my little escapade
ario: definitely – it was the wire cutting that was not so proper 🙂
By: seachanges on September 15, 2008
at 9:38 pm
what a wonderful post! loved the day’s description and pictures.
And then, reading the reviewer’s view on books and readers with a very cynical future look, I found myself as annoyed and concerned, at first,as I am about our upcoming election in the States! What? “Preciousness?” No, I think I’ll just laugh, instead.
And bop over to the bookstore.
By: oh on September 17, 2008
at 1:13 am
I thought the figure would not be so grim in the UK. 25%? For the US, it was nearly 40% I think. That’s creepy.
By: Matt on September 17, 2008
at 6:56 pm