Tip to Merchants: Buyers Do Beware

". Literature now competes with an enormous array
of electronic media. While no single activity is
responsible for the decline of reading, the
cumulative presence and availability of these
alternatives have increasingly drawn Americans
away from reading.
. Non-readers watch more television than do
readers.
. In 1990, book buying constituted 5.7 percent of
total recreation spending, while spending on audio,
video, computers, and software was 6 percent. By
2002, electronic spending had soared to 24 percent,
while spending on books declined slightly to 5.6
percent.
. A 1999 study showed that the average American
child lives in a household with 2.9 televisions, 1.8
VCRs, 3.1 radios, 2.1 CD players, 1.4 video game
players, and 1 computer."

from Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America , 2004

In the 1980s, as General Motors' share of the domestic auto market went into a long decline, which has not stopped to this day (witness the recent bankruptcy of their old parts division Delphi), the initial reaction by GM management was to blame the buyers. "We make what they want. What's wrong with them?" We are sometimes told, usually by Democrat politicians, that a more appropriate reaction would have been to seek tariff protection against Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and other Japanese manufacturers. The obvious question, however, GM didn't ask for more than a decade: What's wrong with our product?

The common howl among social critics regarding the decline of readers for "serious" literature is that people are too busy playing electronic games, or watching soft porn on cable, to be bothered with the difficulties of holding several hundred bound pages of some author's imagination, a combination of both the old GM reaction and the advice of Democrats. The competition, in other words, is debasing civilization itself by distracting potential readers from more serious endeavors. Is this a reasonable point of view?

It's certainly an easy one. And easy is a key word in their criticism. It's easier to watch television. It's easier to play a familiar video game. It's easier to get the news from a Web site than to buy a newspaper and slog through its pages. But aren't we missing something?

Easy may be easily said, but is it ease, or satisfaction, which motivates people to turn to the "serious" book's competition? If, for example, serious trade fiction these days is almost entirely dominated by graduates of creative writing programs, its books exercises in literary theory instead of stories of a recognizable world, isn't it possible that potential readers might find such exercises tedious? And if they did, might they not look elsewhere?

Comes the accusation! readers must learn to like exercises in literary theory. They must go to cultural re-education camp (I hear there are some vacant ones in Russia). We got a lot of this in "serious" music for decades, as it declined into theoretical exercises of atonal serialism, and into audiences who refused to support it except as "curtain raisers" on the real thing, you know, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Handel, Mozart, etc., or Ellington, Basie, Monk, Parker, etc.. Funny thing, if you look at the "top 40" on the serious music concert circuit, you'll hardly find a piece that ticketholders (and patrons) are willing to support that isn't tonal and structured, i.e., music as it's generally been recognized since the Renaissanse. Sadly, that top 40 comprises a list of composers who are either dead, or who are held as being outside the "Modern" mainstream by critics.

Fact is that readers, like music listeners, don't like to be force-fed. As patrons of an art, we expect the creators, publishers, and performers to make a modest effort to meet some of our expectations as to what a given art is. And, funny thing, except in required performances at university, or in North Korea, audiences don't attend what they don't like or can't understand. Some call that Phillistine, but others call it the normal interaction of artist and audience, where the artist is a participant in a conversation, not a dictator.


Luther