Sara and I picked up some books last night and spent three hours reading. It was not Wendell I read. It was just a good story I'd picked up at the book sale. Wendell, amazing as he is, wears me out. Reading him is like pushing around a sweaty sumo wrestler with your mind. Challenging and authentic but exhausting. I can only handle so much. This may be because I'm a child of the screen and require a certain amount of easy input to entertain myself and keep from getting depressed. Ironically, the more I read Wendell the less reading I do in general and if I'm not working on something then I'm laying on the couch staring at a screen of one sort or another. So it was with some aprobation that I read and read and read to my hearts content and came away with a cinematic buzz without the residual glare in my eyeballs. I'm not Wendell, but I do love his thoughts on these things even if I'm incapable in my current state of being to follow his example.
My own phobia or motto is to stay away from screens. I avoid screens of all kinds. ...Movie screens, television screens, computer screens. I'm talking about screens of distraction, that disguise the place where you are. Books don't do that. My test is that if you look away from what your doing and the size of your pupils in your eyes has to change then what your doing is wrong. I believe in ambient light.
Wendell Berry on City Beat Podcast 44.
Because all media shown on a screen is bad, right? Don't we teach our children to not make blanket judgments of people and things? "Don't say it's icky until you've tried it," we tell them when giving them new food. So, why is that good, but TV is different. Is there an incredible amount of crap produced for TV and film? Oh, yeah. Is there some damn good stuff, too? Yes!
ReplyDeleteAnd, you know what? Books aren't any different. For every good book you point out, I'll show you 100 (or more) bad ones. It's Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) and it's not exclusive to visual media.