Garrison Keillor writes about the days when being a tortured literary soul, wrestling for your livelihood with the printed word over a typewriter, was worth something. Money, to be specific.
Garrison Keillor writes about the days when being a tortured literary soul, wrestling for your livelihood with the printed word over a typewriter, was worth something. Money, to be specific.
Yeah, those unwashed hordes who want kids to read Shakespeare and Plato are certainly a danger to our highbrow cultural heritage. What a twit that man is.
Reminds me of when farmers switched from Jersey cows to Holsteins. The Jerseys gave more cream, but the Holsteins more milk. But either way, the cream still rose to the top.
In spite of the Typical Liberal Doom and Gloom, good writers will still rise to the top and still get paid. What Keillor bemoans is that it won’t be the same group of elites screening them, promoting them and holding cocktail parties in Tribeca with them.
You know, I took a much lighter stance on this column. I thought he was mostly musing humorously over The End of the Book As We Know It theme. People still buy books, and the Internet can’t remain free forever generally speaking. Something’s going to change. And editors aren’t going to die or go away. That’s ridiculous.
Yep, I think it’s really all about those elegant young women in little black dresses.
That headline got me to thinking about The Incredibles. (That doesn’t take much; it’s in my top 10 favorite movies.)
Syndrome says his eventual plan is to sell his inventions to everybody, so everybody can be a super. “And when everyone’s super, no one will be.”
However, when he goes to the city to “stop” the rampaging robot, everything he’s doing is just for show; he “knows” that he has the robot “under control.” And the robot gets the best of him.
The real supers don’t really know that they can defeat the robot, but are going to give it everything the have, because it’s what the good guys do. And in the end, they do it.
Had someone without super powers, but with Syndrome’s inventions, and with the right kind of heart, been up against the robot (or the Underminer, or Bomb Voyage), I think the outcome could have been very different than it was for Syndrome. With the right technology, sure, everyone can be super, but not everyone has what it takes to be Super.
And (finally circling back to the headline) maybe it’s true now that everyone can be a writer. But not everyone has what it takes to be a Writer.
Makes sense to me. From what I’ve seen of tweets coming from BookExpo attendees this week, people are talking about needing to attract readers and build experiences.
One point worth noting from Keillor’s blog; The current proliferation of free reading material devalues all writing. When settlers traveled west in covered wagons, space was at a premium. Only the greatest books made the cut, writings that could be read over and over again such as the Bible and classics like Pilgrim’s Progress.
I see that Amazon lists West Oversea as bestseller #517,853 in Books. Not only does that mean that over half a million books are selling better than Lars’s, but that there are over half a million books available for sale. So, even without the internet, the possibility of selling lots and lots of any given title are pretty slim.
Solomon really hit the nail on the head when he said that of the writing of books there will be no end.
Let’s just hope there is no end to the READERS of books.