Bookraft

Christmas vacation around our place allows for arts and entertainment to shine through unaborted by Commerce. Also conversations are like the year-end best-of lists. There is a book about reading, Proust and the Squid by MaryAnne Wolfe, that posits a)that reading, being a pivotal and fairly recent human adaptation, reveals the great plasticity and changeable nature of the human brain; and b)that reading itself may be undergoing huge neuronal as well as social changes with emerging gaming, TV, video, and animation trends which may make reading skills vestigial - sort of like how Latin, once the lingua franca of scholarship, lost out to the vernacular and then English lately.

Well these reading versus media notions plopped full into the family debates about the nature of Christmas gifts and things to do this holiday. For example, it was noted that just a few years ago books, the family gift of choice, easily out-numbered any other entertainment including music CDs, theater tickets, or sports entertainments as a Christmas gift. However, this year the swing to movies was notable and pronounced. Immediately, economic reasons were cited - a video CD costs $8-12 where as a hardback novel or book of equal import costs $25-45. But the video could be enjoyed in 2-5 hours including post viewing reviews while any good book would take at least 2-5 days and could not be "viewed" collaboratively. The next consensus - the world of eBooks, thrice tried to be promoted by the titans of Computing such as Adobe and Microsoft, should be allowed to expire as the number of near substitutes from iPod to Media PC was both adequately large and large in other derivative use opportunities that no eBook configuration currently cares to offer.

So then the discussion turned on whether the largely singular ideacraft of writing and books provided a)more value and b)more innovation then the multiple-author creations that are most media "exercises" (note the implied smear here) from animations through games to movies. The argument turned on the memorability of book entertainments versus media entertainments - and of course Jane Austen inevitably entered the fray, and with great Sense and Sensibility it was discovered that members of the family had the pleasure of meeting Jane's Elinor, Marianne and Edward from both book and movie first paths.

So the final inevitable debate was that no moviecraft had come close to matching the wordcraft of say Dickens or Dickenson or Dostoyevski - and that moviecraft was dependent for its storyboards and screenplays to beg, borrow and steal from bookraft. Which then raised the issue of Shakespeare in Love.