From The Archive: The Common Reader

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense, some pieces from Little Frigging In The Wold, and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope, that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

The Common Reader – 26/04/2005

With its unerring eye for spotting tired bland truisms, The Independent today notices that the people in charge at the publishing houses don't seem to like - or even understand - book readers.

Well, yes.

It is an old story that the publishing houses once run by amateur(ish) enthusiasts are now run by faceless, heartless, soulless management types who only ever reading the accounts, and then only the bottom line.

What is really pitiful, though, is The Indy's solution to this woeful state of affairs, which boils down to that last desperate act of the brain-dead marketing droid - make reading books cool and trendy!

Now, there is an idea:

For a start, publishers have to think harder about how to reach the hordes of critical consumers of film, TV, internet and pop culture who should be reading books as sharp and savvy as all the shows, sites and bands they adore.

What? What!

It is just that kind of saturation vacuous over-marketing that has led to the current woeful state of popular culture where everything is in its niche and every thing that emerges above the dull background roar of hyper-hype is flogged - in both meanings of the word - to death, if not well into its afterlife.

Film these days is almost invariably a blend of over-used special effects and cliché- riddled tedium - marketed and sold as visual junk food for the easily mollified by the bright and shiny.

TV has become even less engaging as the headlong flight away from intelligent programming has accelerated, descending into an almost total imagination-free zone of lifestyle porn, reality prurience and inane celebrity idolatry.

Pop culture? I'm not sure what Boyd Tonkin) means by that - all of this is pop culture. I suppose he means pop music. Which in itself - including its up-market 'intelligent' sub-genre - rock - has been more or less moribund for so long now, that which is not actually re-release is re-tread, re-hash or re-cycled. If it were an emperor, it would have been arrested for public indecency decades ago.

The internet? Has some good things, a few great things, a lot of rubbish and an incredible ability to waste time. However, it is more the tool than the made object and should really be compared to the library rather than the book.

Rather than marketing down to these people, books should be shown - to everyone, not just the cool (how I loathe that moronic ejaculation) and these trendy-tedious bores that all the broadsheet press has taken to pandering-to and pampering - as a way of escaping, of rising above, this bland media and entertainment landscape of low aspiration spectacle-wank, voyeuristic wallowing in the antics of the inadequate and trite formulaic re-hashing of long worn-out prole-feed.

I suppose that what we could do with is a Jamie Oliver-type character, who will show up current popular culture for the junk-culture that it has become through over-marketing. It is now just like the junk food dished out in school dinning halls. We could do with someone who could reveal that there is something out there that is far healthier for all of us, if only we could be bothered to stop wallowing in the stupefying swill that is poured out for us.