This may seem to be a far fetched monthly connection, but i think it still holds some merit and needs to be said.
Thanks to all these free thinkers and the Internet, every piece of crap that is put on paper is getting made into a book. This is bringing the death of the Great American Novel. No longer does a book have to pass a rigorous test of a publisher and have such an epic storyline or tale of truth that it can make it into the real world. Now, walk into Walmart and you have a bunch of two dollar piece of crap sitting on a shelf having some lame recognition from some odd reviewing place. Without scrutiny and tests, the novel will die out.
The main offender of the novel is Twilight. I am not about to battle thirteen year old girls the world over and say that is the most overdone love story ever and goes against most monster and crappy romance novel codes. Twilight, does however show my point in the death of the novel. The book serves no purpose but to entertain. Twilight has no universal truths, no timeless morals, just a wuss of a vampire and some outcast cityslicker girl. Kurt Vonnegut would be spinning in his grave if he knew this piece of crap got published. At the end of his life, Vonnegut wrote amazing stories critiquing the society that he saw circling the drain, and then threw them away because he no longer felt that the public deserved to read his stories. No one deserved to cut it apart and analyze it for entertainment value, say it was to vulgar (like society isn't!), or say that he was a mad man. If i were a publisher, i would have never let Twilight hit the shelves because it is killing the true literary art that is out there.
We as a society have even come to a point that we don't want to read this great novels because they offend us, are too hard to comprehend, are dry of entertainment and action of a love story, or make little Johnny out to be evil. Paradise Lost was hated for how it portrayed religion, but people read it because they wanted to know of the inner daemon. Is the realationshit book going to tell you that. 1984 portrayed the post-social apocalypse, if you will, but now it has to share the shelves with fifty vampire romance books that just plain suck.
Is it just me, or is the temperature getting around 451 degrees?
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ReplyDeletethat was very deep robert
ReplyDeleteRyan, Ryan, Ryan, there have been crappy romance novels since man could hold a pointy stick and scratch it against a cave wall. The Egyptians wrote racy stories in hyroglyphics (sp?) on their obelisks, Greek mythology is nothing but one huge transexual (sp?) orgy. In "The Picture of Dorian Grey," Wilde complains about immoral penny-thrillers. They haven't killed the novel yet. Just because the internet allows that guy down the street to publish everything he wants to doesn't mean great writers won't publish anthing at all. I figure, as long as people still think about the moral struggles of humanity, we'll still be getting great literature.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that those novels won't get written, it is that no one will read them because there are craptasitc romance novels that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside and don't actually make you think. We as a society are getting dumber and dumber, that or lazy, so why would someone read something a little bit difficult. Look at even our class, people complain about certain books, Beowulf for example, becuase it was diffcult for some to keep the story straight and whatnot. Suck it up and read the thing, there is a reason why it is considered the grandaddy of all books ever.
ReplyDeleteElise actually stole my response. It's not the internet's fault. Before the two-dollar crappy novel, there was the dime-store novel, and before that the penny-barrell. The "Great American Novel" is such because it survives the test of time. Books like Twilight will entertain one generation and will fade away before the next. There are still novels, although, in this age that will stand the test of time and become the Great American Novels of the future. So don't mourn this death quite yet :-). Nice connection!
ReplyDeleteCan't argue that no one reads our class-assigned novels....
ReplyDelete