Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I think that one major difference between visual and printed media that impacts the way that we percieve the experience is that (sweeping generalization alert) books tend to leave more to your imagination (at least as far as the visual aspects are concerned) while they tend to be richer in terms of explaining the background and the motivations of the actions.

So unless you have a significant voiceover - like you do on Desperate Housewives, you are more limited in providing context in the visual media. Perhaps this is why you need 100 hours to achieve similar complexity that you can achieve in a decent novel.

And then you can take it to the extreme like Ayn Rand does in Atlas Shrugged and somewhat belabor the point and draw the story out until the reader almost shouts "OK, OK, OK, I get it already!!!"...what is it about Russian writers and length?

It's a shame that The Wire, HBO's most novelistic show, is always left out in these discussions. I wonder if its urban setting is the reason most critics, bloggers, etc. have ignored it (or maybe they just think its a cliche cop show). IMO, it (and especially its second season) will stand up years from now as one of television's greatest shows -- it is to Baltimore as Dickens was to London.

http://salon.com/ent/feature/2004/10/01/the_wire/index_np.html

I didn't hear about The Wire until it was in its second season - that's one of the disadvantages of TiVo - and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Darmn 100-hour tv shows with all their complexity! :)

Rent the DVDs!

Wow. I just caught this while waiting on the subway platform of life, but I liked David's words so much I had to stop and look.

Golly. Well, I don't read enough and most of it is fairly straightforward fiction (or worse). But I have noticed something about books, and books that run in sequels, like a TV series or flicks (the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan novels that I fancy come to mind). I notice that it really matters whether or not I care what happens to the characters and I can identify with their struggles. I felt the same way about West Wing when I had a TV and I notice that worked for me all the way back to Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey (and so help me, Police Woman). I actually didn't care who killed Bobby (or the reality-TV O.J. drama), so I am not completely stuck in the soap opera of it all. I think I am literature-deprived, though, so my standards may not be very high [;<).

Side topic:

David, I notice that the forced-preview step here is one of the gentlest and most-civil ways to discourage robot postings that I have encountered. It is so beautifully simple, so unintrusive and friendly, that I want to model anything I do on that.  How's it working at keeping out the comment spam? Well enough?

Unfortunately, someone who understands how this stuff works (i.e., not me) told me that spammers directly post their spamcomments, so the forced preview doesn't stop them. Too bad. I just haven't gotten around to restoring the "post" button to the initial form. Besides, there's something to be said for forcing a preview step :)

I'm not sure how you'd reconcile the oral origins of the Illiad and Odyssey into the comparison of them as books against TV shows.

Maybe this is veering too far from the point of Steven Johnson's book, but I would say that the role of many pre-20th century stories in their cultures was somewhat different than the role of TV in our contemporary society.

While both books and TV can be exercises of imagination, and enjoyable entertainment, etc., I'm not sure TV plays as critical a ritual role in providing an identity and holding a culture / society together. In other words, I don't know if we so much need TV shows to keep us connected.

Of course, TV does do this to some degree--or, at least, it seemed to more when (in each country) we all had the same 3-4 channels and watched the same shows at the same times (and didn't have VCRs to watch them any time, etc.).

So, maybe you could compare the Illiad with MASH? The Canterbury Tales with The Simpsons? Those TV shows did/do give us some common languag. Doh!

But, we might also think about how the (oral) Illiad was more like a wikipedia of its day. . .

I'm not convinced there's ever going to be a valid argument for the superiority of one artistic medium to another. In itself, it's not the medium that is the signifier of artistic, social, moral, or historical merit. Yes the more multimedia something is, the more it's likely to evolve and make current art look outdated. But perhaps that's more an argument in favor of the inevitability of remixing than anything else.

I think SBJ's main positive argument is simply that just because something doesn't feel like a mentally nourishing experience, or look like one from the outside, doesn't mean it isn't nourishing nonetheless. You could take his argument for pop TV and apply it to a written form like fanfiction, which many also consider useless fluffy pop-entertainment. The broader, deeper argument, at least the one that resonates with me, is that the things that make us think are good, and that as the media world is becoming bigger, those things can be found in many places we wouldn't traditionally expect.

Thanks for bringing him to Berkman, BTW!

The value of books is that they can be -- and almost always are -- composed and performed by one person, with a minimum of resources. This means that written prose and poetry are uniquely coherent forms of communication. I think that the fuzzy qualities which you struggle to describe in this blog entry -- the "bottomless complexity" of good prose, its power to convey "the world of interrelated meanings" -- ultimately derive from this fact.

If Flaubert wants Emma to deliver a certain line in a certain precise way, in order to assure that her tone properly reflects her evolving inner state of mind and that her words evoke the speech she gave 53 pages ago, he needs only to get it right in his own head, and then write it down. But when Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter, is adapting "Madame Bovary" into a film, and he wants Emma to deliver a certain line in a certain way, he has to find the means and opportunity to convey his wish to the director, who will turn it over to an assistant director, who will probably get it wrong when she explains it to the actress, who may well be drunk.

Not that having more people involved is always bad -- a variety of perspectives, approaches, and interpretations can improve a work of art, and Marilyn Monroe was quite a good actress when she was drunk, provided you could afford to film enough takes.

[Footnote: I should immediately placate the editors of the world by saying that, in fact, published prose is usually produced by a team of two or three people. But that's about all. And none of the work is done without being seen and okayed by the primary author.]

I'm a "West Wing" newcomer, watching intertwined seasons via the Bravo channel, six or eight hours a week. I have no interest in the current season right now, but eventually I hope to grab big chunks of it in what then will be fairly recent re-runs. ... or maybe DVD.

It's a fun show. Art? mebbe, mebbe not, but evocative, stirring and occasionally thought provoking. Mentally nourishing? Certainly. Much like a high carb/high fat diet!

The medium of TV makes for a different set of categories of experience, compared with written lit. In a novel, characters' internal thoughts can go on for pages and pages and if they're written well, you actually want to read it. Dialogue can pace itself over many pages. Time can be handled very differently. All sorts of stuff is just plain different. If you compare TV to stage drama, it's a better comparison, but still different enough that TV is honestly its own medium/genre and can't really be compared too literally to the others.
The one characteristic that invites the comparison is that the new dramas have a beginning and an end. They were created with a narrative shape in mind, or at least to allow for satisfactory narrative closure -- not "this show keeps going until the ratings go down and then we stop it."

Personally I think Deadwood, just the richness of the writing and characterization, and its unflinching complexity, is art. Period. (My MA and MFA in Literature and Poetry give me only a little bit of authority on this ... really it's just my opinion.) But there are moments when I feel like I'm watching something Shakespeare might've done -- I'm aware of the danger of hyperbole there, but I mean it.

But Deadwood will never be as good of a novel as any really good novel. It's just not a novel.

Books have two dimensions that seem much less pronounced in 'popular culture' - their appeal to and stimulation of the imagination, and their ability to explore the motivations, reasons and emotions of characters. In film, we mostly judge the latter from the characters' actions, since film (and I include TV) is relatively intolerant of introspection. Books are not. A book can centre on thoughts and emotions. It's very difficult for film to do this well and still hold the viewers' attention.

The appeal to the imagination comes , I think, from the fact that all we see in a book is words. (Go away Obviousman - I'm clearly NOT talking about illustrated books!!) Everything those words represent has to be constructed in the mind's eye. I don't know (but am prepared to guess) that there must be some research somewhere that demonstrates that exercise of the imagination leads to increasing IQ.

Not all are using software to post the blogs, however, forced-preview option would be definately an advantage over such unscrupulous tactics used by blog spammers.