Updike on Books

I wouldn’t have thought I would agree with John "I Hate the Internet" Updike. But, actually, I do. Authors that are truly worth reading take years and years to put down each and every one of their words in just the right order. Kevin Kelly, and any other futurists beside themselves with the potential of technology to "transform" our world need, to respect that.

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author’s photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.

In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another — of, in short, accountability and intimacy? . . .

The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Amazon Blogs An interesting discussion of Amazon author blogs and author blogs in general. I’m in agreement that Amazon author blogs are not really blogs because they...
2. Updike v. CT Sometimes it can be both interesting and enlightening to compare two people’s view of one book. So it is with John Updike’s and Charles Taylor’s...
3. Updike's Rules Updike’s Rules for Reviewing. Pretty good stuff. ...
4. Top 10 Books of 2004: #8 #8 — Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years — Brian Boyd In a recent review of Borges: A Life for the NYTBR, David Foster Wallace wrote...
5. Another Big British Book What’s with the British and extremely humungo reference books? First the OED and now this: In Brian Harrison’s office, arrayed in the simple livery of...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.