{"id":44,"date":"2002-01-26T10:32:54","date_gmt":"2002-01-26T15:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/reading_overrated"},"modified":"2002-01-26T10:32:54","modified_gmt":"2002-01-26T15:32:54","slug":"reading_overrated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/01\/reading_overrated.html","title":{"rendered":"Reading Overrated?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nI found a cute little NYTimes op-ed piece, which argues that<br \/>\nthese days, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2001\/09\/09\/opinion\/09SPAR.html\" title=\"NYTimes: archived and no reg. required\">all<br \/>\nwriting is screenwriting<\/a>.  Embedded in the middle of the article<br \/>\nis this paragraph:\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\nAt the moment, a tribe of 15,000 novel-readers on the Upper West Side<br \/>\nkeep fiction alive in America. Other than that, fiction writers are<br \/>\nas archaic as fishmongers. If you wish to hide some human truth where<br \/>\nno one will find it, place it in the middle of your first novel.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\nNew Yawkers really are a different breed aren&#8217;t they?<br \/>\nSure, if <em>I<\/em> was a member of The Tribe of 15000,<br \/>\nI might believe that that it was only my efforts that kept the<br \/>\nsputtering flame of fiction alive.  But I would never express<br \/>\nsuch thoughts to anyone other than my fellow tribesmen.<br \/>\nCertainly not in the NY Times, where benighted Californians, Britons,<br \/>\nor God help us, <em>South Dakotans<\/em> might stumble across it.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI&#8217;m not sure if this is an example of &#8220;the (New York) fish not noticing the water<br \/>\nin which he swims,&#8221; or something more.  See, I&#8217;ve always heard<br \/>\npeople argue that one should read fiction to expand one&#8217;s horizons and explore<br \/>\ndifferent modes of thinking.  But our essayist now unwittingly provides us with<br \/>\nthe counterargument: that perhaps reading can have<br \/>\nthe opposite effect.  Maybe this whole readin&#8217; and writin&#8217; business isn&#8217;t all<br \/>\nit&#8217;s cracked up to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;At the moment, a tribe of 15,000 novel-readers on the Upper West Side keep fiction alive in America.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}