Nick Hornby and Entertainment

Game Fifteen of the 2009 Season is due to start approximately, uh....now.

Until then, we have this essay by Nick Hornby, an English author who I find tremendously entertaining and meaningful. (http://nickhornby.campaignserver.co.uk/?p=129)

Hornby describes an essay by English playwright Mark Ravenhill in which Ravenhill decries contemporary culture that treats adults as children.

Hornby writes:
"I like to think that I too am an adult who doesn’t need to be constantly diverted – unless, that is, I have paid good money to be in a place of entertainment (and even the theatre, which God knows has provided some of the dullest nights of my life, can still, at a stretch, be described thus) - in which case I demand diversion, every single second of the evening."

I have a pile of "good" books-Tolstoy, Kafka, Garcia Marquez, Proust, Melville-that are still waiting to be read, while I plow through much less meaningful books by the carload. Sometimes I feel guilty about this, and try to plow through a "real book", but I invariably wind up turning back to the "junk" again.

Life is too short to read a book or sit through a TV show or watch a movie if you're not enjoying it. I think reality TV is garbage-but that doesn't make you a bad person if you enjoy it, just a different person.

As John Lennon was trying to tell us, "Whatever gets you through the night...it's alright...."