Wednesday, April 22, 2009

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...."

4 comments:

  1. The Lennon quote is reminds me of "If it sounds good, it is good", a quote from Duke Ellington. Prof. Peter Schikele, best known as "P.D.Q. Bach", often quotes/quoted this on his radio program.

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  2. I like that, too.

    Somehow, that reminds me of that quote's opposite, the Mark Twain observation about music he didn't care for:

    "it's not as bad as it sounds".

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  3. Love Hornby. Seriously.

    I find I can read Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, New York, multiple daily newspapers, and blogs and still manage to sneak in the occasional (perhaps habitual) People. And if I read some "great" books and then read a little trash, heck, why not?

    Maybe balance is the key?

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