THREE-MINUTE IDEAS:
Garvey, John
THREE-MINUTE IDEAS JOHN GARVEY In a recent American Poetry Review column Charles M. Fair quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: "The ever-increasing crowd of readers, and their continual craving for...
...Ideas which may or may not have been oversimplifications to begin with, have been further oversimplified and extended to every area of life...
...but most of them are shallow things which are bought and read only because their authors have managed to make it to places like the Tonight Show...
...Is that really it...
...You can't blame publishers for wanting to get a book exposed as much as it possibly can be, nor can you blame them for wanting their businesses to be immensely profitable, which means publishing for as broad an audience as they can find...
...I hate to think of what might have happened to some classics under the current system- would we have a slick de Tocqueville on Johnny Carson's show, slurring through ideas between commercials...
...They range in quality from Charles Reich's Greening of America (Bantam, $1.95) and Thomas Harris' I'm OK-You're OK (Avon, $1.95) to the dreadful Total Woman, by Marabel Morgan (Reveil, $5.95...
...Parent, Adult, Child) explains everything...
...The sacraments are strokes...
...Nearly every American publisher is involved in the hunt for three-minute ideas which can be puffed up into books, even if the results aren't worth the wind expended-except, of course, financially...
...And of course widespread literacy plus the invention of movable type have produced as by-products a lot of inferior writing...
...The problem with the de Tocqueville quote cited by Fair is that it speaks of good sales for books which "nobody much esteems...
...The rhythm of the average talk show seems to have been designed for people whose attention span lasts about three minutes, and an author who has to present his book to an audience within such a framework has to be able to say, and say fast, what his book is about and why everyone ought to read it...
...Which would be nice...
...There is nothing new here, but Fair's worry is that bad writing will drive out good, that any writing which does not seem in advance to have a mass audience may soon join poetry as a not-for-profit venture, done for love by small presses, as large firms move into the exclusive production of gimmick books, how-to books, and novels programmed for sales-blockbusters like Jaws or Harold Robbins' novels...
...Most publishers want to make money, but most good publishers also want to publish genuinely good books...
...That format leads, logically enough, to the production of books which can fit it...
...The point here isn't blame, but rather the influence a format has...
...and there is no real reason why a book designed with a mass audience in mind could not also be a good book), there is an important warning in Fair's prediction...
...And that's part of the problem: where would Joyce Brothers and David Reuben be without talk shows...
...I wonder whether it isn't simply that as the looting impulse has hit the entrepreneurs of the book business, they have started doing to us what Hollywood did in the 'SO's-exploiting our taste for schlock to the point that they may kill it...
...I think it comes down to what a friend of mine calls "three-minute ideas": there are ideas which can be stated in about three minutes, and they are worth thinking about for maybe three more minutes, and then you should go on to more important things...
...others do too much with one idea but are still worth looking at...
...While it is true that some great writers had unabashedly commercial hopes for their writing (Dostoevsky and Dickens wrote against deadlines for money...
...That is what even the most decent examples of books based on three-minute ideas have to endure to be popular, and to be popular is the whole point, the one thing necessary...
...And a young priest has written a book which reinterprets the Church in TA terms...
...In a recent Commonweal article (April 11, 1975) Haughton wrote of American intellectual curiosity that "it has its weakness, which is an addiction to words and concepts, as a game...
...There may be a bright spot...
...These books are the best sign of the breakdown of those institutions which have normally been expected to provide this sort of instruction...
...Another aspect of the problem is the desire to have simple and painless answers to problems which sometimes require a lifetime and painful self-examination for their resolution...
...But he is saying something much more worth hearing (and finally it is more healing) than the more popular books...
...Now although it is true that you might be able to come up with quick approximations of a few of the classics, good writing and good thinking don't ordinarily lend themselves to this treatment...
...Over the past several years books of this sort have become a publishing staple...
...THREE-MINUTE IDEAS JOHN GARVEY In a recent American Poetry Review column Charles M. Fair quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: "The ever-increasing crowd of readers, and their continual craving for something new, insures the sale of books which nobody much esteems . . ." De Tocqueville, Fair says, foresaw the era of the gimmick book, the manufactured bestseller...
...Three-minute books influence ethical and religious thought as well as cocktail party chatter...
...It is more difficult to live in a world where we are more responsible for the words we use, and therefore more tentative about using them to enclose everything...
...some, like Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (Bantam, $1.95) are fascinating...
...Toward the end of his column Fair writes, "The question in my mind is whether, despite our distractions and all that is wrong with us, our literary taste has really become that bad...
...Talk shows are probably the chief influence on most popular non-fiction these days . . . not only what is bought, but what gets published...
...One minister I know wound up finding the Transactional Analysis fad pretty silly, but before he got to that point he had preached sermons in which he stated that the main message of Christianity is that God tells the believers, "You're OK...
...Writers whose work does not fit the three-minute rule have to struggle against weird odds to speak clearly in a time when fog is appreciated because it is consoling: it is nice to imagine a world in which a simple grid laid over everything (Consciousness 1,11, III...
...In The Liberated Heart (Seabury, $7.95) Rosemary Haughton tries to use the concepts of Transactional Analysis in a creative way, and this is refreshing- because it is so often used to short-circuit any real reflection rather than provoke it...
...It's a good game, but it can be abused, and it is being abused when the use of new psychological and theological and moral language-styles, designed to express important aspects of contemporary experience, are regarded as substitutes for dealing with the experience...
...It isn't that Berry's writing is at all difficult-it just doesn's have an easy handle, a gimmick...
...What happens to a culture which requires books on how to make love, be a parent, be your own best friend, make friends and influence people...
...It could be a sign of some kind of decline (if not of the West then at least of cocktail parties) that we have had to turn to such pathetic sources for enlightenment...
...It is easier, for example, to hear in a few minutes what I'm OK, You're OK and The Greening of America are about than it is to get a sense of what Wendell Berry says in his fine book A Continuous Harmony (Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, $5.95...
...They are not all bad books...
...They are esteemed, though, and we can expect more of them...
...The death of schlock would give them the space they need...
Vol. 102 • June 1975 • No. 7
