View Single Post
Old 08-13-2016, 10:38 AM   #44
Morthoron
Curmudgeonly Wordwraith
 
Morthoron's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Ensconced in curmudgeonly pursuits
Posts: 2,528
Morthoron is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.Morthoron is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.Morthoron is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.Morthoron is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.Morthoron is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.
The Twilight saga sold millions of books, as did Fifty Shades of Grey. Having read a single page of each and finding the dialogue stilted and monosyllabic and the characters flat and tedious, I can only say one should never be surprised by the limited attention spans and juvenile reading capacity of the general public.

But then, one should consider how modern folks have been trained via media and the internet to react to stimuli. The world is full of brief memes and cat videos that requires the patience of a gnat to view and digest. The 24-hour news cycle has rendered reporting down to momentarily sensationalistic headlines and flittering twitters within a regimented amount of characters repeated long enough for the next news item to take its place, and the song structure in popular music has been reduced to catchy hooks repeated over monotonous rhythms and borrowed beats.

Big-box, brick-and-mortar stores, the bastions of consumer spending for a century, have gone the way of the dodo because people simply do not want to disengage from the internet and spend an afternoon shopping in a crowded mall. Order the crap online and be done with it. Let someone else deliver the goods. Likewise, the education system has all but eliminated cursive writing in school, because...who writes? Putting pen to paper has become as archaic as putting quill to parchment. Affix your X to the online document and proceed with your order.

And so, the works of Tolstoy, Hugo or even Tolkien, massive, sprawling story-lines with numerous characters and much dialogue and a lack of stimulating action or violence every few paragraphs, would naturally be viewed negatively with the jaundiced eyes of the tragically hip and eternally bored. I hate to invoke the name of Peter Jackson, but he did film Tolkien's works to play to this restless audience. Insinuation, ambiguity and nuance has been deleted in favor of action, chases and violence, dangling the string in front of the cat long enough to keep it engaged and then moving on to the next toy in his arsenal of arrested development.

Alas, to be an old fart in this day and age, and watch with dying eyes the collapse of culture! I may be a cynical curmudgeon, but I don't believe I am too far off in my presentiment.
__________________
And your little sister's immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulders of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously into her geography revision.
Morthoron is offline   Reply With Quote