On furthering the construction

To add to the construction of reconstructing: what if pieces of the book were to then disappear. Thus the author was to randomly remove them each week. Or if the author was to upload them in sporadic episodes and then take them away. Would the reader form attachments to single parts? Would the reader check to see when that part might return?

Would there be any point at all? I hear you ask. Well I read something where Cormac McCarthy alluded to the fact that the brain had changed and thus it would not matter if you wrote some 5000 page epic and it was almighty in quality. People won’t read it was essentially what he was saying. If this is true, then how has the brain changed and what are its newer appetites (note the petit in appetit(e))

Are readers more willing to have a relationship with an ongoing piece of prose, the way they’ll have a relationship with a going  blog or stream of tweetation. You could argue that the episode is seeing a resurgence like no other form. Whether it is through the web comic, or the blog, or the podcast, or the moment a la tweet.

If our brains have changed to embrace smaller amounts of text will we embrace a flittering manner of delivery?

I’m increasingly curious about the visual conquering the theatrical in cinema (tho’ I accept this happened eons ago). A droning monologue once had a place in a film that it may no longer have. Yet the monologue is a mainstay of youtube.  In my earliest memories of being read to was Listen with Mother (we were sat on the kitchen floor beside a wireless and each day a voice said are you sitting comfortably, then we’ll begin…) It was somewhere around lunchtime I think. Then there was Jackanory (sp?) where a person in rocking chair read a book on television. There was also the man who drew and talked and stories unfolded. But essentially there’s very little in the difference between that and sitting on a train listening to a podcast or a comedy. My child consumes far more audio than I had access to.

I digress.

We need to consider if the brain has changed, how it has changed.  The neuroscientists could enlighten on this.