Single view

Increasingly I have been thinking of the single reader in the last year: if thoughtful literary criticism has little place in our medja then where is it to sit. We can tell such criticism no longer has much if any place because of the obvious “life-span” of a book. The book is of interest when it is released. Sometimes it is not of interest at all when it is released.

This week it came to me on Friday that one solution could be to consider such pieces as photographs and to frame them for mounting and sell them to a single reader rather than a newspaper. Thus the single reader would be assured an exclusivity to your thoughts and considerations and may very well appreciate them sufficient to continue collecting them paying the same fee (v poor) that a newspaper pays. This could alleviate some of the frustration that I experience in taking time to write about books (outside the current conception of lifespan) only to find a newspaper decides they’re not in the national interest and some other old purposeless waffle is.