I like the insight on silly takes about MFA lit. But I don’t know why…

a) people find declining book reading depressing; it’s like finding it depressing that too few people write assembly code these days or can read/write cursive. Higher-abstraction new media naturally marginalize lower-abstraction old media. Depressing for book writers maybe. Not for the human condition,

b) Distraction etc has nothing to do with it. Thinking of TV, twitter, tiktok etc as “distraction” from reading is like thinking of Python, AWS lambda, etc as “distraction” from writing assembler and C. The whole argument is repeated endlessly but is basically writerly self-importance.

While I was simultaneously active on twitter and longform I found that people who read my threads only vs essays only simply had different processing styles. Both engaged in interesting ways. Some did both. I myself read perhaps a dozen books last year but also watched probably a 1000 hours of tv and consumed maybe 2000 hours of online shorter media.

Frankly I’m glad most of humanity does not read or write books and has lost its historic reverence for the priestly classes that make it out to be some sort of deep virtue as opposed to an unevenly distributed preference.