Books on
Radio
Subject: Your love of words
Looking around my piles of unread stuff --- I came upon an opened Ralph (the printed version). What a great review it is ... always opens my mind to new authors and new ways of understanding literature.
But it's actually a lot more. The one I am talking about is volume nineteen (what an age --- ugghhh --- the whole future in front of us ... scary) and the review of Wuthering Heights made me think (once again) what would happen if there was a radio station, --- or many radio stations that just read books, all kinds of books, all the time, day and night --- with no frills --- no interviews, no "talking about" books or authors. Just a voice reading.
My feeling is that little by little people of all venues of life would latch on (little by little) and without knowing they would (little by little) start going to the local libraries and even maybe to the bookstores on account of that gestalt principle that makes one want to complete things.
If to this you add the simple fact that thought is text, and that literature and all texts for that matter are instructions for the mind to follow in its construction and development of the plot --- just as a musical score is a set of injunctions for the musicians to follow if they are to reproduce and perhaps feel what the composer had in his heart as an experience, and a recipe likewise has to be performed in order to feel the taste intended by the author.
What has happened in the last century has been the creation of a superb artificial image replicating technology --- in which photos, films, TV have captured our stupid minds tricking us to believe that that which we are seeing has some reality in it. When I was about five- or six-years-old I fell madly in love with Rita Hayworth on a cover of Life magazine. It must have been 1943 or so. The problem is that everybody succumbs to this in one way or another, know it or not. Our culture --- and in Chile it's especially noticeable --- has gone entirely for the looks, what looks good drives consumerism an so forth.
Chile is the second per capita consumer of Coca Cola in the world (The Economist) and the first in the region of cosmetics and shampoo.
So what could be better than attract the minds --- not with images and advertising --- but with literature....
Tonight in my "Free Dance" session we might dance the Schubertianas as I call them --- soprano, clarinet and piano I played his Octet long ago, on the horn. Great music --- and pretty corny too --- but I can't be too choosy with the horn.
Francisco Huneeus
Cuatros Vientos
Santiago, Chile