The naked city

For me and my writer friends, this article from The Morning News -- a "web-based broadsheet" I'd never heard of until I saw the link on Romenesko -- gives us all a glimpse into the rarified world of New York publishing. Ordinarily I would find stuff like this depressing, but the author takes such a sardonic look at it all, I enjoyed it anyway. Maybe it's her theory that there are 20 good stories submitted by unknown writers to the New Yorker every month. That's only half of one percent, but hey, that's twenty a month. I'm just glad there's that much good writing about.

Speaking of stories, I heard someone interviewed on "Talk of the Nation" today -- an author named Neal Gabler -- who said there were three big reasons why so-called reality TV shows are so popular. First, people are exhausted by narrative; second, the reality shows offer a genuinely open-ended narrative which, because it hasn't happened yet, is always in doubt; and third, there's something at stake, whether it's a million dollars or a potential fiance.

I was struck by the first reason, that people are exhausted by the ubiquitous presence of narrative. It's an idea that's occurred to me before. Think of the thousands of stories we see on television and in movies, read in books, and see in other venues like the theater. No matter how long the work is, whether it's the 22 minutes that a network sitcom gets between commercials, the three solid hours of "The Two Towers," or the hundreds of pages of a Dickens book, that's thousands of expositions, complications, turning points and climaxes. I was impressed by this for the first time a few years ago when UPN was running "Star Trek: The Next Generation" night after night, week in and week out, until they had run all 278 episodes about three times each. After that kind of exposure to pure narrative -- when the only thing that changes from episode to episode is the plot itself, with the characters and the basic setting (the spaceship) remaining the same -- the patterns of the teleplays start to emerge, and I started to see the extent to which it was all formulaic.

Surely the human imagination suffers some sort of fatigue after years of narrative. I'm not even talking about the tens of thousands of characters you are presented with. I'm just talking about the thousands of narrative arcs you have to digest. After a while you have to think, "Enough already -- I'd rather watch paint dry!" And voila! It's reality TV to the rescue. (Gabler's ideas are also referred to in this article from The Witness, and don't miss this interview.)