Monday, August 26th, 2002
It’s more than a blog, it’s a mind movie!
For some reason this morning, I am thinking about the time one of our relatives showed up at my parents’ house with a U-Haul full of vanity press books he’d been hawking to Wal-Mart. The short novel was entitled, “Razorback Walk-On.”
What I remember about the books (and I still have a big stack of them) is a phrase printed on the red cover: “It’s more than a book, it’s a mind movie!”
The more I think about this phrase, the more I realize how it applies to most of the good books I have read. Visual literacy is more important than textual literacy in our culture now, and fiction mainly serves to fill in the gaps between episodic theatrical releases (of course, I am talking about mainstream fiction, not the stuff they pretend is important up there in da un-a-vars-i-ty).
I can’t pretend anymore that I’d rather read the book than see the movie.