It’s the technology; duh!

We humans like to think we are so smart — but we show all too many signs of latching on to any handy idea which suits our preconceptions and sticking with it to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary. It’s sort of like the writing issue I was holding forth on a couple of days ago. You say something, anything, and if it sounds like a “reasonable” argument, that’s what it becomes. Just because it fits with the premiss it must be true — no time to check it though, we’re on to the next point. n+1 is a respected literary magazine. They recently published an article entitled “Old Directions”, which notices the recent phenomenon of success visiting backlist books. Lots of older books, having missed their audience at first publication, are now reaching a mass readership, often years later. The piece is basically a well-deserved paean to New York Review Books, who were early in this now quite common publishing trope of rescuing from obscurity older books which didn’t exactly make it the…