What's going on with modern literature? I have always contended that literature is the last intelligent medium still alive and functioning at a high level. Its probably because most dumb people don't read and therefore, few books are written for that intellectual level. But after a serious of completely air headed "celebrities" have issued books they claim they wrote (but which are all ghostwritten), perhaps Reality TV is coming to literature. Ugh! I don't like the sound of "Reality Literature".
The newest "author" is the very pretty and totally talent less reality TV star and, well, poser for the cameras and famous for nothing...Kim Kardashian. Kim has even signed up her sisters for a book writing brain trust., or so she says. This follows books that Reality celebrities Nicole Ritchie, "The Situation", Hillary Duff, Lauren Conrad (all "authors" but non readers!) and that creature they call "Snookie"? William Shakespeare...I warn you to stay in your grave and not peek at this atrocity.
How does a woman like Snookie, who says she has only read two books in her entire life, and is famous for fist fights with other women, drunken orgies, and sleeping with any thing wearing pants, have the education, background and experience to wrote a book? Uh, by having it ghostwritten do it for her, as all the other Reality TV celebrity books have. Sad to say, Snookie's book was on the New York Times best seller list. So what was once an art, the author, a single person who creates to stimulate our mind and our imaginations, has instead become a merchandise to be marketed by use of the name of non talented celebrities. Literature as merchandise and not as art, ouch! I am not sure who reads those kinds of books, but I am sure I don't want to discuss epistemology or any other philosophy with any of them.
Publishers love the non books because they sell, which indicts the intelligence of readership today and dumbs down literary standards with each Snookie essay that is printed. When pressed to acknowledge whether those "authors" actually wrote their books, they or their publishing houses all admit that each was ghostwritten. Some of the "authors" dictate into a tape recorder and others just lend their name and credit for the book.
Books have always been ghostwritten, but in the past the subjects were worthy people, intelligent individuals who allowed a more skilled professional writer to put their thoughts in print. John F Kennedy, the American President, won a Pulitzer Prize for his book 'Profiles in Courage', which was entirely written by Theodore Sorenson. There are many other examples. But I think the Kennedy story is far more worthy of a book deal than is the blabber from Kim Kardashian and her like.
What's the saddest fact of all about this corruption of the written word is that literary agents are chasing after the Snookie's of the world and begging them to sign book deals because... as the old P.T. Barnum line went, it's best to "Never overestimate the intelligence of the American people".
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