Sunday, March 15, 2009

The dangers of the early books

I've been reading Gears of the City. I don't care for it; to me it's bleak yet predictable. I'm slogging to the end, but it's a chore.

The book is hallucinogenic. It's loaded with memes of despair. They infiltrate my own memetic structure, altering my thoughts and attitudes.

I'm accustomed to this drug however. I've done much harder stuff, stiffer literary trips, books that rend and tear. I've been reading all my life, I was born into a culture that had made reading culturally acceptable and chained it with tradition. My genes are reader genes; the genes of those made mad by reading have passed on.

What were books like when Gutenberg unleased a plague of memes open medieval Europe? Those early minds must have been torn like leaves ...

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