In a presentation of a Mass Communications thesis a student recounted his research into the characteristics of music videos that make them of greater or lesser quality in the eyes of his peers, who are also college students and watchers of such videos. His results struck me as utterly peculiar: the students he surveyed agreed almost unanimously that music videos weren 't very good, that none of the characteristics my student researcher had come up with to describe those videos made much difference in quality, and that they all watched those videos for hours every week. When I inquired of the class to which the student was presenting how this could be, they nodded their heads in agreement when one said "I know they're brainless, but watching them is addictive."
I was taken aback. "They're addictive when you think they're stupid? Why?"
"You watch, and then a new comes on. You watch that. A new one comes on."
At first I was struck dumb, shaking my head. Now I think I'm seeing something. There in front of me was the distinction between novelty and novel. Each video offered just enough sight and sound to be the little seduction of the senses that is novelty. None offered enough news, enough change, enough provocation, to be novel.
A pet rock is a novelty; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is novel. Huck offers such thought about inversions of right and wrong as evidenced in civilization and civilization's perversions that it requires the labor of engaged processing, testing against internal preconceptions, to comprehend what encountering it means. Encountering a pet rock is seeing a pet rock.
My superb creative writing teacher, Mark Vinz, told his classes what he'd heard from Tom McGrath, Mark's peer as writer and writing teacher, about encountering a poem. Ask the poem "What's the news?" What has the poem to offer that shifts the reader some way. The good poem brings news. The new, the novel, forces the engaged reader to see to think to feel familiar territory differently or to see unfamiliar territory as compared to past experience.
The pet rock or the dull poem lies there to be seen in its novelty of encounter, without the reward of the novel.
From music video to literary criticism. I hope that is novel.
I was taken aback. "They're addictive when you think they're stupid? Why?"
"You watch, and then a new comes on. You watch that. A new one comes on."
At first I was struck dumb, shaking my head. Now I think I'm seeing something. There in front of me was the distinction between novelty and novel. Each video offered just enough sight and sound to be the little seduction of the senses that is novelty. None offered enough news, enough change, enough provocation, to be novel.
A pet rock is a novelty; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is novel. Huck offers such thought about inversions of right and wrong as evidenced in civilization and civilization's perversions that it requires the labor of engaged processing, testing against internal preconceptions, to comprehend what encountering it means. Encountering a pet rock is seeing a pet rock.
My superb creative writing teacher, Mark Vinz, told his classes what he'd heard from Tom McGrath, Mark's peer as writer and writing teacher, about encountering a poem. Ask the poem "What's the news?" What has the poem to offer that shifts the reader some way. The good poem brings news. The new, the novel, forces the engaged reader to see to think to feel familiar territory differently or to see unfamiliar territory as compared to past experience.
The pet rock or the dull poem lies there to be seen in its novelty of encounter, without the reward of the novel.
From music video to literary criticism. I hope that is novel.
1 Comments:
That is indeed a novel connection. Music videos are designed to sell. They are more about the effect than the content. Must have been an interesting thesis presentation.
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