I found the article to be intriguing and thoughtful. Although I've never been anything close to an avid gossip consumer, I would find myself reading People at the dentist's office and scanning headlines from the tabloids in the grocery store check-out line in times past. But now I find myself so weary from pop culture that I just can't rouse even the minimal furtive interest I used to have. I do feel over-pitched-to, so many entities vying for my clicks or attention or dollars or whatever that I'm just worn out. I think Traister has some insightful arguments for describing what I'm feeling. My husband and I got rid of our TV/cable a year ago and have just been downloading what we want to watch from the Internet ; when we stayed at a hotel recently with access to cable, we were astonished to find that it was even worse than when we quit watching (i.e., more annoying, stupid, braying commercials, advertisements parading as programs, really mindless programs, etc.). Even the Internet is starting to seem strained in the same terms, though it has much more diversity, thank god. At any rate, there comes a point when a phenomenon has played itself out. I hope that point might be now. We need to give some really thoughtful attention to the serious issues that confront us as a society and inhabitants of a planet that does have its limits in terms of supporting us.

Well, I never had my liberal grandmother take me aside to give me unsought-for information about her and my granddad's sex life, which, admittedly, would have made me feel intensely uncomfortable. And I haven't read Wowowow and probably never will. As it happens, I had only one liberal relative out of about, oh . . . 137. At the same time, I do find myself becoming utterly bored, as I get older, with youth's narcissistic take on their monopoly on sex. Ew! Sex between anyone older than 35! Ew!!!! Get over it. When you're older, you'll be very happy if your sex life isn't nonexistent. With all this focus on Women! --how about getting over some of this ageist garbage. Are we all supposed to shrivel up and die the minute we turn 50? Not have any fun at all? Wait until you get there. You're going to want to still have a life, believe me.

Others have addressed the discussion of critics quite well in this thread, but I would also like to say that I agree that a big part of the problem is the current state of published literature. Like poster Evie G., I have always been a huge, lifelong, voracious reader of fiction. But for the last ten years or so, I've been reading only the occasional novel. I feel that two extremes are offered to the reading public by mainstream publishers: highly formulaic genre fiction or self-important, self-conscious literary fiction. I love a really good story that surprises me. I look for that in movies as well (which, by the way, I've been watching fewer and fewer of for exactly the same reasons). This is very hard to find. It seems to me that the literary publishing houses publish mainly to impress each other (or the critics), and commercial publishing is very cynical (though quite successfully so if their sales are any indication) about just what predictable buttons to push (though they've pushed mine so often now, they don't respond any more). I used to write jacket copy for a couple of the big houses in NYC and I would say out of the hundreds of books I blurbed, there were only a handful that I would actually have spent my own money on. I've said this before in another thread, but some of the best writing I've encountered is from unpublished writers I've met in fiction workshops. It's good writing and fresh, good story-telling--not slick, either commercially or literarily (not the now-formulaic Literary fiction that Evie G. described). It doesn't read like everything else nor does it necessarily fit into a requisite category, which often means it's never going to see the light of day. After reading a script, some famous producer--whose name escapes me--was famously quoted as saying something like: "This is better than a masterpiece! This is mediocre!" I think that this is, sadly, what commercialism does to art. It may not be a coincidence that the death of the novel began when all the independent publishing houses got bought up by giant conglomerates who wanted higher profit margins and "brands."

Personally, I could never tell which book I was actually going to end up liking from reading someone else's critique of it. Much of the criticism I used to read often seemed to be for other critics, not necessarily readers. I tend, especially these days, to read recommendations from like-minded readers whose opinion I respect.