WORLD OF LEARNING: LISTENING IS LEARNING

"Neil Gaiman Asks: Heard Any Good Books Lately?" NPR 11/30/09

More fodder for my upcoming essay on audio books, and the need to respect the listening experience as its own kind of duck (see "What Is Reading, Anyway?" below). It turns out that Gaiman forwarded his argument for audio books previously on his blog in 2005, where he is even harsher on Harold Bloom than in his NPR story. He tells us that Bloom "demonstrates his twerphood to the world" in a comment solicited as part of an New York Times story on the validity of the audio books experience. To wit (quoting from Gaiman's blog):

"Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear," said Harold Bloom, the literary critic. "You need the whole cognitive process, the part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you." From this we learn that art and wisdom only go in at the eyes. What comes in by the ear is manifestly a lesser experience. The corollary, of course, is that real writing gets written down by the hand, and only inferior, wisdom-less writing gets dictated by the mouth, which is why Paradise Lost must have been rubbish...

Not to mention The Iliad and The Odyssey. Which brings me to an earlier critic, Socrates. Maryanne Wolf tells us in her wonderful Proust and the Squid that: "In examining written language, Socrates took a stand that usually comes as a surprise: he felt passionately that the written word posed serious risks to society." His reasoning, Wolf informs us, was quite similar to Bloom's. Except that Socrates felt that it was written, rather than oral, language that did not engage "the whole cognitive process" because written language offered less need for using memory and internalizing knowledge.

Maybe by not listening to audio books, Bloom is the one who is not "open to wisdom."