You know, I'd like to register my confusion as to the report just released about "literacy" in America. (Not only my confusion, but my irritation at the Guardian's unhelpful hysteria and condescending writeup.)

It doesn't make much sense to me to run around trumpeting Americans' ignorance because they don't read novels, poetry, or the collected works of Gibbon. Let me be clear: I think the world would be better if more people read Yeats and Toni Morrison and Proust and so on. But these writers just aren't relevant or necessary for most people. I'm not going to act shocked if someone I run into at Home Depot hasn't read Orwell's earlier essays, but I'm not going to pretend that that same Joe/Jane wouldn't be able to understand them, either.

The report notes that part of the drop in book readership can be accounted for by an increase in consumption of electronic media. So we're not a nation of illiterates, exactly, we're becoming a nation of people who prefer television and the internet.

What's wrong with that? I daresay most TV shows are more complex and engaging than the idiot lit produced by and for the Starbucks set. I daresay I've spent many hours reading on the internet and don't feel like a dunce for it. When the predominant aesthetic is one that emphasizes Self-Expression Uber Alles, of COURSE casual readers are going to quit reading.

Just a theory: the market's flooded with people eager for their fifteen minutes, people who are convinced their essence, their confession, their being has a right to public attention. That's the death of reading as the kind of responsible social act the NEA seems to want to promote, because there are simply too many selves vying for expression. Publishing becomes a slave of niche markets, and even if everyone read it wouldn't benefit us as a society because there's as much printed matter floating around as there are websites; both media are equally tough to navigate. Pretty soon no one will believe anything not endorsed by their own microcultural information consumption niche- and there will be so many of these that any gesture we might make towards civic unity will sound like an archaic joke.

[Please read this article, if you have a New York Times account. And if you don't, Dana Gioia thinks you're a bad person.]

As a bibliophile, it irks me to hear that people aren't reading as many books, of COURSE. But I can't stand the self-righteousness of people who don't see that most people's lives aren't especially conducive to the ten or twelve hours of solitude and quiet and uninterrupted attention it takes to finish a book, or who don't see that it's just not the direction the world is heading.

Welcome to the brave new world, Mr. Gioia: where no one reads, everyone expresses, and there's no universally agreed-upon way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Good gracious! Does this mean Mr. Gioia should worry about Americans running to the nearest school en masse, burning it to the ground, and replacing it with an internet cafe? Bullshit.