Jeanette Winterson is an amazing writer. I love her fierce imagination, her relentless intelligence, her insane childhood which makes my own appear mundane.
But in her recent Times piece, she lamely points out that book shows currently make for boring TV.
That's sort of like grandly and earnestly announcing straight men like boobs.
Of course, Winterson uses graduate department dribble to fill out the piece, noting:
When we hear about books on television we are confronted by the strange disjuncture between what is being discussed and the setting and body language of those doing the discussing. Turn down the sound on a books TV programme and it could be about anything. I believe that such anodyne “anythingness” subliminally undermines the content of what is being said. Books are not boring, and book programmes are not boring, but they look very boring indeed, and I think this might be the problem.
This is exactly why by my last graduate course I was hissing the word "fuck" under my breath and glaring at anyone who noticed. If theoretical discourse makes someone as cool as Winterson sound like a dick, no one stands a chance.
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