The Center for Future Storytelling

MIT has opened a Center for Future Storytelling, a determined effort to destroy the written word in even its debased www form. Sam Leith's (until this week, literary editor of the Telegraph) comments are interesting, although characteristically of a modern Englishman he feels obliged to lout to pop culture (Twitter, GTA4, soap operas) however unconvincingly, and even if, characteristically of an English journalist, he misrepresents the situation. There is no doubt about what the Center intends: it wants to provide the tools for worldwide LARPs.

By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web.

Vampires ahoy, matey.

Even worse, one of the professors is a Ramesh Raskar, "a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies." In a word: bodcasts.

Leith is only pretending not to understand what MIT is up to and is only playing at pop culture, but he really does know English. He says it perfectly:

The eggheads at MIT have, in this respect, more than just a prose style in common with the governing body at Meadows Community School in Chesterfield.

The closure of the library at this 759-strong comprehensive is being explained as "a move towards the relocation and redistribution of non-fiction and fiction resources in the light of the new developments in a virtual-learning environment and interactive learning".

Every clause is doubled-up into redundancy in the hope of sounding grand. How does "relocation" differ from "redistribution" - and don't they add up to "relocating from the library to the skip"? What are "non-fiction and fiction resources" - other than a fancy way of saying "all the books we have"?

How does "a virtual learning environment" differ from "interactive learning" (what learning isn't "interactive", come to that) - and is it just clever-sounding verbiage for the internet?

The thing is, the internet does some things very well, and the codex book does other things very well. There is an overlap - they are both means of preserving and sharing information - but it's foolish to see the two as interchangeable, or the former as supplanting the latter.

One of the clichés about education is that it should teach you not what to think, but how to think: and a vital part of that is understanding the shape of knowledge - being able to evaluate categories of information and degrees of authority in sources. If the educators themselves can't or won't think about these distinctions, God help their pupils.

Rem tetigisti acu, to address him in his ill-concealed native tongue.

Taking recommendations

Most of the time, if a writer recommends a book it is new and publicized well enough that the recommendation is mostly unneeded. Recommendations for older books have proved worth following up, though. From Theodore Dalrymple I picked up Malice Aforethought, an excellent mystery that would belong with Ronald Knox's and Dorothy Sayers' mysteries, except for its quiet lack of sentimentality. George Will recommended I Hear America Swinging, which was an odd but entertaining experience in itself, and a little unsettling, too, to see how far its satire had become reality in thirty years. I just now finished The Belles Lettres Papers; it is a pity I have already forgotten who recommended it, because it was well worth interrupting the Johnson marathon. Which reminds me, I first read Rasselas because of Dalrymple's recommendation.

So far all the recommendations have given the best kind of delight, unexpected and unobligatory. Belles Lettres is written as though a history of a literary journal, narrated by a smooth, politic young editor. It is a light satire on office and literary politics, which I enjoyed even though I last read the NYT Review of Books, where the author was once an editor, five or six years ago and do not keep up with literary fashion. I also cannot help thinking the author, Charles Simmons, must be the namesake of Charlotte Simmons in Tom Wolfe's novel, but none of the reviews suggest why that might be and I am not very willing to read one of his tomes just to find out. Wolfe, for me, suffers the blight of over-recommendation, which encourages all that is mulish in me; there is enough of that to start with, so I may never get around to him. It may be just as well, since reading lengthy descriptions of college girl sex written by an elderly man has a slightly creepy feel to it.