Strange Wine Read Free Page A

we’ve just permitted it to be badly used; but if we could get some good stuff on the tube…” No, I’m afraid I’ve gone beyond that rationalization, to an extreme position. The act of watching television for protracted periods (and there’s no way to insure the narcotic effects won’t take you over) is deleterious to the human animal. The medium itself insists you sit there quietly and cease thinking.
    The dinosaurs. How they died.
    Television, quite the opposite of books or even old-time radio that presented drama and comedy and talk shows (unlike Top Forty radio programming today, which is merely TV without moving parts), is systemically oriented toward stunning the use of individual imagination. It puts everything out there, right there , so you don’t have to dream even a little bit. When they would broadcast a segment of, say, Inner Sanctum in the Forties, and you heard the creaking door of a haunted house, the mind was forced to create the picture of that haunted house–a terrifying place so detailed and terrifying that if Universal Studios wanted to build such an edifice for a TV movie, it would cost them millions of dollars and it still wouldn’t be one one-millionth as frightening as the one your own imagination had cobbled up.
    A book is a participatory adventure. It involves a creative act at its inception and a creative act when its purpose is fulfilled. The writer dreams the dream and sets it down; the reader reinterprets the dream in personal terms, with personal vision, when he or she reads it. Each creates a world. The template is the book.
    At risk of repeating myself, and of once again cribbing from another writer’s perfection of expression (in this case, my friend Dr. Isaac Asimov), here is a bit I wrote on this subject for an essay on the “craft” of writing teleplays:
    Unlike television, films, football games, the roller derby, wars in underdeveloped nations and Watergate hearings, which are spectator sports, a book requires the activation of its words by the eyes and the intellect of a reader. As Isaac Asimov said recently in an article postulating the perfect entertainment cassette, “A cassette as ordinarily viewed makes sound and casts light. That is its purpose, of course, but must sound and light obtrude on others who are not involved or interested? The ideal cassette would be visible and audible only to the person using it…. We could imagine a cassette that is always in perfect adjustment; that starts automatically when you look at it; that stops automatically when you cease to look at it; that can play forward or backward, quickly or slowly, by skips or with repetitions, entirely at your pleasure…Surely, that’s the ultimate dream device–a cassette that may deal with any of an infinite number of subjects, fictional or non-fictional, that is self-contained, portable, non-energy-consuming, perfectly private and largely under the control of the will…. Must this remain only a dream? Can we expect to have such a cassette some day?…We not only have it now, we have had it for many centuries. The ideal I have described is the printed word, the book, the object you now hold–light, private, and manipulable at will…. Does it seem to you that the book, unlike the cassette I have been describing, does not produce sound and images? It certainly does…. You cannot read without hearing the words in your mind and seeing the images to which they give rise. In fact, they are your sounds and images, not those invented for you by others, and are therefore better…. The printed word presents minimum information, however. Everything but that minimum must be provided by the reader–the intonation of words, the expressions on faces, the actions, the scenery, the background, must all be drawn out of that long line of black-on-white symbols.”
    Quite clearly, if one but looks around to assess the irrefutable evidence of reality, books strengthen the dreaming facility, and television numbs