[Paracelsus]

(08-04-2018 07:49 PM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  

(08-04-2018 04:26 PM)Thot Leader Wrote:  

(08-04-2018 03:42 PM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  

And yet when as is said and done, it's Kafka we remember almost 100 years after his death, not any of the girls who passed him by. It's Kafka who changed literature, changed the way people think, and even inspired a Frank Zappa song ("In The Penal Colony" from 1968). Bookstores and libraries carry works by Kafka, not picture books of that girl's breasts and hips.

In that sense, Kafka won the game in the end. There's a lesson there.

Very well said.

Counterpoint: We now live in a culture where the average person spends far more time looking at IG models than reading Kafka (ask anyone under 30 their favorite Youtuber or IG model, then ask them their fav Kafka story, if they've even heard of him). So yeah, he made a tremendous impact, but I can't help but wonder, so what?

Very well said.

Counterpoint to your counterpoint. Back in the '80s I spent far more time reading a magazine called Gallery* than I ever did Kafka. But I still remember Kafka and not the names of the myriad of women whose tits and asses I salivated over.

* Gallery was a mag where women or their husbands would send in nude shots of themselves. This was sort of a proto version of the Instagram selfie. I preferred seeing real women to airbrushed models. Still do.

When I got into Elvis Costello, I got a kick out of his reference to "reader's wives" in his song "Sunday's Best." Guess Elvis was reading Gallery, or its British counterpart.

Not really an answer, more of a starting point for thought:

Does it take the average person reading a book for a book to heavily influence a society?

Example one way: the myth that only a tiny minority of Germans were actually Nazis or supported Hitler's ideas. This myth is adequately rebutted by the fact that Mein Kampf was a bestseller in the 1920s, not an underground work passed from hand to hand.

Example the other way: I doubt anyone average outside a union like the SEIU has ever actually read Das Kapital. Yet in 250 years Marx's book has killed more people and caused more suffering than any other bar maybe the Quran, founded and assured the destruction of modern Russia and will assure the destruction of America in time.