I'm excited that Jam Cary has joined the blog world here. Someone as witty and erudite as Jam who successfully makes a living writing jokes should have fun things to say. He also has thoughtful Christian reflections on the secular world, particularly the world of the media that he works in. Go, read, make comments, and encourage him to keep blogging!

Today I read this essay by C. S. Lewis on 'good' and 'bad' literature. Essentially he argues that 'good' literature is determined by the kind of reading it permits, invites, and perhaps even compels. Good literature may allow 'bad' readings, but bad literature (like bad music, bad poetry and bad art) will never sustain a 'good', literary reading. A literary reading is seen in things like the desire to re-read, an open-ness and receptiveness to allowing the text to mould and transform you, and time spent thinking about the text itself (rather than just the ideas it refers to). This is distinct from the 'unliterary' reading which 'uses' the text for information, entertainment or other things (which, Lewis asserts strongly, may be good things in themselves).

These are the final paragraphs:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes [animals] cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

I love the way this poem makes you think about things you think you know in a different way. I also like it because the poet went to my Oxford college.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings-

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside-
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer openly.
Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

Alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Craig Raine

Okay, I kind of like the toilet humour too.