News, and the past

Today's NY Times reports that Americans are spending 'about 20 percent more time consuming radio, television and the Internet they were a decade ago' (Monday April 11, 2011, p.B2)

(Note the capitalization of 'Internet').

The average daily time spent with the above mentioned media was 6 hours and 50 mintues in 2001; by January 2011 the average daily time was 8 hours, 11 minutes. Tv viewers skewed older, Internet users younger. The report also noted the 'increasing ubiquity of smartphones, which have brought media into what were once silent spaces.'

Some of us now spend more time consuming media than we sleep.

The report brought to mind the avant-garde artist--whose name I've forgotten and who practiced at a time when there was an avant-garde, there being no avant-garde now--who kept his newspapers at least a year before reading them.

Of course there can be no avant-garde--and excuse the use of the phrase 'avant-garde'--when the present is so avidly consumed that it obliterates the necessity of a future.

Thank heavens then for the past and for observations such as Pound's, that 'literature is news that stays news'.