1870s

'I love having an alternate life to retreat into and to lose myself in. I love being away from the world so long — so far out from shore. Eleven years. '
---Donna Tartt.

'In a culture of speed-dating, quick fixes, fast food, bullet trains, pop-up everything, and unreadably long jeremiads about the increasing incidence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the single-minded commitment required to read a long, absorbing book serves as a rebuke to a culture that favours those who can simultaneously email/tweet/instant message/hold up their end of a phone call/Skype while live blogging the whole shebang'

---Stuart Jeffries.

'We wanted to start to tell a story that would take a long time to tell. We were creating a sophisticated, multi-layered story with complex characters who would reveal themselves over time and relationships that would take space to play out.'

---Kevin Spacey.


He then spoils it by saying 'the industry' should give people what they want.  Organized religion and the music industry failed (or will fail) because they didn't give people what they wanted and so they, 'the people', ended up taking it for free or rejecting what was being offered. 

Always give people what they want. '8/10 cats prefer...' And if people want porn in their soaps, then?

The longer form, the slow movement: the last convulsions against the fragmentation, discontinuity, or the beginning of something radically new?   

~~~

'Boccaccio wrote the book between 1348 and 1352, when the values of the Middle Ages (valor, faith, transcendence) were yielding to those of the Renaissance (enjoyment, business, the real)'

In Boccaccio the world is:

'like the tiny natures mortes, corners of landscapes, and background-figures of some of our fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painters. Action, pure action, without intended meaning or ethics, gains depth, lucidity and mystery from those details that no amount of serious moral intention could give it.'

~~~

Each person is a centre.