Catching up on Charlie Rose's week, I was struck by one of A.O. Scott's comment about "The Reader". He had quite a few reticenses about the movie but a particular one was that the movie "mystifies" reading and literature. To paraphrase him,  A.O. Scott does not believe that books are as transformative as they are often portrayed to be. (In "The Reader", he actually thought the point was almost assumed but not proven in any way, since the viewers are never made prevvy in any way to if or how the Kate Winslet's character may have been truly changed by her readings.)

What is truer and truer however is that media are cross-pollinating. More and more, people watch movie versions of books, then go buy the book; people listen to books on their ipods; people write books on the web; people write stories in group etc. In today's New York Times there is even a story about a a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn, Patrick Shea,  whose been writing one song for each of the 136 chapters in “Moby-Dick.”  Talk about mixing it all!

What is for sure is that in this case, the written word, and its mythical standing are still the source of the exercises.  For those who worry about an endangered future, the question is not wil books disappear, they will in their paper form, but how to take advantage of the popularization of the distribution channels to help pushing the best to the front. Who will be the filters of tomorrow? Who will help fire up our imaginations? Who will be the cultural Obamas of 2010? That is what I wonder about.