The Deep Dark Secret of Dyslogia

THE DEEP DARK SECRET OF DYSLOGIA

No two ways about it, the famous editor was fried. Doing too much phone had finally done in his brain. No big thing normally, but his reader was sick this week, and his famous author had to have an answer, but ye gads, he couldn't read his meal ticket's writing anymore! Matter of fact, he couldn't read the letter he got from his mother the week before, or the article in the famous magazine that quoted him talking about his famous meal ticket. But at least he had the good sense to have the article scanned for his name, so he did catch the sentence illuminated in yellow magic marker where he was glibly quoted explaining that sales were down because, "People just don't read anymore."

He was now a testament to his own testimony. Counted among the growing number of people not just in the publishing business, but in the entire infotainment industry, who have dyslogia, which, for the uninitiated, is a mild, yet quite serious eye to brain reading (listening-viewing) dysfunction which is on the verge of literally becoming an intellectual epidemic.

Caused primarily by infomania, which is the obsession to collect more and more information without making any distinction in its value, the untalked about downside of the technology boom is that everyone in the content end of the Biz has been forced to overload their poor unprepared human hard drives without being taught how to download what they've already taken in and are no longer using.

Right now, for instance, a lot of people are going through dyslogia without even knowing it, because it happens gradually, not suddenly, which is the main reason it's so difficult to detect. And once they have it they don't talk about it because it's too embarrassing, and they think it's them, not the effects on them of the system in which they're working. So just like the Peter Principle explained how people are naturally promoted out of their competence - as one moves up in the Biz, the amount of germane duties they actually have to perform move down, reading among the people who actually make decisions about books and movies, is something their underlings do. Executives do phone and they do lunch and they do fine.

It's a well known fact that people in decision making positions in the Biz have readers who read the work and write coverage on it for them so they can talk about the scripts as if they actually read them themselves. Certainly in the movie business, as novelist Gerald Green's famous Harry Cohn story testifies, it's always been a cretin's picnic. Green was of course accorded the whole nine yards when Cohn bought his novel all those years ago; flown out to Bimbowood, put up in what might be considered tres-tres ostentatious digs, he was immediately wisked to the studio and ushered in to meet the mogul himself. The moment Green walked through the door, Dirty Harry leaped up out of his chair and embraced him, then began pounding him on the back, as he oozed, "Young man, young man, I actually cried, cried real tears when my secretary read me the synopsis of your novel."

Is this an exaggeration? I'm not sure, but probably not. I talked to a lit agent in New York recently who quite openly boasted "I read everything I sell, but not until I sell it." Then not long after that, a once famous but now somewhat fading editor-in-chief who I had read for at the height of his career, asked for a novel of mine. Six months later, when I hadn't heard from him I started calling him. He never returned my calls, but one day, probably while his secretary was in the bathroom, he answered his own phone. I identified myself and asked him whether he had had a chance to read the novel yet. "Uhhh, I don't know,"