If I stand up from the computer and go to a bricks-and-mortar movie theatre to see Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” I will see the actors in that movie age in real time over twelve years, folded into the movie’s hundred and sixty-five minutes. If, when I come home from that movie, I need more visual entertainment, I can, if I wish, watch an entire season of HBO’s “The Newsroom” or Netflix’s “Bojack Horseman,” or many other television series, in twelve or (many) more straight hours of viewing. What used to be released over three months or a year can now be consumed at any rate the viewer chooses, even as the time of each episode remains the standard hour or half an hour, and the narrative pacing hasn’t changed. Watch more than three at a time and one can feel peculiarly numb, nerves deadened by too much experience delivered too quickly. If, dead-eyed from movies and television, I want to return to literature, I can pick up Book One of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” and pace with him through four hundred and forty-eight pages of the story of his life, doled out in the measured rhythm of what feels like real time, radically ordinary time, unshaped, unhurried, and uncensored.
Stacey d'Erasmo
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