TT: Longer than Twitter, shorter than Kushner

In my “Sightings” column for today’s Wall Street Journal, I write in praise of shorter attention spans. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Take a look at any TV sitcom of the ’50s and ’60s and compare it to modern-day televised fare. It’s startling to see how slow-moving those old shows were. The same thing is true of live theater. The leisurely expositions of yesteryear, it turns out, aren’t necessary: You can count on contemporary audiences to get the point and see where you’re headed, and they don’t want to wait around for you to catch up with them.
Does this mean that the discursive masterworks of the past are no longer accessible? Yes and no. A great work of art that is organically long, like “The Marriage of Figaro” or “Remembrance of Things Past,” will never lack for audiences. But just as most of Shakespeare’s plays can and should be cut in performance, so should today’s artists always keep in mind that most of us are too busy to watch as they circle the airport, looking for a place to land.
“The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures,” the new Tony Kushner play that opened in New York last week, is three hours and 40 minutes long–a half-hour longer than the Donmar Warehouse production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” that is currently playing in Brooklyn. Even if “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide” were 15% better than “Lear,” Mr. Kushner’s play would still have profited from being stripped of its lengthy digressions and superfluous subplots, most of which serve only to obscure the play’s good parts.
Anyone who doubts the virtues of brevity should dip into Oxford University Press’ “Very Short Introduction” series, in which celebrated experts write with extreme concision about their areas of expertise. Each volume in the series is about 140 pages long and runs to roughly 35,000 words of text. (Most serious biographies, by contrast, run to between 150,000 and 200,000 words.)
How much can you say about a big subject in 35,000 words? Plenty, if you’re Harvey C. Mansfield writing about Alexis de Tocqueville or Kenneth Minogue writing about politics. These “Very Short Introductions” are models of their kind, crisp, clear and animated by a strong point of view. They are terse but not anonymous: Both men express themselves not in the blandly corporate tones of an encyclopedia entry but in their own distinctive voices….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.