My great book: ultimate edition

I was thinking the other day, as I watched some turgid scenes that had been removed from a film but deemed worthy enough to stick on the DVD in order to justify the extortionate recommended retail price, that you’ll never have deleted scenes from a book.

Wouldn’t it be odd, if the chapters the author thought were too crap to put in were included at the end of the book, something a little extra for you to read. If the writer added 750 words after that about his desk, interviewed the man who sold him his pens. Why don’t we get that added value from the printed word?

In many ways a book remains valuable in itself – I think there’s still much to be said for the tangibility of the touchable – you can’t reliably evaluate a DVD until you stick it in a special decoding machine, something that will turn shiny reflections into cinematic pleasure. A book is just a book, it’s there, the words are sitting, waiting for you to observe them. The way one sits behind one word, in front of another, like they were fated to be there, it was meant to happen. No wait, it was.

I find deleted scenes a really odd concept in our new DVD society. They didn’t exist as a concept when the VHS was still around. It’s a fanciful notion, that you’d have too much space to fill so you’d scrabble around to find things. I cooked dinner the other night, but I didn’t empty the dustbin onto people’s plates to fill dead real estate.

And so ends another post – give it a couple of months and maybe I’ll post it again, with a director’s commentary.