Old Fogies suggest that "[r]eaders should be trusted to self-edit by skimming passages: 'Aren�t readers intelligent enough to do that?'"

To which those of us who love the idea of a 28-page "Anna Karenina" (time is money, time is also watching re-runs of "Friends" with friends who, just like you, have read that 28-page version of "Anna�Karenina" and loved it just as much as you did) can retort:

Aren't modern readers, young and with-it, intelligent enough, as�graduates of�"world-class universities" each�more wonderfully impressive and well-endowed than the next, capable of figuring out what was cut out, and exercising their vivid imaginations, so constantly stimulated by television and the movies (Shrek, Star Wars,�Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)�, to make it up and put it back in themselves, making the reading of "Anna Karenina" just what the encounter with any work of art should be, just like a good video game -- that is, interactive?

Isn't that exactly what Shakespeare wanted us to do -- to exercise our own imaginations when seeing his plays, or for that matter reading "Anna Karenina"? And that is what any artist, even those less great than Shakespeare, wants his audience to do. And what better way to insure that interactivity takes place than to cut out a lot of the connective tissue, and even some of the bone, and let the Reader or Viewer supply it himself, as part of that Interactive Effort that is Art.

Yes, of course Shakespeare would have welcomed these latter-day abridgements.

After all, in his cryptic way he said it first:

"Still be kind, and eke out our performance with your mind."

All that is now being done, by reducing texts to the bare minimum, is enlarge rich possiblitiies for readers who wish to have the opportunity of exercising their imaginations by eking out those performances ofShakespeare, of Tolstoy,�of Dante , through having much of the text removed, so that what remains is senseless unless the reader performs his imaginative and secret ministry.

Did I tell you, by the way, the latest news? "The Divine Comedy" has at long last been reduced to a mere 17 pages through the joint scholarly efforts of Cornel West, Stevem Speilberg, and �Cicciolina, working overtime. All three books, all 99 cantos of The Inferno, and The Paradiso, and that one in the middle, whatever it's called (they decided to cut out that one entirely). I was especially impressed the way they managed to take that phrase at the end, about "la rosa sempiterna," and simply call it "the rose." Let the readers try to rummage around in their brains for the perfect epithet, and come up themselves with that "sempiterna." It will do them a world of good. It will not only make them true collaborators, in the best interactive sense, with the Work of Art, but also improve their Self-Esteem. And that, as we all know, is possibly the greatest thing that Art can do for us.