Black Garterbelt

"And what’s this Rake guy’s deal? I picture him living in the mountains with a couple years growth of beard."

Sometimes, the internets make for an interesting mirror.

Sing along with the common people, sing along and it might just get you through

I pledged (at least to myself) to stop being Blog Quixote when it comes to print-based haterism, but here my pledge ends, as a kind, if mischievous, fellow has directed me to this article.  You say it has vague, unoriginal talking points about blogs courtesy of James Wood?  Fine, I'll play the fool again.

Here we go.

The internet, far from stepping in where print no longer publishes, has proved no boon, in terms of blogging. "It licenses first thoughts, vituperation," [Wood] says. "I don't go on much to those sort of blogs because there are better things to do with my life."

First of all, I love the use of the word "licenses" here.  It's the sort of thing one should say as one fastidiously buffs the dust off one's monocle with the slightly stiffened corner of a silk handkerchief.

But I digress.

There's nothing inherently vituperative about the blog form; the degree of vituperation varies according to each blogger's conscience.  That most people online have very little conscience says more about what people tend to do in the dark than it does about this particular vehicle of expression.  (It should also be noted that literary bloggers tend to be relatively well-mannered, despite what the pearl-clutchers would have you believe.  On the vituperation scale, at highest pitch, most rate below a slightly perturbed high school football coach.)

And do blogs license first thoughts?  Short answer: Yes, and so what?  Long answer: It varies according to the blogger's conscience.  But we certainly hope that what a blog lacks in polish it makes up in spontaneity, humor, tonal and cultural range, voice, and so on.

As it happens, there is a proud historical and literary precedent for like the kind of blog I'd love to preside over:

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

And:

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it . . .The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality. . . . The era of the commonplace book reached its peak in the late Renaissance, although commonplacing as a practice probably began in the twelfth century and remained widespread among the Victorians. It disappeared long before the advent of the sound bite.

Certainly a man carrying a torch for the living tradition of criticism that predates English studies has heard of this sort of thing.  I'd love to hear what he'd make of the connection, if he saw fit to dedicate some original thought to the matter.

n+1 is Satan

(I'm kidding, kidding.)

So: This recent post bestows the knockout power of a young Mike Tyson upon the gentlemen and ladies at n+1:

I think it's safe to say that two of n+1's favorite punching bags are the "Eggersards" (associates of Dave Eggers, whose "sub-literary work," according to n+1's inaugural "Intellectual Scene"* column, includes the journals McSweeney's and the Believer), and litbloggers -- that is to say, bloggers who blog about literature. In their most recent "Intellectual Scene" column (Winter 2007), the editors of n+1 described litblogging as an unholy mixture of guerrilla marketing and vomiting; and in the current issue's "Intellectual Scene," they contemptuously dismiss litbloggers in a single sentence, after having praised Amazon.com's anonymous book reviewers. At least the "Amazonians," they claim, actually read the books they're writing about. Ouch!

So who's going down -- the Eggersards? Although Eggers did reportedly once threaten to give up writing forever unless the Atlantic Monthly killed an anti-Eggers essay by future n+1 co-founder Keith Gessen (the essay was killed; Eggers kept writing), this outcome seems unlikely. But the effort to single-handedly silence scores -- maybe hundreds -- of litbloggers is as quixotic as Cuchulain's fight with the sea.

Or is it? This morning, I visited one of the most popular, and reliably informative of all litblogs, Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant -- hoping, like everyone else perched anxiously on the margins of the lit-review world, to be titillated by (among other things) Champion's fearless, if over-the-top denunciations of New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom the Brooklyn-based Champion has described as an enemy of literature. And what did I find? This: "I'm done with blogging. And I'm serious this time."

That's right, Champion -- "the litblog world's preeminent gadfly" -- has suddenly quit litblogging. (Say it ain't so, Ed!) Can the timing be mere coincidence?**

This dispatch prompted about 1,000 words worth of sarcasm and recrimination from your old pal the Rake that, sadly, must never see the light of day.  But I think it's for the best, for as I revisited Round One of n+1 versus the bloggers, I realized that n+1's Intellectual Situation is more lazy and dishonest than I remembered.

In short, the unattributed architects of the Intellectual Situation seem to find litblogs beneath sustained analysis--they're willing to be snide and cast them out categorically, but not willing to name a single name or explore differences in style, approach, or quality.  The entry from Winter 2007 employs naught but insults, gross characterizations, and categorical dismissal.

And it gets worse.

Ed is Dead/E-I-D, E-I-D, E-I-D/No no no no nooo

Ed is, yeah Ed is.

But he's ascending to the Empyrean, where he will still smile down upon us with great wisdom and a complete understanding of Divine and human nature.  And podcasts.

What I have to say I said there.

All those nice things he sez about BGB?  Don't get your hopes up; they ain't true.

Sven's Snake Pit (or, Feel My My My Serpentine)

Instead of doing the usual pale Dan Green imitation, I'm leaving the likes of Sven Birkerts to Dan Green (and others).

That said, is it me, or do others find the following hilariously purple and melodramatic?

...[I]t is alarmingly easy to slide into a slipstream, or, better, go rollicking in a snake-bed of sites and posts, where each twist of text catches hold of another's tail, the whole progress and regress morphing into a no-exit situation that has to be something new under the sun.

Apparently, we're to believe that many apple-cheeked innocents are logging on in hopes of finding some information for their kid's report on dinosaurs and unwittingly ending up as pitiable Beckett characters, trapped & dragging lame legs and busted bicycles through the comments section at Perez Hilton.  The poor bastards.

The most sublime visual evocation of this slippery slope can be found here.

The Anti-Editpus

Speaking as a semi-professional editor, I see the value of quality editing.  The wise, eagle-eyed, ink-stained editing wretch is a valuable person, indeed.

What I don't see is what point Gary Kamiya is attempting to make here:

...[E]ditors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It's also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent -- and perhaps more training -- will be required.

We already use other readers to sort things out for us: My bookmarks are mostly referrals from writers I've learned to trust. Some utopians may dream that an anarcho-Wikipedia model will prevail, that a vast self-correcting democracy of amateurs will end up pointing readers to the most worthwhile pieces. But that is only "editing" in its crudest, most general form -- it's really sorting. In the chaotic new online universe, the old-fashioned, elitist, non-democratic system of sorting information will become increasingly important, if only because it enforces a salutary reduction of the sheer mind-swamping number of options available. The real problem is glut, and it's only going to get worse.

In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day -- and it's this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It's edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don't want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can't breathe or think.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

If I'm reading this correctly, the thinking goes: Editors are good, because they help imbue writing with meaning and coherence.  Blogs, by virtue of their sheer number and amateur provenance, are full of non-meaning and incoherence and could use some pruning.  But not editing, exactly, because editing is something finer.  OK, I give up.  We should have more good things, which are good, and fewer bad things, which are bad.  And all this will be possible through the magic of editors!

I used to be "with it," but then they changed what "it" was.

When I desire deep thinking on the state of modern culture, I go directly to Tom Wolfe.  After all, it takes a man of uncommonly level perspective to liken his "pimped" Cadillac to a 16th-century cathedral.

Here's our man TW on blogs.  Happy birthday, blogs.  Hope you like GET OFF MY LAWN:

One by one, Marshall McLuhan's wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective "news" reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.

And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way.

I have a rumor for you, in fact, my dear fellow.  I hear that you disappeared up your own ass in 1985, thereby forming the densest white dwarf ever recorded by science.

Not that it matters, but the architects of this travesty went on to ask TW about his favorite blog(s):

Mr. Wolfe, "weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless 'information,' " says he no longer reads blogs.

No, he gets quite enough of that sort of thing standing in front of the mirror, talking to his reflection.