Trapped in the Tower of Babel
The more I’ve worked on the memoir, the less energy I’ve put into this blog. Which makes sense to me. Less clear is why I’ve kept the blog sputtering along on a quarter tank of gas for the last couple of years.
I suppose it’s a combination of motives: stubbornness, of course. Optimism that I might find within myself more energy than I’ve shown. And, worst of all, my grudging acceptance of the conventional wisdom that today all writers (or all artists, or pundits, or fourth-graders) need to maintain a “web presence,” a marketing tool, an idea that wasn’t around over six years ago, when I started this thing.
Back then different motives drove me: the need to start writing again after a long dry spell, the need to document the last couple months of my mother’s life, the desire for approval, and the yearning to connect to what used to feel like an underground community of freaks.
Around the time that people started throwing up blogs featuring nothing but photos of half-naked boys, blogging went from something I loved to do, to something I felt obligated to do. A total snob I sometimes am. Unwilling to pull the plug, however, I need a different motivation.
Over Christmas, in the long lazy hours at my father’s Palm Springs condo, I picked up a copy of Newsweek with a cover story on Amazon’s Kindle
But the section of the article that most disturbed me was about the ways in which technology could, or would, change the very nature of reading and writing. The article quoted a guy who heads the Institute for the Future of the Book (paging George Orwell…):
Stein sees larger implications for authors—some of them sobering for traditionalists. “Here’s what I don’t know,” he says. “What happens to the idea of a writer going off to a quiet place, ingesting information and synthesizing that into 300 pages of content that’s uniquely his?” His implication is that that intricate process may go the way of the leather bookmark, as the notion of author as authoritarian figure gives way to a Web 2.0 wisdom-of-the-crowds process. “The idea of authorship will change and become more of a process than a product,” says Ben Vershbow, associate director of the institute.
This is already happening on the Web. Instead of retreating to a cork-lined room to do their work, authors like Chris Anderson, John Battelle (“The Search”) and NYU professor Mitchell Stephens (a book about religious belief, in progress) have written their books with the benefit of feedback and contributions from a community centered on their blogs.
“The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship,” says Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some writing-in-public advocates, he doesn’t spare the novelists. “Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium,” he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a “superuser,” the lead wolf of a creative pack.
An-ever updated book, written by a thousand keyboards. I couldn’t help imagine picking up a copy of Lolita, only to see Nabokov pecked to death by a thousand earnest voices. Not to sound too dramatic (too late, I know) but what a fucking loss that would be.
When I read a book I want to dive down into a world, or a consciousness, and listen to just one voice tell a story. I want to absorb just one person’s insights. I want to stay, listening to that story, and that voice, without interruption, for more than two minutes at a time. The thought of that one voice interrupted by a thousand others disturbs me to no end. But I’m not sure I buy that my preference for one author, and my distrust in the “wisdom of the crowd” means that I’m somehow against democracy.
I suppose this is why I prefer a nice long dinner with one or two friends over the chatter of a cocktail party. A good conversation with one friend makes me inordinately happy; it pulls me out of the gloom of my personal obsessions, the abandoned carnival of my mind, and briefly restores my faith in humanity. As in books, the more time I spend with one person, the better I understand them, and selfishly, myself.
In the month since I turned in my thesis, I’ve lost several days surfing the web, emerging at one or two a.m. feeling irritated and disgruntled. Certain things, like the internet, Playstation 3, and a tub of pudding, feel good in the moment. But they never feel good at the end of the day.
Unlike Philip Roth, who apparently doesn’t own a television, and spends his hours, when not writing, reading and rereading the classics of Literature, writers of my generation grew up with television and the internet. Some of them seem able to balance the twin pulls of literature and popular culture remarkably well. But I’m no good at it. Popular culture, so shiny and bright and sweet, swallows me whole and spits me out later with nothing to show for it but a more well-developed case of cynicism. Books feed me more, but they require more of me, too.
This isn’t so much a declaration of a new motivation for blogging, so much as a reminder to myself of what I’ve been trying to do all along. I don’t want to offer only hyperlinks and jpegs of naked rugby players. Not that I have anything against naked rugby players; I’m sure they’re very nice people, and if you sat down with them over coffee you might glimpse the richness of their inner lives.
But I guess I want to strive for the feel of literature conveyed through this form of pop culture. I’d like to try and offer one voice, one consciousness – flawed, grouchy, and a little too earnest – and hope that every once in a while somebody can relate, and maybe recognize themselves. I guess I want to give back to those writers who kept me company, and to provide a place where other people might leave feeling a little less alone in the world. That, interspersed of course with photos of Manly Fireplugs and my adorable puppy. Too much self-seriousness leads to bloating, and drives people to poke you with sharp sticks.
more internet, less pudding and more writing; also more friends to talk with. you can never run out of friends or writing. pudding, on the other hand, is finite.
April 9th, 2008 at 8:49 pmWhen I read a book I want to dive down into a world, or a consciousness, and listen to just one voice tell a story. I want to absorb just one person’s insights. I want to stay, listening to that story, and that voice, without interruption, for more than two minutes at a time. The thought of that one voice interrupted by a thousand others disturbs me to no end.
DP,
You make some really interesting observations. I’m inclined to agree with you about the Kindle. There’s something very alluring about a physical book. Holding one, opening it for the first time, running fingers over spines poised on a shelf… nothing like it.
I’d like to respond to your idea of the solitary author, writing alone and uninfluenced by others.
This notion, though romantic wasn’t ever really a reality. We can see this in many circumstances. First, most books aren’t actually written by just one person. Editors step in at many stages in today’s publication process. Similarly, writers’ workshops offer writers instant feedback from up to twenty readers. And even asking a friend for her thoughts risks altering that “one voice” of the author.
On a deeper level though, we can see that the author has never really been alone. This blog post on plagiarism clearly points out the intertextual influences, known or unknown, that each writer is subject to. Bakhtin also calls attention to this interplay of ideas of words when he writes, “our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others’ words” (“The Problem of Speech Genres” 89). Similarly, in “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argues, “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”
And, the more I read Rebecca Moore Howard’s Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators, the more I’m coming to understand that this (incorrect) notion of the original author, uninfluenced by those around him, is unique to our time and culture.
What does all this mean? As writers (and scholars) it means that we need to acknowledge the influence of others’ words on our thoughts, actions, and words. We need to be aware that our culture, even our culture before the web, holds our hand as we write, constantly directly and reshaping that work-in-progress. If we accept this, we can embrace the true potential of the cacophony of voices in our lives and blend them to a unified, unique whole.
April 9th, 2008 at 9:05 pmLynn, you make very good points with which I agree. But in the post I wasn’t taking exception so much with the process of WRITING as with the process of READING. Of course writers don’t write in a vacuum; they are influenced by untold numbers of outside voices and factors. And those influences are invaluable.
But as a READER, when I pick up “Lolita,” I want to read one voice, that of Nabokov’s, not “Lolita” footnoted by a thousand comments and suggestions and helpful edits. Whatever process it took to get to the page, the pleasure for me is immersing myself in the one voice and one story that the page actually presents. A thousand voices may have influenced that one voice, but listening to all of them, while trying to read “Lolita,” would drive me off a cliff. I can get that at a million websites. But books, or rather some books, offer a different experience, one of singular immersion. Maybe I’m one of a dying breed, but I think it takes one author to, as you say, blend the cacophony of voices into a unified, unique whole.
Hugh, I’m totally with you on pudding.
April 10th, 2008 at 12:09 amYour comments about reading “Lolita” encumbered with everyone else’s comments and suggestions, somehow reminded me of something that happened on Flickr a few years ago. Someone posted a copy of a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, uncredited, to see what all the commenters would say. And sure enough, there were tons of “it would be better if you’d done X or Y” comments and suggestions before anyone noticed and spoke up about the image’s actual origin.
Too many cooks spoil the broth – trying to make an artwork (of any sort) while attempting to please every possible critic or taste, only leads to mediocrity. Just look at “American Idol,” a triumph of the bland and the safe over anything truly unique and new. We’re never going to get, say, a band like Sigur Ros, or a writer like Joyce or Proust out of any kind of “reality-TV” popular-vote process.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:28 amIt doesn’t matter when you write — or how often you update — but for those of us who aren’t personal friends of yours, it’s a blessing to get updates on you and your writing. so, please don’t stop. even if it’s only once a month, or even less frequently.
you have a gift — a true skill — and *my* world is better for having your voice in it.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:42 amcan we still photocopy our butts?
April 10th, 2008 at 1:23 pmYes because we are underground freaks
April 10th, 2008 at 2:42 pmI’ve been reading your blog lo these many years because I like to read what you have to say. I check in on so few blogs these days, but I find myself consistently drawn to yours.
Why? I doubt I could articulate a reason that would satisfy everyone who would ask, but I suspect it’s not unlike the way I feel about why I keep certain people in my life. Because. Just because.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:53 pmI just said it in the prior post and I am wine blogging tonight and you are from my sister city so really it’s like we are related. You are way cool. I love this blog.
April 18th, 2008 at 8:20 pmDogpoet rules.
Of course, all of these innovations are interesting, and many people will carve their postmodern niches out of collaborative work on the internet. Some of this work will be fascinating, and it’ll probably get taught in the kind of college literature classes where you go to meet your fellow art-damaged creatures. (That being where I met some of my best friends…) But I’m a bit more like Philip Roth, at least this year. Reading and re-reading books that are called “classics” with good reason. I already what’s going to happen to Little Nell, but how it happens can’t be remembered, only experienced one page at a time.
I don’t think bookreaders are obsolete yet, though we may wind up like poetry readers, who represented the zeitgeist in 1820 and maybe never since. I was very encouraged by Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s a series of children books that seems to be designed to create the aesthetes of the future. I imagine the sensitive 10-year-old of today realizing 10 years later that she has already heard about Baudelaire, Poe, Plath and a host of other mordant writers in the pages of Lemony Snicket. She has already been shown the handshake of the secret society.
And if it becomes weirder and weirder to be someone who reads books, I’ll be happy to embrace that. So little effort, and so pleasurable, to continue to be a freak.
Did I mention that Dogpoet rules?
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:15 pmAs a reader of only several years, but one who obsessively read the chronology, we are all better off for learning about ourselves in the stark reflections of your mirror.
The Tower of Babel was not about too many voices, but too little understanding from the communication. Your writing speaks to the soul.
Good luck to you in all you do. And to the extent you continue to share with us, the great–unseen audience, the little people out here in the dark–we thank you.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:01 pmAs someone who’s put his career and other eggs into one basket, viz. a social networking site for authors, I hope books aren’t going to be totally irrelevant. I’m encouraged that the Txt Culture that seems so much a part of teens’ and tweens’ lives: the written word may be unrecognizable to us fogeys, but it ain’t going anywhere. There seems to have been some doubt in the second half of the 20th century.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:26 pmPeople who genuinely have something to say, and a need to say it, will find a way. Information based writing may change, procedurally, but genuinely creative writing will always require real writers. And people will always read them.
May 25th, 2008 at 12:54 pmDogpoet, I love this entry. It touched a very deep chord. I too love your blog, and naked rugby players would not diminish the pleasure of hearing just your voice. That said, where are the naked rugby players, again?
I get jealous of Shakespeare when I imagine him standing behind the stage curtains, watching the audience react to his work, and then having the ability to go back and rewrite as he saw fit. I would love to have that kind of feedback on my writing. The take it or leave it variety.
I get the whole idea of collaborative-writing-as-wave-of-the-future. It’s sexy. But let’s be real: every system has SOME structure of power, and nobody’s going to tell Michael Chabon how to write. Leader of a creative pack of wiki commentators? Right. The “possibility of interaction” has been around since Shakespeare. It didn’t redefine the play, HE did.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:37 amI love reading dogpoet because the interaction is so vivid and comprehesible. Writers, artisits, performers, all of us edit or respond to an audience of one sort or another, usually ourselves. Reading dogpoet gives me an instant picture of your inner dialogue which I love.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:27 am