Sven Birkerts and the Frightening Fitzroya
Being wrong is wonderful! It’s a bit like accidentally walking into a fitzroya and suddenly realizing that there’s this large evergreen that you didn’t know about. Suddenly, you’re forced to alter your existence to account for the fitzroya. And when you ponder the fitzroya a bit — as Darwin did, dutifully naming it in honor of the HMS Beagle’s captain — you begin asking a few questions. How did the tree get there? Why does it have such a mammoth diameter? And how can all this be used in tandem with other shards of understanding?
I suspect that Sven Birkerts is a man terrified of the fitzroya.
On Friday afternoon, I entered a Columbia University classroom. Birkerts had come into town for a debate with Jenny Davidson, moderated by Andrew Delbanco, styled Blogging: Good or Bad for Literary Culture? “I can’t tell if we’re positioned at odds,” whispered Birkerts to Davidson before the proceedings started, a foreshadowing of the stalemate to come.
The audience was composed of approximately twenty-five nimble-minded students, many of whom offered interesting inquiries. I felt a tad displaced wearing my The Brain That Wouldn’t Die t-shirt, but sitting in the front row with this sartorial choice seemed the right thing to do. As one of the “reputedly intelligent” figures mentioned in Birkerts’s 2007 Boston Globe article, I thought I’d see what this reputedly intelligent man had to say. After all, our man Sven had called the litblogosphere “too fluid in its nature ever to focus on widely diverging cultural energies” and railed against us being “predatory on print.” (Never mind that Birkerts, as a literary critic, is likewise predatory on print whenever he writes an essay concerning books.)
It should be self-evident by now that I find the idea of one form of writing deemed inferior solely on the basis of appearing in a different medium — whether it be a blog, a hypertext novel, or what not — to be an utterly ridiculous tautology. Sven Birkerts, I’m afraid to report, is a man who specializes in tautologies. This is not to suggest that he isn’t a smart man. Nor is he entirely against blogs. But he is certainly a weary man, a self-described “gradually graying book reviewer with several decades in the trenches.”
He opened his remarks by reading thoughts from a slightly crumpled piece of paper, hoping that in tossing around cerebral softballs, he could perform some off-the-cuff binomial expansion. Here were some of his phrases:
“A whole new paradigm of transmission.”
“We bring forward a technology. It begins to fashion and inform us.”
“Like the car, it has conditioned us and bent us to its shape.”
“The size an scope of an idea. Within the book, ideas formed in certain ways. Exigencies on the thinking life.”
“Notions of authority and gatekeeping and accountability.”
“The technology intricately bound to our mentality. All of the premises associated that will change.”
“One specific development within a very large, vastly distributed tendency fueled by the possibilities of the Internet.”
“Eroding the notion of the single subjective author as the locus of authority.”
“Organization now lateral and associative based on the link.”
“Loss of centralized top-down structure.”
And so on. Birkerts was much better speaking off the cuff. But one sees within this shaky torrent of phrases the main problem with Birkerts’s position. His complaints are centered exclusively around his own perceptive hang-ups. He did not cite any specific examples to justify his line of thinking. I pointed out to him that his gripes were primarily perceptive and conceptual, and he seemed to agree. Birkerts’s position was further parroted by Delbanco, who expressed a mild sense of terror at participating in a Slate roundtable because this involved sending his thoughts off into the ether. He was, however, slightly more open-minded than Birkerts. Slightly. Delbanco’s terror also equated to being unfamiliar with the form. It struck me that writers over a century ago must have had the same fear of the Remington typewriter that these guys have of the Internet today.
By far, the most reasonable participant was Davidson, who advocated blogging, but pointed out that blogging could not directly replace newspaper criticism. She pointed to both the constraints of word count within newspapers, and simultaneously observed that there were certain advantages of concision within the short-format blog post. She pointed to Caleb Crain’s behind-the-scenes approach to blogging, Colleen Mondor’s well-rounded perspective, and numerous other blogs. She pointed to certain advantages to the blog form, including the ability to quote more of a textual example — something that newspapers were increasingly not in the habit of doing. I did hope that Davidson would be a little more contrarian about blogging. But unlike Birkerts, she had solid examples for her position. Birkerts, by contrast, essentially parroted the same stolid points over and over again, sounding very much like a broken 78.
I do not believe Birkerts to be an entirely inflexible intellect. He did address my line of questioning, which, in Birkerts’s defense, involved excessively effusive delivery on my part. But he did appear quite bored to be sitting in a Columbia classroom. When I came up to him afterwards, he wanted to get the hell away from me as quickly as possible. But I gave him my card.
It has become evident that the biggest problem with this “debate” is the surfeit of stubborn souls unwilling to consider the alternative form, whether it’s the blogger who refuses to consider the virtues of editing or thinking through his post a bit or the print advocate so terrified of anarchic fun that he cannot find it within himself to trust his instinct from time to time. I’d like to think that this can be bridged. But in the meantime, where does this leave the wondrous fitzroya?
(For another take on the talk, go here.)
Tony Pierce Moves to the LA Times
Now this is a very interesting move, and I hope that Mr. Pierce will be granted some major technical flexibility to dramatically reconfiguring all of the blogs. The main problem with the Los Angeles Times’s web design is that is very counter-intuitive to the reader. Furthermore, content has a tendency to disappear. (The situation is so bad that Ed Park and Sarah Weinman’s excellent columns for the LATBR aren’t even archived.) I hope Pierce will be able to communicate these evident problems to top brass and finally get the damn situation rectified. He certainly has some solid ideas about current media culture. (via Callie)
A Message from the Bloglines Plumber
The Entirely Unsuitable Guide to Book Blogs
Being something of an involved party on the subject, I’ve finally had a chance to read Rebecca Gillieron and Catheryn Kilgarriff’s The Bookaholics’ Guide to Book Blogs. I’m wondering why such a poorly researched and slipshod book was permitted to come out. (My answer might have something to do with Gillieron and Kilgarriff being the publishers of Marion Boyars, the press that generated this book.) Certainly, litblogs and their ilk deserve this kind of treatment, perhaps not in book form. But Gillieron and Kilgarriff are not the ones to do it.
They identify the motivation behind book blogs as enthusiasm, but that’s as obvious as saying that your motivation for driving into a gas station is to fill up. They choose not to investigate why this enthusiasm exists, much less consider the possibility that enthusiasm only goes so far. They also fail to consider that there are often moments in which blogging is not guided by enthusiasm, that many of us take hiatuses when we cannot offer content that is lively or purposeful, that we sometimes blog when we shouldn’t. Speaking in all candor for myself, many of the posts here arose from a remarkably dull job I once held in a law firm in which it was necessary for me to pretend to be someone who I was not. So I proceeded to amp up a part of me into a twisted persona named “Dr. Mabuse,” who still shows up on these pages out of habit, in an effort to stay sane, giddy, and alive. (I am now far more myself since I went full-time freelance: poorer but happier.) Thus, there is much more here than being one of the “individuals who have no grist or motive other than a love of books and a desire to share their finds with others.”
Why fame or ego should even be a consideration in blogging is a mystery I likewise cannot fathom. I certainly didn’t set into this business for any glory. Bookbloggers simply are. Some of us cannot help but follow the natural rhythm of what we enjoy doing. There isn’t a simpler answer. I’ve achieved a modest notoriety for this site — and even this may be overstating my trifling impact — that I’m often perplexed by. Since moving to New York, I’ve had total strangers come up to me in the street and say, “I’ve just listened to your Jonathan Safran Foer podcast,” which they then point to on their iPods. I’ve received a pair of underwear from a secret admirer in the mail. I’ve been called an egotistical asshole, a hero, a Buddhist (at least twelve times!), a “troubled young man,” and many other things, both pleasant and minatory. I remain baffled that so many people purport to know me based on my words, when they haven’t even had a conversation with me longer than five minutes. Is it egotistical for me to dwell upon this? Well, I suppose so. But I am merely trying to point out that blogging and writing are just what I do and that deriving some great import about who I am misses the point of what this site is about.
There are too many factual errors and oversights in this book for me to take this book seriously. It was certainly news to me to learn that Ron Hogan and Sarah Weinman were married. It is exceedingly frustrating to see Colleen’s quote once again misattributed to me, when it was rectified here and clarified in a correction in the Los Angeles Times. It is quite disgraceful to see someone like Maud Newton get little more than a few sentences.
Simple fact-checking along these lines could have been easily resolved by sending a few emails or making a few phone calls or carefully reading these sites. But Gillieron and Kilgarriff appear incapable of even the most basic journalism. So I have to wonder if their book, containing numerous prevarications and other mistruths, is really worthy of serious consideration. Since every conversation about blogs inevitably ends up back at the same three talking points, was a book along these lines really necessary?
Blogging is Hardly Stalingrad, But the Point is Taken
Jessica Coen: “Eventually, the constant criticism (coming at me and from me), combined with the isolation of working alone from home, began to take its toll. I’ve never been a particularly chipper girl, but my psyche darkened considerably, and the change was obvious. My language got harsher; my tone, less playful. I felt permanently on the defensive and, as a result, fell into a bizarre combat mentality. My headquarters: my tiny apartment, from which I would emerge only to secure provisions from my neighborhood deli.”
Do Today’s Blogs Owe Much to Izzy Stone?
Neiman Watchdog: “Although Stone worked for decades vigorously tweaking authority as a daily journalist, editorial writer and essayist, it was in 1953 that he created the perfect outlet for his extraordinary mind, starting I.F. Stone’s Weekly, easily the scrappiest and most influential four-page newsletter ever sent through the U.S. mail. When Stone shut it down in 1971, the Weekly had 70,000 subscribers. In many ways, the Weekly was a blog before its time. In format, it was a combination of articles, essays and annotated excerpts from original documents and other people’s reporting — just like a blog. In content, it was a far cry from the passionless prose that afflicts so much mainstream political reporting. Like so many of today’s top bloggers, Stone built a community of loyal readers around his voice — an informed voice, full of outrage and born of an unconcealed devotion to decency and fair play, civil liberty, free speech, peace in the world, truth in government, and a humane society.”
Gloaty Blogger Rebus (Self-Link!)
Hint: It’s not Bugwan Bardson point storm.
The solution is.
Bloggers Like to Gloat, Link to Themselves, Eat Small Children
According to the most shrill of the Critical Lumpians (see Ed’s post below), we’re just a bunch of self-linking, traffic-craving, nose-picking, basement-dwelling maggots. Well, I’m proud to be a maggot and I’m damn sure aiming to make a few bucks off it.*
*Not really.
Aside to Ed: Sorry for piping in just to post a link to my own blog. I’ll make it up to you with a free Totebag!
Blogging Entrepreneur in Action
I’m Jason Calacanis! Come to my seminar! Look at the choices I have today! Would you like to have choices like this, someday? I became a multimillionaire from blogging. They kept saying, “Jason Calacanis, you’re a crazy nut. Here you are a smug white boy. Look at all the people out there! They’re smarter than you, and they’re not even rich! Who are you to try?” And you know what? I had to keep telling all these people, “You a loser! Get out of my way! I make it on Technorati somehow!” If you want to rise to the top of the blogs, come to my seminar, let me share with you the three little words that can change anybody’s life. I have a beautiful mansion, luxury cars, yachts, and dozens of babes as my arm candy. Come to my seminar and I’ll tell you how you can get all these things through blogging!
Newspapers Shifting to Paid Content Model?
From MarketWatch:
By putting a price on the Reader, The Times creates another stream of revenue, albeit a small one, to add to what it’s generating from subscriptions to its Times Select service, and sales of archived articles. Piece by piece, these services add up — but not to a lot. And they don’t answer the bigger question for the newspaper industry, how to survive the threat of the meme, “Information wants to be free on the Internet.”
Just today, the San Francisco Chronicle’s David Lazarus opined that, “It’s time for newspapers to stop giving away the store. We as an industry need to start charging for … use of our products online.” He said such a move needs to be industry-wide, and that, “This is approaching a life-or-death struggle for newspapers, and an antitrust exemption may be the only way that the industry can make the transition to a digital future.”
I think Lazarus is wrong (and I’m also very troubled by his call for an antitrust exemption). I can’t think of a way for newspapers to become more irrelevant and blogs to make more of an impact than the newspapers removing free access articles from their websites. Blogs have often been described as parasitic in the way that many of them rely upon newspapers for links and commentary. Fair enough. But here’s the flip side: blogs also draw more attention to an article and, thus, a newspaper’s reputation for quality journalism.
But let’s say newspapers abandon their free content. Well, online audiences, looking for free content, go elsewhere: to blogs that are conducting in-depth interviews, essays and ancillary journalism. (Without that newspaper content to draw from, blogs may resort to conducting journalism of their own. In fact, many already are.) The advertisers, seeing this bandwidth shift, turn to the blogs for their revenue. (In fact, as reported this morning, we’re beginning to see early signs of this.) The blogs, all competing for this revenue, then proceed to up their game. And it’s just like the early days of newspapers, with multiple newspapers were competing for a city’s reading attention. Except the competitive model has now shifted to a micro-level, with individuals or collectives conducting this new journalism. Perhaps former journalists, many of them downsized because of recent newspaper firings, will initiate blogs of their own and, like the two Glenns (Reynolds and Greenwald), attract mass audiences.
And let’s say these new journo-bloggers team up and generate enough revenue to hire copy editors and fact checkers. Well, then, you’ve got a virtual newsroom on your hands. And it’s all free. And with email and comments enabled, you’re talking about an instantaneous model with 24/7 reporting that newspapers can’t compete with. Why can’t they compete? Well, it’s all about access. Sure, readers can and will contact newspapers to tip reporters. But if they can’t access all the content and follow the stories, they’ll go to another free conduit in which a story is easily trackable — a particularly easy thing to do with blog categories enabled. They’ll do this because they’ll know that their voices will be heard and responded to and possibly included within the course of a story. They’ll do this because the journo-bloggers won’t view themselves as gatekeepers. The journo-bloggers will see their readers as peers with which to exchange and verify information.
Sure, there will be a period in which the experts and the cranks will have to be sorted out. And it’s very possible that cranks might prove popular. Hell, one can easily argue that they already are.
Of course, the easier thing for newspapers to do is to hire bloggers and start thinking about fusion of print and online journalism, adopting these virtual newsrooms themselves. (Even mid-sized newspapers like the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News are thinking along these lines.) But I don’t think this will be easy. Because there’s a vast difference between $745.5 million in online advertising and $13.2 billion in print advertising (both figures from Q4 2006, cited in Editor & Publisher). That’s a stunning shortfall that a collection of newspapers, each with a staff of 200 or so, can’t support.
But a collection of blogs, each with a staff of 3 or 4? I’m thinking they might get by on that amount.
Whatever happens, I don’t think either newspapers and bloggers are going away. I think we’re going to see a lot of newspapers go extinct in the next five years (with some major surprises), particularly the ones which insist upon paid content only. I also don’t think journalism is going away either. It’s just going to change. A lot.
Why Vox is Worthless to Any Thinking Blogger
Maxine Clarke: “I concluded that Vox must be going for the ‘young’ market — free (unlike Typepad), easy to use, high-level modules that don’t allow much personal variation on a basic theme, and don’t let the blogger remotely near the html code (total contrast with Blogger’s ‘let it all hang out’ approach). This impression is to some extent confirmed by the latest upgrades: you can now customise your banner design, and, with a complete straight face, Vox provides a question of the day for those inconvenient occasions when ‘you don’t know what to blog about’.”
Speculation on Nick Douglas
10 Zen Monkeys collates the theories, getting several email responses back from Denton, Congdon, and Douglas himself.
Web Negative 2.0
Nick Douglas has apparently been shitcanned from Valleywag and all I got was this crummy T-shirt (and one of the worst blog designs I think I’ve ever seen).
Blogging Worse Than Masturbation in the Eyes of the Church?
The Restored Church of God: “Should teenagers and others in the Church express themselves to the world through blogs? Because of the obvious dangers; the clear biblical principles that apply; the fact that it gives one a voice; that it is almost always idle words; that teens often do not think before they do; that it is acting out of boredom; and it is filled with appearances of evil—blogging is simply not to be done in the Church. It should be clear that it is unnecessary and in fact dangerous on many levels.”
Now If Only Deborah Treisman Would Start Blogging
Howard Junker, editor of the swank San Francisco literary mag ZYZZYVA, is now blogging. (via Madam Mayo)
Pointless Tests on a Moment’s Notice
In response to this nonsense, which suggests that bloggers who are “used to cranking out pointless rants on a moment’s notice” are worse than “highschoolers [sic]” “well-practiced at responding to their teacher’s inane writing prompts,” I note the following:
I took the GRE test twice last year and scored a perfect 6.0 each time on the written essay section. It was some of the laziest, half-assed writing I’ve ever done.
In short, Greta and Dave Munger can bite me.
(via Scott)
Just When I Was About to Dig Up Some Guest Bloggers…
Wall Street Journal: “Yet for the sliver of people whose livelihood depends on the blog — whether they are conservative, liberal or don’t care — stepping away from the keyboard can be difficult. Unlike other jobs, where co-workers can fill in for an absent employee, blogs are usually a one-person show. A blogger’s personality carries the site. When the host isn’t there, readers tend to stray.”
Blue Goes Blue for Chron
Violet Blue doesn’t like me very much, but I’m happy to learn that she’s landed a gig as the Chron’s sex columnist. Kudos to Phil Bronstein for recognizing Violet Blue as a grand blogging voice and for taking her on as a columnist. This isn’t just a great boon for Violet. It’s a great sign, I suspect, of things to come.
Either That Or It’s a MSM Conspiracy!
Editor and Publisher: “Asked how often they visited blogs, the responses from the 78% who said they used the Web, came out this way: frequently 10%, occasionally 9%, rarely 17%, never 40%, and 2% did not answer. That suggests that less than 2 in 10 Americans now visit blogs a lot or occasionally.”
Bloggers Triumph Over Mainstream Media on Mere Hunch
Using deductive prowess, several bloggers determined that Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph, “The Battle of Iwo Jima,” may have been staged by Rosenthal. The bloggers once again triumphed over the mainstream media by Googling the words “Joe Rosenthal staged” and turning up this Fortune City page, which offered nothing more than conjecture on the subject. The Google search result took 0.06 seconds.
“If someone is thinking about it, then someone is hiding the truth,” said the blogger behind Little Green Gerbils, who speculated upon Rosenthal’s photograph at his day job when his boss wasn’t looking.
“Jay Rosenthal is a godless heathen and should be strung up in public before the weekend,” noted Michelle Milkme. “Never mind that he’s in his eighties. Vigilante justice applies even to those past their prime.”
The bloggers, who had abstained from ice cream to facilitate their anger, reportedly experienced higher blood pressure which coincided with their levels of outrage. The fever and hypertension spread to their readers, who offered more fury and amateur speculation in thousands of comments.
“What the maintream media doesn’t realize is that we too use Photoshop,” said Milkme. “I don’t quite understand all the filters and tools the way a professional art director does, but I do know how to crop a photo and save it as a new filename that I can upload to my site. So do most bloggers. The mainstream media will now think twice about messing with us. We have cropping and uploading skills!”
So Long, Number One
Aw fuck. Another good blog bites the dust. Best of luck, Dana, wherever your banter takes you.
Speedy Snail Turns Seven
Happy Seven Years, Mr. Ewins!
Newspapers Confuse Print for Weblogs
New York Times: “The Washington Post, The New York Sun and The Daily Oklahoman, in Oklahoma City, have contracted with an online news aggregator, Inform.com, to scan hundreds of news and blog sites and deliver content related to articles appearing on their Web sites, regardless of who published those articles. Links to those articles will appear in a box beside the site’s original article or within the text of the story.”
I’m wondering if this is a desperate effort to hijack Technorati. Will weblogs be shut out or ignored, even as they break news stories such as Thomas Pynchon’s new book, the Zoo Press literary scandal, Rupert Thomson’s film adaptations or call John Freeman on flummery?
It’s Funny Because It’s True
Blogathon ‘06
Okay, we might do it.
Minnesota TV Station Employs Stalinistic Tactics Against Blogger
Star Tribune: “Matt Bartel, owner of the popular MNSpeak blog also was issued an invitation by WCCO, although the station apparently didn’t recognize the name Bartel (ubiquitous in Twin Cities publishing circles) or his business, until the event was about to start. ‘They pulled me out of the auditorium and told me that they’d become aware of the fact that I had a blog,’ Bartel said. ‘They said, ‘We don’t want you to participate,” then offered him a choice: surrender his notebook or leave the event. I wasn’t going to give them my notebook; I had business stuff in there.’”
More from Bartel at his blog, where he confesses that he agreed that he would not talk about the event. This kind of Stalinistic strong-arming is something that no blogger should have to go through, not as long as the First Amendment (or what’s left of it) exists. Bartel was issued an invitation, but, as far as I can tell, there was no agreement in place that suggested he couldn’t write about the event (although there appears to have been an oral promise from WCCO news staffers). In fact, if WCCO was so concerned about public perception from bloggers, why were they idiotic enough to invite a blogger in the first place?
The Lesser of Two Evils?
Dan Green takes umbrage with Wendy Lesser’s establishing principles behind The Lesser Blog. I’m a big fan of The Threepenny Review (and Lesser was once interviewed for The Bat Segundo Show; ironically, paired up with a certain poet-litblogger), but I actually agree with Dan that there are already plenty of “self-contained essays” to be found within the litblogging community. Of course, if Lesser really does desire to organize her blog, she can start by offering an RSS feed for those of us who hope to keep up with her thoughts. Lesser may claim to offer content which resembles “a printed article more than most blog entries do,” but I presume she refers to the completely disorganized navigation currently found at the Lesser Blog rather than any elitist qualifier. At least I hope that is the intent.
Nevertheless, Lesser’s stance continues the troubling hard line spouted off by John Updike and those dashing critics who seem to prefer gasconade over civil discourse. The continuing assumption that print is somehow superior to online writing simply because trees are massacred is as disingenuous a claim as Intelligent Design or proving the existence of the Tooth Fairy. Perhaps if these print-to-online greenhorns actually presented convincing arguments rather than generalized castigations sans examples, proponents of both mediums might find ways to learn and benefit from each other. Which seems to me a more constructive use of the Internet.
[6/21/06 UPDATE: Interestingly, Lesser has amended her post and removed the offending remarks from her blog. While it's good to know that Lesser is reading the blogs and responding accordingly, one would hope, however, that Lesser (or another critic) could simply offer an explanation of where she's coming from instead of a wholesale deletion. Perhaps one print critic being honest about the way she feels might lead to both sides understanding why there's this continuing divide, driven by a fey animosity, between print and online mediums. As I suggested in my initial post, I believe that both sides have a lot to learn from each other. And wouldn't the willful antagonism of the Sam Tanenhauses and the John Freemans of our world be better expressed with open communication and respectful conversation? (Thanks for the tip, Scott.)]
Imagine What She Might Have Said If She Were Heading to Lunch
New York Observer: “What Time once had—and still could have, despite Time Warner’s budget cuts—is a giant apparatus for reporting and writing news. And reported fact is what keeps the blog world spinning. Even bloggers agree. ‘Obviously, they have enormous investigative resources that bloggers don’t have,’ Arianna Huffington said, on her way into dinner.”
So Should I Make My Thoughts Known on “Joe Vs. the Volcano” So That Abe Vigoda Can Collect a Small Residual for His Pension?
The Guardian: “Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a ‘disproportionately large influence’ on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.” (via Speedy Snail)
“Why Don’t You Write a Book, Ed?”
Oh boy, is this spot on.
