From Word To Word

One of the hazards in being an English literature teacher and a reader and a writer, of being self-professedly a person interested in words and language, is that I am constantly having people ask me to edit their work, everything from resumes to entire novels.  This sometimes makes for quite interesting reading (like the novels of my friend John) and sometimes quite tedious reading (like the paper in business administration that I recently edited for a former student), but more and more frequently, it seems, it makes for very awkward reading, because so much of what comes across my desk now fails entirely to account for its audience.

Now, I am not claiming that this inability to write for an audience is a recent development, that writers are worse at writing to an audience now than they have been historically, though I really do suspect that this is the case.  I am merely observing that, at this point in time at least, much of the writing that I edit is written without any consideration at all for the sort of people who will be reading it or for the social roles that those people occupy.  I get essays that ignore any kind of academic formating, use the grossest slang and colloquialism, and appeal to ridiculously popular sources to support their arguments.  I get resumes that offer deeply personal information and that read like a twitter feed.  I get children’s stories that use vocabulary and sentence structure far above the ability of any children that I have ever encountered.  I get poetry so self-involved that it is meaningless to anyone but its author.  In short, I get writing that has no idea of what its audience might want, need, expect, or understand.

Even more troublesome, when I critique writing on this basis, these writers are almost always resistant to changing their work to accommodate their readers, and they do so more or less explicitly on the basis that it is the audience who should accommodate the author.  The assumption is that a failure in communication is always a failure on the part of the reader, never on the part of the writer, that the audience should just accept what the author writes and be happy with it, and it is very difficult to convince these writers that most readers will not actually be happy with it, that their professors will just give a poor grade, that their employers will merely throw away their resumes, that children will not be interested in their stories, and that readers will make polite conversation about their poetry and then promptly forget that it ever existed.

The fact is, however cliche it might be to say so, that as long as a piece of writing has any audience at all beyond its author, so long as it is intended to achieve any kind of effective communication, whether it be informational, persuasive, or artistic, the onus is on the author to write in ways that the audience can understand, to adhere to the conventions insofar as they are useful and necessary, to choose a tone and style that will be appealing and comprehensible, to include information that is accurate and persuasive, to maintain the appropriate distance between the author and the audience.  An author is by no means compelled to do this, of course, and may willfully choose to do otherwise for one reason or another, even at times for artistic effect, but let there be no question as to where the fault lies when the audience is confused, offended, or otherwise uninterested in reading what has been addressed to it.

I hate writers.

I like people who write, of course, like them very much, even the bad ones.  I also like people who do not write, especially the ones who express themselves creatively through other forms.  But I hate writers, those people who are so worried about being a writer, looking like a writer, talking like a writer, and otherwise occupying the role of the writer that they cannot be bothered with actually writing.

You can tell people who write from writers quite easily.  People who write, actually write.  Writers, however, spend all their time going to writers’ groups and writer’s conferences, and writers’ festivals and writers’ seminars.  They attend book launches and book signings, read books on how to get published, sit on local arts boards, and are always talking about the one short story they published back in university, just the student arts magazine, of course, but still quite an accomplishment for a young and aspiring writer, don’t you think.  When you ask them about their writing, they inevitably talk about the hell of sitting in front of a blank screen, drinking mug after caffeinated mug, struggling against all life’s petty distractions, just to say something real, you know, something meaningful, something that will show what kind of writer they really are.

When it comes to writing, however, the very first criterion is whether or not you actually write.  You either write, or you do not.  Things are really that simple.  There are other criteria, far more ambiguous, that separate good writers from bad, most of which I fear I fail, but the first question is always whether or not you actually write.  Do you have the need to write, the drive to write, the compulsion to write, the discipline to write?  Are you unable to go without writing?  Is it necessary to you, like an addiction or disease?  Then you are a writer, no matter how badly you write.  Do you spend more time reading books about writing and going to book signings than you actually do writing?  Then you are not a writer, no matter how much you claim to be.

I have been reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death again, and I think he may have been wrong, not in entirety, but at least in one critical point that bears materially on any attempt to extend his work to social media.  Postman’s central thesis is essentially that textual media and visual media produce profoundly different kinds of public discourse.  He claims that textual media require active interpretation and so produce a public sphere that is characterized by rational, propositional, and informed discourse, while visual media encourage passive amusement and so produce a public sphere that is characterized by concern with image and appearance.  This is not to say that visual media are in every respect inferior to textual media, only to say that they produce a public sphere that is less able to conduct the kind of discourse required for an informed and functional democracy, and I would agree with this analysis in its broad outlines.

Where Postman errs, I think, is in including the telegraph and the telephone among the technologies of amusement, when I would argue that these media are actually forerunners of the social media that currently dominate the media landscape.  Because his book precedes the internet and the rise of social media, it fails to see how profoundly different these kinds of media are from both textual and visual media, even in their simplest forms.   This is not exactly Postman’s fault of course, not considering the time in which he was writing, and I have been told that he did address the idea of cyberspace in some of his later work, but I would like to presume on Postman’s ideas a little by extending his analysis of textual and visual media to social media, probably in ways that he would not endorse.  I apologize to anyone I might offend in so doing.

Here is what I would suggest.  First, where textual media require active attention, and where visual media require only passive attention, social media require a kind of attention that is neither active nor passive but idle.  We have these media continually on hand, in our pockets, on our screens, in the background, but we seldom actively apply ourselves to them or passively amuse ourselves with them.  We play with them.  We fiddle with them.  We trifle with them.  Rather than absorbing our attention actively or passively, they absorb our attention idly.  Though they are capable of supporting active and passive attention, the natural mode of social media is merely idle attention.

Second, where the activity of textual media results in understanding, and where the passivity of visual media results in amusement, the idleness of social media results in diversion.  These media operate by ceasing to be merely on hand, in our pockets, on our screens, in the background, and by demanding to be answered, now, in this instant, by ringing or chiming or vibrating or appearing on our desktops, and they thus diverts us from whatever it is that we were doing at that moment.  They can be ignored, of course.  We can let our phones go straight to voicemail, ignore the message telling us that we have mail, put off reading the latest item in our feed, but the natural mode of these media is to disrupt, to demand instant response, and so they divert us.  Indeed, they very often divert us from a previous diversion, so that we intend to check only one meassge and end up looking at the pictures of some guy we hardly know, or we intend to follow one link that a friend tweeted and end up surfing youtube for half an hour.  Diversion leads to diversion.  This is the mode of social media.

I am not implying, of course, that social media cannot support other modes of attention and activity, only that idle diversion is the natural mode of social media, the mode into which they fall by default, the mode in which they are most comfortable.  I am also not implying that the mode of idle diversion is necessarily without value, because it is very good at accomplishing certain ends.  What I am suggesting, however, is that this mode tends to produce a particular sort of discourse in the public sphere, just as textual and visual media do, and that the sort of public discourse produced by social media is not necessarily in the best interests of a healthy democracy.

The reason for this is that success in social media is not a matter of attracting active attention, as in textual media, and not a matter of attracting passive attention, as in visual media, but a matter of diverting idle attention.  To put this practically, it is a matter of going viral, of getting more likes and more retweets and more comments and more hits.  It is not necessary that we understand the political issues, not necessary that a candidate amuse us with witty talking points and distinguished good looks, only necessary that something divert us long enough to click it.  Our engagement in public discourse becomes reduced from active engagement, to passive reception, to idle clicking that diverts us from something else and will almost instantly be replaced by another diversion in its turn.

This is not, as I said above, the only mode in which social media can function.  It is possible to stimulate tremendous political action through social media, as history has shown already.  Social media can reach massive numbers of people almost instantly, and can mobilize these people in powerful ways.  However, even when it is successful in producing action, this action remains mostly uninformed.  It is a viral action that mobilizes over a slogan or an event, something that can be summarized in a hundred and forty characters, something that we can post on our feeds and send to our lists, something that we can click, and it lacks the kind of sustained, reasoned, informed public discourse that is necessary to produce healthy political action.  It is political action as a diversion from the other things we do, and we are as quickly diverted from it as we were to it.  When something else hits our feeds, we are off in another direction altogether.

It is certainly possible to use social media against their natural mode, to conduct through them the kind of political discourse that a healthy democracy needs, to disseminate information through them, to hold government accountable through them, and I affirm anyone and everyone who uses them in these ways.  The real problem is, however, that these social media produce us as much as they produce the discourse in which we engage, and they are increasingly producing a population which is incapable of any political action beyond following a feed and clicking a “Like” button, not merely because this seems natural, but because they have no experience of any other political discourse or any other political engagement.  It is not only the public sphere that is being changed by our media, but we ourselves.  We are becoming a culture that is capable only of idle diversion, and the implications of this impoverished ability to engage politically can only have a detrimental effect on the health of our democracy.

I have this idea.

The publishing industry has traditionally produced different editions of texts in order to market them to different kinds of customers, from lightly annotated popular editions to help readers with places, names, archaic terms, and unusual language, to heavily annotated academic editions that come complete with relevant historical material, critical essays, chronologies, bibliographies, and every other textual apparatus imaginable.  These editions are, of course, limited by the number of customers willing to buy them, so they tend to include mostly the major texts, and they tend to be edited by scholars who are more or less experts in their fields.  Texts that are not commercially viable or that are edited by people who are not experts in their fields are understandably left unpublished.

However, publish-on-demand style websites like Blurb or Lulu or Xlibris, among many others, now make it possible, at least in theory, for people to make their own editions of public domain texts quite easily.  The texts themselves are readily available from sites like Project Gutenberg and Digital Book Index, and they can be simply copied and edited and published as new editions with the tools provided by the publishing sites.  The cost is nil, except to have the new edition printed, and the result is an edition that meets the precise needs of the one who edited it.

The most obvious users of personal editions would be teachers.  In fact, the idea first occurred to me when I tried and failed to find a decent academic edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill.  How hard would it be, I reasoned, to lift the text from Project Gutenberg and add my own introduction and notes specifically for my class?  As I thought about this, I also realized how easy it would be to make course specific collections of essays or short stories, so that I would always have exactly the texts that I wanted and not have to bother paying for anthologies that restricted my choices and never had the texts I really wanted anyway.  I am at the moment working on some of these kinds of ideas.

There are other less obvious uses for personal editions, however.  For example, I might make notes directly into a digital copy as I am reading it and include appendices of anything that it prompts me to write, so that I can publish a very intimate edition of the text.  A group of friends might read a text together and compile their responses into an edition.  A conference on a text might collect the papers that were presented and gather them into an edition.  Wherever critical or scholarly work on a text takes place, in other words, it should be possible to gather that work together and to create an edition of the original text that includes this work.

Of course, these editions would not often be interesting to anyone who was not directly involved in their production.  An edition prepared for my class or myself or my friends or my conference will likely only be interesting to my class or myself or my friends or my conference, but just because something is only locally valuable does not necessarily mean that it is less valuable.  In fact, for me, the one involved in the production of these editions, personalized texts of this sort might very well be an invaluable record of my intellectual practice through my teaching, studying, and discussion with others.  Their interest to third parties would hardly be relevant.

On the other hand, by publishing personal editions publically rather than just making notes privately, it becomes possible that someone just might find the personal edition useful and be able to access it.    As a teacher, I might be able to find an edition of The Napoleon of Notting Hill or a collection of Renaissance literary criticism that is in fact useful to me, because someone else has taken the time and the energy to make it.  As a reader, I might be able to find an edition with a style of notation and commentary that is particularly conducive to me, because someone has taken the time and energy to make it publically available.

So, there you have it: my idea.  Let me know if you think it has merit.

The light is dim, and the writing seems to appear a fraction of a moment after the pen has passed, a fraction of a moment too late, an illusion of the lighting, surely, but an illusion that is like a metaphor of how we only see for ourselves what we are doing once the moment is already gone, and then the writing stops altogether, and perhaps this is a metaphor also, because it is now too dark to see what has been written.

The title of this post perhaps overstates the situation somewhat.  I am not abandoning the blog entirely.  I will continue to post chapters of Lindy and other creative pieces.  I will also post longer essay-length pieces occasionally, and I will not guarantee that the urge to write something blog-ish will not strike me now and again.  On the whole, however, I have decided that I will no longer be writing the blog in the intentional way that I have been over the past three years.

It was not any major event that triggered this decision, just the growing sense that I am becoming bored with the form of the blog post, bored with its brevity, and bored with its lack of focus.  I feel the need to produce writing that is longer and more focused and more reflective and more patient again.  I feel the need to read and write less but to do so therefore with a greater concern for my reading and writing.  So, while I will still be posting in this space, it will be less frequently and probably at greater length.

As part of this change in my focus, I will probably also begin gathering some of  my earlier posts on different topics and editing them into larger pieces that I will then post under the Longer Works section.   Many of the posts that I have written these past years have become reference points for me, like a set of notes for larger ideas and questions, and I would like the chance to spend some time giving these notes a fuller form, particularly those on home, and threshold, and community.  I have begun on some of these projects already, but I will not hazard to guess when anything finished will be forthcoming.

On a final note, I would like to thank everyone who responded to what I have written in this space, either in comments or in conversation.  I have greatly appreciated the ways that you have challenged me to think and to rethink, and I am indebted to you very deeply.

People always want to begin with writing, but good writing is an ending before it is a beginning, a culmination before it is an inauguration.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, good writing is preceded by slow and careful reading, by thoughtful and patient reflection, and by learned and leisurely conversation.  Writing that does not proceed from these things is deficient.

Slow and Careful Reading – It is better to read one book very well than to read many poorly.  Being well-read should never be confused with being much-read.  Many people read much without ever reading at all.  There are fewer people who truly read well.  Though they may perhaps read less, they are the readers who gain from their practice.

Good reading approaches the text slowly, attentively, with an openness to what might be thought through it, with an openness to being interrupted by reflection and by conversation.  There is no substitute for this time and for this attention.  It permits what is not us, what is other than us, to approach us through the text.  The text is not itself of the greatest importance.  It is the site through which we are encountered by what is of the greatest importance, and its value is in how well it provokes us to be so encountered.

Good reading leaves its mark on the text.  It writes in the margins, and it turns the corners of pages, and it notes its favourite passages with bookmarks, even if it does these things only figuratively.  A book that is well read is stained with fingerprints and coffee stains, even if only in metaphor.  It is well used.  It is a tool that has become worn to fit the mind that is reading it.

Thoughtful and Patient Reflection – It is necessary to reflect on reading whenever something calls through the text, whenever the text provokes, but also regularly, as a discipline.  To reflect is to engage in the exercise of thinking as if it were a religious act, as if it was the rule of a monastic order, in order that it might sometimes become a spiritual act, beyond the rule of any order.  It is to order one’s mind so that it might be prepared more fully for what will come to disorder it entirely.

Reflection is always accompanied by a writing that is not a writing, a secret and secretive writing, notes and jottings, incoherences and incomprehensibles, a writing that will never appear as a writing to be read, a writing that remains hidden and unread.  It is a writing that is also a rereading,  a returning to the places in the text that need mastication, rumination, regurgitation.  This writing chews the text like a cow chews its cud, again and again.  It digests the text, gains sustenance from the text, takes the text into itself, makes the text a part of itself.

Reflection is a wondering and a wandering.  It follows the text to other texts and returns them to where they began. It takes its time as it wanders.  It does not run or even walk.  It strolls.  It ambles.  It perambulates.  It wallows in its journey through the text, follows it wherever it leads.  It is not concerned with a destination, at least not now, not yet.  It leaves destinations to the future and reserves for the present a certain forgetfulness of what the future might demand.   Its purpose is to see what might be encountered now on its path through the text, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, not to create a coherent text of its own.

This activity, this reflection, this meditation, is essential.   It must not be hurried.  It is not brainstorming or some other such technique.  It is an openness to the text, a willingness to give the text time and space, a discipline of doing the text justice.

Learned and Leisurely Conversation – Conversation is not mere group discussion.  It is not mere argument.  It is not mere chatter.  It is a coming together through the text, where the text becomes a site where we catch sight of one another.  There are always too few of these opportunities to converse, always.  They must be treasured when they arise, guarded jealously, so that they are not overwhelmed by the many things that are less important but more pressing.

Conversation involves a careful listening of one another.  It considers what the other has to say.  It considers what it will reply before it replies.  It takes its time, so it is not afraid to pause.  It is willing to say less and have it be meaningful than to say much and to have it be mere chatter. It knows that it is better to give things their proper time.

Conversation is being on the way together, is helping one another along the way.  It turns us in the same direction, puts us shoulder to shoulder.  Though we may turn our eyes to one another, our feet are always on the path together, following the same path together, so that we might draw nearer to what it is we are seeking.  Whatever disagreements we may have between us, conversation always agrees, before all else, to walk the path together.

Conversation is also sitting at the table together, breaking bread together, recognizing what is other to us through the breaking of bread.  It is the invitation to the table and the acceptance of the table.  It is sitting face to face.  It is having more between us than words.  It is also having between us a giving, and a hospitality, and an invitation, and an acceptance.  It allows us to digest each other’s words like bread and wine, to make each other’s words a part of us.

Conversation never ends.  It is always being suspended for a time, but it is never ended, except by death.

Writing -  Only in the context of these disciplines of reading and reflection and conversation, only in the context of these practices, that writing can begin.  Indeed, these disciplines will produce writing, inevitably.  Though this writing may take many forms, it will become a necessity in the one who reads and reflects and converses.  It will become, not a task to be undertaken, not an ideal to be fulfilled, but a hunger to be satisfied, a thirst to be quenched, a lust to be satiated.

This is what there is to be learned.  This is the learning that teaching must let be.  This is the learning that teaching must let be learned.

Last year I wrote what I called a State of the Blog Address quite close to the anniversary of my first post on April 11th, 2008.  This year, as you will see if you check today’s date very closely, I am a little late to mark the anniversary, and this is mostly because I forgot about it until now, and I would not likely have remembered it at all had Dave Humphrey not emailed to tell me that he has extended our vocamus.net domain for another three years and to remark that I will now need to keep blogging at least that much longer.

This gave me pause for thought.  I had told myself when I started writing this blog that I would commit to it for at least a year, and I publicly committed myself to a second year in my first State of the Blog Address, but I had never looked any further ahead than a year at a time, and the idea that I might be writing in this way for three more years was, I admit, a little daunting.

This is not to say that I am less interested now in writing through this form.  I still find it a very useful medium for me, allowing me to formulate ideas in the limited time that my life as a father and a husband and a teacher and a gardener and a cook permits me, and allowing me to share these ideas with the people who are important to me.  For these and other reasons I have every intention of continuing to write through this blog for at least the next year or so, though what I write through it will likely change as much during that time as it has changed over the past year or more.  Even so, the idea of comitting to three years of writing in any particular form is perhaps a little more than I am willing to entertain.  It is certainly possible that I will still be writing a blog in ten years.  It is also possible that my life or the world or both will have changed so much even in the next year that I will need a very different form to accommodate what I would like to write.

So, the domain has been renewed for three more years, but I will commit to nothing more than to be here to write a State of the Blog Address next year, which will have to be enough for all of you, since it is more than enough for me.

Words are like stones.  You must work with them.  You must heft them, turn them in your hands, feel their weight and their shape, know each one for what it is before you can find its proper place, not its perfect place, for no stone and no word ever fits perfectly, and each word and each stone must be held in place by other stones and words, by earth or by mortar, but each will have its proper place, a place that fits it, a place for which it might have been fitted if it had been fitted, though it has not been fitted for any place at all, and what these words and these stones become is precisely this, a proper place that is the sum of their proper places, where they come to be something that they always could have come to be, one of the many things that they could have come to be, and perhaps, oh, let us rest in this perhaps, they will come to be something beautiful.  This is the work of the mason and the writer, both.  It is what makes words like stones.

I have always wanted to invoke a muse, any muse really, although I hold a special fondness for Calliope and Melpomene and even, to a lesser but still substantial degree, Polyhymnia. The trouble is that there is relatively little demand (current literary fashion being what it is) for invocations to anyone, and there are tragically few readers (current educational standards being a little worse even than current literary fashion) who would recognize an invocation even if I were to write one.

Fortunately, I have never been easily dissuaded from an idea once I have made it my own (usually by theft, original ideas being increasingly difficult to come upon), and so I have determined to write an invocation here for no very good reason except that I want very much to write one.  Even if everything else I write is worthless, let it only be said that my invocation was wonderfully accomplished, and I will consider myself satisfied.

So, I strongly admonish anyone with so little to do with their time that they can spend it critiquing what I write: refrain from criticizing this invocation entirely unless you are prepared to do so in the most laudatory fashion. I leave you the rest of my writing for you to tear between yourselves beneath the table, and if you object that my current metaphor casts you as dogs, at least be thankful that you are well fed, because I have given you the meal almost whole and kept only the smallest scrap for myself.

An Invocation for a Blog
Come sweetest three of sisters nine
And grant your ancient dignities
To this still adolescent art,
That it might learn maturity
By speaking with your wiser tongue,
And you might find your youth return
By walking in its firmer step,
And we might make a unison
That knows the best of youth and age.

Now, there you have what may be the world’s first invocation on behalf of a blog, though I am certain that it will not be the last, not with the shining example that I have just set for the world.  This invocation will probably mark the beginning of a new era in the literature of the web, a new movement to integrate the traditions of the past with the media of the future.

Of course, I have been wrong before.