From Word To Word

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.

Dave Humphrey gave me a book a month or so ago, a collection of pages really, a printout of a pdf  document.  It was a novel, written by Robin Sloan and entitled Annabel Scheme.  Dave passed the book to me, he said, because it had been published in an interesting way, where the author had solicited people, a posse of patrons as he calls them, to sponsor the project in return for a copy of the book when it was completed.  This idea intrigued me, and I put the pile of pages on my desk to await a more or less quiet afternoon, which finally happened yesterday.

Sloan describes the novel as “Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century”, but I am not sure this accurately describes the sense of the book for me.  It feels like a less drug-induced Philip K. Dick mashed with a more tech-savy Douglas Adams and a more playful William Gibson, all writing of a world with demon-possessed computers and ghosts using electric lines as an internet to haunt the living.  The paranormal is mixed liberally with the technological, and both are infused with a mischievous and affectionate satire of google, hard-boiled detective novels, start-up culture, urban ghost stories, and sundry other things.  It may not be great literature, but it is certainly good entertainment.

The story moves quickly and directly with a minimum of description and introspection.  In some places it reads almost like a more fully realized film script rather than a novel, but this feels like a strength rather than a fault because the tone and the narrative arc proceed in similarly easy ways.  The accomplishment of the novel, I think, is that it can move at this pace and still comment interestingly on the almost mystical ways that our culture relates to its technology.  It manages both to be an entertainment and a playful reflection on the gods and the ghosts in our machines.

All this is encouraging to me, because it is an example of  an alternative publishing model that has been largely successful in achieving its admittedly limited goals.  Though the model is still unable to provide a sufficient living for the author, it is perhaps a movement in that direction as it reimagines patronage apart from wealthy benefactors or corporate sponsors or government grants, where people can come together to support the kind of writing and music and art that is most meaningful to them.  I am interested to see if Sloan, or someone else for that matter, will be able to push the model further, to make the posse of patrons a means through which our increasingly virtual communities are able to choose and support adequately the artists that will define and represent them.

Dave Humphrey posted on the subject of grammar the other day, arguing against the now cliche assumption that new textual media like texting, instant messaging, twitter, facebook, and blogs are creating a generation of students who are poor writers.  Now, as a teacher of English Literature, I have been confronted by some horrible writing over the years, and very little of the writing that I see is of the quality that I would like it to be, but this does not imply an easy correlation between new media and poor writing.

In my opinion, the shift in writing has not been from good writing to bad writing at all, but from technically correct writing to technically incorrect writing, which are related but not identical questions.  Though good writers generally do have a certain facility with the technical aspects of writing, it is certainly possible, as the schoolwork of previous generations would testify, to write correctly, by dint of rote and repetition, but still to write poorly, without style, without rhetorical force, without intellectual or emotional insight, without sensitivity to the subtleties of sound and connotation and allusion.  It is entirely possible, therefore, even likely, that previous generations of students were no better writers than the students of our own day, even if they were better able to write correctly according to a certain definition that may or not be very useful in any case. I am certainly not suggesting that today’s students are better writers  than their predecessors, because they may in fact be worse on the whole.  I am only suggesting that it is not possible to measure writing ability solely by the degree of adherence to certain technical standards.

With this distinction in mind, I would argue that new textual media do in fact have a relationship with the ability of students to write in ways that are technically correct.  It is not that these media have produced an increase in incorrectness, in colloquialism and informality, but that they have made our already colloquial and informal communication a textual and public activity rather than an oral and more or less private one.  We now write to one another the things that we previously only said to one another, and this has produced a new kind of writing that tries to represent textually the kinds of colloquial talk that has never before found a significant place in formal writing.  This new colloquial writing is not merely a corruption of more traditional formal modes of writing.  It is a mode of writing unto itself, with its own grammars and technicalities.  It is not necessarily good, of course, but that is not exactly the point.  After all, the colloquial talk that is now being made textual through new media writing was not often of tremendous value either.

This textualization of our colloquial talk is significant, however, because it begins to blur the boundary between the colloquial and the formal.  If there was once a strong distinction between the ways that people spoke and the ways that they wrote, a strong distinction between colloquial speech and formal writing, this distinction is now increasingly obscured as both the colloquial and the formal become a matter of textuality.  After all, people now text gossip to each other and blog their lives to each other and write their school assignments or professional documents all at the same time and on the same device.  These activities are just different windows in the virtual space of the same monitor.  There is no longer a strong spacial or temporal separation between formal and informal communication, so it should come as no surprise that the two begin to bleed into one another.

Not only do new textual media blur the distinction between formal and informal writing, however, they also blur the distinction between textuality and other forms of media, as text becomes only one of many elements that are combined in the space of the screen in order to communicate, something to be combined with emoticons and embedded audio-visual material and hyperlinks and other such media.  Though this is not exactly new, as even the earliest written texts have incorporated illustrations, what is new is that these additional media are no longer intended only to support or to enhance or to explicate the text.  Instead, they are now understood as having equivalent or even greater significance than the text, where the primary medium is audio or visual, and the text is included merely as a caption or a label.

It is the blurring of these two distinctions, between the colloquial and the formal and between textuality and other media, that I think is the real source of anxiety for most educators, even if they have not yet recognized it.  What they perceive as a degradation in their students’ ability to write properly is in actuality a shift in the very idea of what constitutes proper writing and even a shift in what constitutes the proper role of writing.  They advocate a return to rote grammar and spelling in the schools without realizing that writing well in the context of new media may well require very different kinds of propriety altogether, very different approaches to rhetoric and persuasion, very different understandings of style and tone.

Now, let me be as clear as I can.  I am very definitely not suggesting that the writing going on through new media is good writing simply because it writes in new and different ways.  My experience with most new media writing is that, when it is intended still to be the primary mode of communication, it is as horrible as most writing has always been, and when it is being subordinated to other kinds of media, it is usually a good deal worse.  Simple novelty of form and purpose should not at all obscure the fact that this kind of writing is mostly characterized by cliche, incoherence, and general sloppiness, but this is not merely an effect of adopting one standard of technical propriety over another.  It is an effect of having few models of good writing within the newly adopted standards of technical propriety, models that teachers and schools are too fixated on grammar to provide.

Let me take emoticons as an example. I have no essential objections to emoticons, neither in themselves nor as an example of visual elements being introduced to a textual medium.  My objection to emoticons is that they are usually the visual equivalent of a textual cliche.  They say only very little, and they say it in only a very simplistic way, which makes them suitable for only certain kinds of writing, for those kinds of writing that are the equivalents of our colloquial speech, which often do not require anything more than simple and uncomplicated modes of expression.  Rather than just objecting to all such visual elements in a text, however, I would suggest that teachers should be providing models that combine visual elements with written text more effectively, models that signal a more formal or thoughtful use of these visual elements without necessarily making recourse to traditional writing conventions.

They could, for example, show how a still primarily textual piece might include audio or video or photographs or hyperlinks to material that explicates its subject more effectively than words could alone.  They could show how text might be superimposed as commentary on a video or on a series of photographs or on an electronic text in order to make a close reading of these media.  They could show how text might be voiced, or combined with music, or laid over visuals in order to produce a certain stylistic or tonal quality.  In short, they could address emoticons, not as a failure to understand formal grammar, but as a failure to understand the visual possibilities of which emoticons are only the most banal example.

This does not devalue the role of formal grammar.  Many of our grammatical conventions exist because they help us to communicate more clearly and more easily.  They are not essential, to be sure, and they can and should change over time, but that does not alter the fact that they are useful as conventions of communication.  What I am suggesting is merely that the value of these conventions needs to be modeled in the context of writing that is relevant to students because it also models the ways in which their media enables them to write.  I am suggesting that we need to write new media well, to encourage others to write it well, and to learn from others who are writing it well, and I am suggesting that this requires us to discover and develop and artculate and share new conventions that will enable this kind of writing, even if these new conventions take some of what they need from good old fashioned grammar.

My friend Lauren Anderson has just posted about finding an old binder full of her juvenile writing, some of which she was brave enough to share, and it made me reflect on how much of this kind of writing there must be, lying in the neglected folders and binders and boxes of even the most accomplished writers.  I found myself wondering what might happen if everyone were brave enough to share this kind of thing with each other, whether this might not encourage people to see writing and writers a little differently, a little more accurately, a little more humanly,  and so I thought that I might also share some of my own highschool writing as a beginning to that end.

Now, my juvenile writing is certainly as horrible as Lauren’s, but it is horrible for all different reasons.  Mine is horrible because I was reading far too much Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and Shakespearean romance, and because I desperately wanted to be a Romantic poet, more than anything, which produced poetry of only the most painfully maudlin sort.  Let me give an example from a poem called “The Prayer of Sir Gawain”.  I am particularly fond of the affected archaisms and the constantly inverted, yoda-like, sentence structure:

A solemn vow to Knight of Green
I made before my King and Queen
That, if my stroke did fail to part
His mighty head and stop his heart,
Then when a year and day had gone
Should I my fullest armor don
And ride from Camelot away
To where that Knight doth hold his sway.
So reaching that unwelcome place
There give myself unto his grace.

So now I kneel ‘neath awesome fear
As quick the payment stroke draws near.
My mind does see the chapel there
That fearsome Knight’s most dreadful lair.
And in his hands an axe of steel
which on my neck I soon shall feel.
I see that helmless head before
My eyes, and here his roar
Forever ringing in my ears,
Forever playing on my fears.

Unfortunately, the melodrama of Sir Gawain seems almost restrained in comparison to these lines from the fabulously titled “I Hamlet Unto Thee Ophelia”:

These tears, great sobbing tears, adorn my cheeks.
Why did I stay away so long a time?
For Fate did take within those absent weeks
Your mind, soul, heart and very life betime,
Forever stole from me, your grace sublime.

Now my lament must seek to cleanse my soul
Of grief, deep seeded guilt which rends it now.
My inaction, only mine, made this bell toll
Which now decries dread Death upon your brow,
The icy grip of hell I did allow.

Now Death alone can give me my desire.
This life can never show to me your grace.
Right gladly will I face Death’s fearful fire,
For only in that dark and unknown place
May I look once again upon your face.

I could go on, but you get the point, or I hope you do, because I would be very pleased to have people share their own such youthful secrets with me in turn.

I am interested, not in devotional art, but in art as devotion, not in the artistic object made to be a site of devotion for its creator or for its receiver, but in the artistic practise that, with the proper spirit, becomes a discipline of the mind and of the body and of the spirit that allows devotion, perhaps, to occur in us.  In an artistic practise of this kind, the object of art, far from becoming an idol, never even becomes an icon, because the iconic function is played by the artistic practise itself.  It is a practise of art in which the artistic object and even the artistic act become radically secondary to an artistic discipline that seeks to be, before all else a devotion, though it knows that true devotion must always lie beyond it.  I would have my reading and my writing become this kind of discipline, this kind of devotion.

I have often made this point in conversation, and I have implied it in various posts before, but let me make it a little more formally now:  we need to reject the assumption that one must be a writer, either by profession or by special vocation, in order to write.

As with so much else in our culture, we have come to believe that writing is best left to the experts, to those with the credentials or the publications that certify them as real writers, and our choice has become either to acquire these credentials and these publications so that we too can be real writers or to stop writing altogether.  Rather than accept this choice, a choice that assigns writing to the realm of the expert no matter how it is answered, we need to reclaim the place of amateur writing, not a writing that only accepts amateurism for a time as a means to pursue a future professionalism, but a writing that celebrates amateurism as such.  We need to reclaim a writing that addresses its own place, its own locality, its own community.  We need to write poetry for our spouses and stories for our children and letters for our friends, not because these things might one day be published, but because they will not be published, because their purpose is already fulfilled when they are received by those we love, and because it is precisely this that makes them valuable.

This kind of amateurism is not an excuse to write poorly, to write hastily, to write carelessly.  Quite the opposite: to write as a true amateur, to write out of love for writing and out of love for the one that writing addresses, is always to write with the utmost care.  It is precisely because I write for the one I love rather than for a public that I do not even know, precisely because I write as an amateur, that I write as best I can, always and in every case, as best I can.  Whether or not this writing meets the standards imposed by the world of publication is entirely beside the point.  These are the standards of professionalism, and they cannot measure what is written by the amateur.  The writing of the amateur finds its measure only in the relation between the one who writes and the one who receives, because the writing of the amateur is always this: a gift.  It is and can be nothing else.

I posted some time ago about textual apparatus and the web, and I have been thinking ever since about the kinds of tools that might be most appropriate to the kinds of textuality that find their place on the web.  More recently, I read Ivan Illich describe his use of footnotes as a place to share the things that he has collected through his reading, and I began to wonder how this more convivial approach to textual apparatus might be applied to the web as well.

In the midst of this wondering, I became increasingly dissatisfied with how I was linking to books and to their authors in my posts.  Sometimes I could find a useful place to link, but most often I was merely linking to some brief biographical page or to a short review of a book, usually something that I had searched out for the purpose and had not even bothered to read very thoroughly.  Yet, when I began actually studying other people’s linking practises, there did not seem to be many alternatives.  As long as people were linking to something very specific, the links were interesting, but as soon as they began linking in a general way, in order to provide a citation or some context or some supplementary information, the links ceased being useful.  They were links to information that was too general to be useful as a citation and too uninteresting to be useful for anything else.  I felt that this kind of linking was often worse than not linking at all, and it was certainly not a kind of linking that was reflective of my own reading of the web, but I was not certain what I might do instead.

A few days ago, however, I read a post called “Notes on Methodology” on the Philosophy and Modern Carpentry blog that was working through the difficulties of citing the web.  It is a longer post, and it does not touch on the question of citation until somewhere near the middle, but it argues essentially that citing the web is difficult because the web is changing c0nstantly and because, even with third party web archiving projects, it is not possible to ensure that what has been cited one day, or even one second, will be there the next.

Now, I have no real solution to this problem, and it is not even a problem that troubles me very much as such, but it is a problem that gave me a moment of clarity.  I realized suddenly that citing the web was never going to be the same as citing a physical artifact, at least not in the technical ways that academic writing has come to understand citation, but that citing the web might very well allow the kinds of footnotes that Illich was making, footnotes as a kind of sharing, and might do so to a greater degree than even Illich could have imagined.  Citations, in this sense, would perhaps cease to be useful as references, and this would remain a problem for a certain kind of writing, but they would become much more useful as a kind of recommendation, a kind of sharing.  They would cease saying, “This person wrote these words in this edition of this text on this date,” and they would begin saying, “This person is an interesting writer, or thinker, or artist, so take some time to check this link, however much it might have changed since I posted it for you.”  They would cease providing a justification or a supplement to what has been written, and they would begin providing the textual connections that the author feels are worth sharing.

In that moment, I realized how it was that I will change my practise of linking.  Rather than linking an author’s name to a brief biography that I would never be bothered to read myself, I will link to an essay or an interview or a story, something that I have enjoyed that has been created by or about the author.  Rather than linking the title of a book to a synopsis or a short review that is useful only at the level of basic information, I will link to an interview with the author or a scholarly article about the book.   Instead of accepting the illusion that these links can and should be made to justify and support the facts of what I am writing, an illusion that most of the web seems to maintain subconsciously, even if only in the most general way, I will foster the practise of making my links into recommendations to the things that I find interesting about the authors, books, directors, films, and ideas that become the subjects of my writing.  Instead of asking links to be technical or informational, I will ask them to be personal and convivial.

If everyone were to link like this, perhaps, just perhaps, we would end up following links more often, rather than just noting that they are there.

Several people have brought it to my attention that I do not always quote my sources exactly.  It seems that they have compared what I have quoted with the original texts and have found there to be some odd discrepancies, and they thought that they would do me the service of bringing these issues to my attention so that I could correct them.

So, let me say, once and for all, that I have indeed misquoted, often, purposefully, systematically.  I have changed tenses and pronouns.  I have replaced contractions with full words.  I have omitted the contents of parentheses and subclauses.  I have alterred endless amounts of punctuation.  I have, in all these ways and probably many others, misquoted.

Do not, however, mistake this confession for contrition.  I do not intend to start subjecting myself slavishly to the letter of the texts that I quote.  Though I am deeply respectful of authors and their words, I would suggest that a true respect for words involves the understanding that they are not absolute, not sacred, not originary, but malleable, multiple, and sometimes best respected when they are incorporated into the idiom of another author who loves them enough to work and to play with them.   To insist on the letter of the text, even when it does not do justice to the living text, can only ever be a mere legalism.  I am not concerned with it.  My concern is elsewhere.

Mike Hoye wrote yesterday about four essays that have caused him to reconsider his writing practise.  These essays themselves are quite interesting, but I am more intrigued by the reaction that they caused in Mike.  He quotes each essay at length to show how they model a more purposeful approach to writing and being, and then he concludes by saying,

“The world needs changing and my work and my writing frankly suck, because good enough sucks. Adequate sucks. Merely competent sucks, and don’t think I’m willing to set the bar at contentedness with anything that isn’t the best I’ve got on offer anymore.”

I agree with Mike entirely, not that his work sucks, because I have been enjoying his writing very much, but that any work sucks, and any writing sucks, as soon as it has become good enough.  Writing that has become satisfied with itself, that sees itself as adequate, that no longer strives to be more than it is, can only ever be poor writing.  Good writing is always trying to be better writing, and it should therefore provoke better writing in its readers.

This returns me to the opening phrase of Mike’s post, where he compares the four essays he is discussing to a “swarm of intellectual candiru” that have “lodged themselves in his apparatus.”  This is a wonderful and appalling image.  It likens the reader to someone standing thigh high in the river of writing, in the place where the Amazon and the Rio Negro meet, pissing into the passing water, when these four essays, these four small, bloodsucking, parasitic catfish, jump from the river and into the reader’s urethra to gorge themselves on his blood.

The violence and the repugnance of this image describe, at least for me, what good writing needs to do.  It needs to violate the reader somehow, to pain and discomfit, to provoke.  It needs to get under the reader’s most sensitive skin and incite a different and better reading, a different and better writing, a dissatisfaction with what has so far been read and written.  This dissatisfaction, this refusal to be merely adequate, is what produces writing worth reading.

This past Saturday the 11th marked the anniversary of my first post, which means that I have been writing this thing that I now confess to be a blog for a little more than a year.  About the time I began, someone told me that the average life expectancy of a blog was something less than three months, and there were perhaps ten inactive blogs for every active one , so I told myself that I would not begin writing a blog unless I could commit to it for at least a year.  At that point, I thought, I would take stock of what the blog had produced and decide whether I wanted to continue it.  The result of that reflection was interesting for me, so I have included it below:

1. As I wrote some time ago, I have found the medium of the blog to accord surprisingly well with the rhythm and pace of my life.  It is adaptable to the many ways in which my other roles distract and interrupt my writing.  I am able to write as a part of how I live in any case.  This has been nothing short of a gift to me.

2. The practise of the blog has come to function, much as writing papers did in school or as my personal correspondence did for some years after, as a way to respond to what I am reading and to articulate what I am thinking.  I need to write in order to think and in order to remember, and this space not only allows me to write in such a way, but gathers what I have written in a kind of archive to which I can easily return.

3.  The site of the blog has become a means for dialogue with some of my immediate social and intellectual community, though much less well than I had hoped.  Many of those whom I had hoped to engage through this medium have not found themselves able to respond through it, and it is a regret to me that my attention to the blog has caused me to reduce the amount of correspondence that I maintain and has therefore lessened the amount that I interact with some of those whom I appreciate most.

4.  In compensation, however, the space of the blog has also connected me with some people whom I did not at all expect.  I began with the thought that I would write for my existing community of friends rather than for the internet in general, but I discovered that, on occasion at least, the internet was reading along as well and was willing to receive what I was writing with the greatest hospitality.  In some instances, these responses have become the basis for ongoing conversations that I value very much.

5.  Writing the blog has encouraged me to write through other mediums as well, to write more often and more broadly.  During the past year, for the first time in my life, I can say that I probably spent as much time writing as I did reading.  This has taken me by surprise, and I am still adjusting to the expanded role that writing has come to play in my daily life.  I have always identified myself as a reader, and I have recently come to identify myself as a teacher also, but I have recently been confronted by the possibility that writing now plays as large a part in my intellectual life as reading and teaching do.  I am sometimes frightened by this.

6.  Writing through the internet has caused me to think more deeply about the nature of the internet specifically and about the nature of electronic media more generally.  The question of how we are mediated by the digital has taken its place among the several questions that regularly recur for me.

7.  The simple practise of writing, broadly, repeatedly, almost promiscuously, has also caused me to think more deeply about the nature of writing itself.  I am increasingly aware of the limits of writing, and yet I am also increasingly aware of how necessary these limits are for me.  Writing has become a way for me to mark, provisionally and tentatively, but also absolutely and authoritatively, above all paradoxically, the limits of myself.

There is probably more that I could say, but I will not.  What I have said already will suffice, I think, to explain why I have decided to continue writing in this way for a little longer yet.  Let us say, at least, though I will commit to nothing further, that I hope to be making a similar address next year.