Cosmopoetica

As a quick glance over this blog (or Ruminate) will make clear, I’ve yet to figure out the forms that are my own best fit for blog writing. I feel intuitively that there’s an undiscovered, Platonic form out there in the hazy region where prose poems, free-form essays, and micro-fictions live– something sinewy and interconnected, something satisfying on the screen but still significant– that I could settle comfortably into.

My intuition might simply be confusion. I strongly believe the features of the "Read/Write Web"– lightweight publishing mechanisms, reputation systems, space for commentary, and the hidden plumbing of web feeds– hold an inconceivable amount of promise to rehabilitate, renew and advance those three forms (which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another): prose poems, flash fiction, and brief essays. The last seems particularly fit for the medium. When Montaigne first used the term "essai" he did so with its literal meaning in mind, intending that what he was writing was an "attempt" at writing something new, in a new way. Where prose poetry and flash fiction inherently tend toward being small, highly polished jewels, there’s a healthy strand of essays that retain a kind of ragged, informal glory.

Isn’t the world of blogs and wikis a perfect one in which to return to the principles of essays as assays? The new essai could be a form uniquely suited to the prosumer, enthusiast nature of the net.

I’m not talking about creating more actual links or an increase in explicit, technologically assisted hypertextuality. Those aspects of the media interest me, but less than the general idea of form in individual posts and then how those posts create aggregate forms, both intentional and those that coalesce serendipitously through the actions of users browsing and searching as well as by virtue of technological elements such as tags and categories.

I’ve been thinking about this subconsciously for a while, but with more attention as I brainstormed my latest mini-project: for the rest of March I’ll be writing an abecedarium of sorts– 26 essais from A-Z– that live somewhere in that interstitial space between, and encroaching upon, prose poems and "in short" creative nonfiction.

While not exactly what I have in mind, I was inspired by Priscilla Long’s "My Brain On My Mind," a fantastic piece about the brain’s workings, memory, and cognition told through the lens of the story of her grandfather… in the form of an abecedarium.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics No Comments »

A month or so ago Scott Leslie posted about Sni.ps a service for enhancing web clipping and attribution for “serious bloggers.” I’m out of the serious game, but I’ve been trying Sni.ps out and find myself in a familiar quandary: I agree with the philosophy motivating the application and want to like it– indeed I have nothing to complain about as far as the apps functions from sign up to first clip–but I’m not sure I’ll use it. The missing piece, which leads to a bit of a chicken and egg style conundrum, is that the extra data that is created– the RDF description of the clip and where it came from– isn’t that useful to me individually, serious blogger or not. I already have multiple ways of clipping, snipping, saving and linking.

Where Sni.ps could get interesting is considering the applications which could be built to take advantage of the metadata, both in terms of exposing new connections (i.e. connecting other people linking to the same source and/or information) and making the snips themselves a social object. This is where Diigo does a good job, making bookmarks and annotations a more useful object than the traditional social bookmarking of delicious… but Diigo has the advantage of also providing a very useful service to the user individually. Sni.ps– so far– doesn’t reach my personal tipping point where it provides value beyond simple cut/paste, bookmarking and capturing to Evernote (my personal general methods)…

Posted in: Ed & Tech & Productivity 2 Comments »

[photo by midorionna]

I can’t decide if Adam Kirsch really, really gets it or if he’s so wrong that he’s almost bent back around to righzt, wormhole fashion. The whole essay on writer’s aspiration, fame, and the age of blogs and the Internet is worth a read, but here’s a taste that made me think:

The Internet has democratized the means of self-expression, but it has not democratized the rewards of self-expression. Now everyone can assert a claim to recognition—in a blog, tumblr, Facebook status update. But the amount of recognition available in the world is inexorably shrinking, since each passing generation leaves behind more writers with a claim on our memory. That is why the fight for recognition is so fierce and so personal.

Yet the bloggers who were so indignant at Gessen’s attempt to engross more than his share of recognition did not direct their indignation at literature itself. They did not want to dismantle the prestige of “being a writer,” but to claim it for themselves; they did not want to end the economy of scarcity but to move individually from the camp of the have-nots to the camp of the haves. In this they are like the snobbish narrator in Proust, whose fascination with aristocratic titles reached its height at just the historical moment when titles became completely meaningless. They are not revolutionaries but social climbers.

If that is the case, then the best strategy for writers in the age of the Internet may be to ignore the Internet and look down on it. If print is a luxury, make it a rare and exclusive one; if literature is antidemocratic, revel in its injustice. Make sure that the reward of recognition goes to the most beautiful and difficult writing, not to the loudest and neediest. Above all, do not start a blog, for the non-writers who wish they were writers will only despise you for choosing to meet them on their own ground. As one of the commenters on Gessen’s blog put it: “get off the Internet as soon as you possibly can. Every second you stay online…another 18-28 year old (that coveted demographic!) loses all respect for you.”

Kirsch definitely needs to read Here Comes Everybody which would provide further– and more insightful perspective– in the idea of celebrity and ego in the era of social media and networks. There’s both irony and revelation in the fact that Kirsch’s piece is fully available online, certainly managed by some kind of content management system… how is it different from a blog again (outside of a very narrow conception of blogging and an unseemly devotion to technological determinism)? Perhaps only really in expectation and execution– Kirsch himself clearly has a readership in mind that he feels bound to and, judging from this article, no plans to respond to even the keenest comments whose tenor and substance themselves belie his assertions.

That being said, the question of why we write and who we write for is never far from my mind, as is our place at the controls of the great participatory machine. I’m both suspicious of those who maintain that desire for recognition– or even readership– doesn’t play into the nature of their creation and cognizant that new intellectual and social currency is being coined for a multitude of new realms. I largely agree with Henry Gould, a fine poet, who asks in the comments:

… but is the desire for recognition really the essential motivation underlying art and poetry?

Major writers have certainly pointed in that direction. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes). “Fame is the spur…” (Milton). But my guess is that even these exalted figures were voicing their views, not while at the pitch of creative composition, but in a moment of analytical distance & fatalism.

And then goes on to answer himself:

No one will deny that fame & fortune (along with anonymity & failure) are fickle, illusory, and at the same time pervasive social factors; but this state of affairs does not mean one must accept Fame’s (& Adam Kirsch’s) seductive argument, that Fame is the actual SOURCE of artistic making.

My primary quibble being the repeated insinuation that there is “a” (single or essential) motivation or source for artistic making. Where Kirsch sees bloggers as hungering for recognition, it seems as likely to me that many publish their without any real hope or thought of gaining readers precisely because the field is so large that they expect to be swallowed up. But as I believe all writers recognize, there is something important about writing “out” that differs from private journaling and letters tucked away unsent… even if there is no expected or desired reader at all.

Generalization is always dangerous, but rarely more intensely so than in talking about a group as diverse and widespread as “blogs” and “bloggers.” Perhaps writers do and don’t want recognition, do and don’t think of their readers… and maybe this is true of all writers, bloggers included. But at the same time, while I believe we are (or should be) in control of the technology, it undeniably takes effort and creates an interactive context that places deep and different demands on the finite resource of our creative concentration. Given this, perhaps those who posit less engagement for better writing are correct, just for the wrong reasons.

Kirsch’s final paragraph tickled me, veering off as it does into prose poetry:

So too with the virtual mind of the inconceivable future. When it looks for traces of us, it will not turn to novels or poems, but to e-mails, blogs, and Facebook pages. Mind will treasure these evidences of its own past, and devote all its infinite resources to interpreting them. And because it is infinite, it will have more than enough attention to give to each of our lives. Even the least articulate of us will become the focus of a kind of ancestor cult, subject to the devoted meditation of innumerable intelligences. The first will be made last, and the last first. At last, the scarcity of recognition will give way to the plenitude that has always been the mark of the messianic age. If only we could be certain that this was the future we had in store, no poet would ever have to write another line.

Posted in: General 1 Comment »

And not just my skin, though we are down to just over 4 hours of daylight and not a lot of that is quality time with The Great God Sol. After a few weeks of rumination, scheduling and unscheduling, re-prioritizing, reading and sleeping, I am emerging from anti-social, introvert Cave 1.0 and re-joining the land of the socially distributed. At least to the degree that I can remain committed to juggling work, life and art.

Until I have more to say, I suggest you learn some answers to life’s important questions, helpfully depicted by The Stereotypist. As a sample:

Or you can quit wasting time reading this blog and go read Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech wherein, among other things, she makes clear why you shouldn’t be reading blogs…

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Says Sven:

“For as exciting as the blogosphere is as a supplement, as a place of provocation and response, it is too fluid in its nature ever to focus our widely diverging cultural energies. A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet.”

Read the rest of Birkert’s rumination on the Boston.com site…

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Man writes bland article about Paul McCartney for the New Yorker. Blogger comments on article’s blandness. Much unintended hilarity ensues. The funny lesson here is that the “writer” who is upset comes off looking so poorly prepared for his job, while the “blogger who is not a writer by virtue of being a blogger” is in every way more professional and interesting to read.

In an amusing demonstration of irony, John Colapinto– through his own attack on a blogger– turns a blog into a vehicle clearly demonstrating his lack of facility with the medium. It seems unlikely that John intended to proclaim to the world that he is a thin-skinned traditionalist.

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If only a few more blog entries could approach Anscombe’s potent blend of incisiveness and brevity…

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