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the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested
My kiddo only naps in the car. Despite the fact that it's negative sumthin sumthin out there (wind chill adjusted), my wife and I take turns sitting in the driveway while she snores away. No fun. Except for the fact it's good pleasure reading time. No computer to take notes, etc etc. So today it was the newly arrived n+1 for me.
I'm going to write another post soon about a few individual articles, but first of all, I am wondering about how LS fits into their "Intellectual Situation" piece on "The Blog Reflex":
The accident waiting to happen to bloggers was most visible when they turned their attention to literature and ideas. The hope had been to democratize the intellectual sphere. Freedom of the press is for those who own one. But now all you needed was a laptop and some time on your hands. The idea was especially attractive in light of the consolidation of media holdings and the destruction of intellectual life in the '80s and '90s, when people began to work longer and harder for less, available public spaces and quiet cafes dried up, and argument in the academies gave way to 'respect'.
The blogs salved this ennui and created nourishing microcommunities. Yet criticism as an art didn't survive. People might have used their blogs to post the best they could think and say. The could have posted 5,000-word critiques of their favorite books and records. Some polymath might even have shown, on-line, how an acute and well-stocked sensibility responds to the streaming world in real time. But those things didn't happen, at least not often enough. In practice, blogs reveal how much we are unwitting stenographers of hip talk and marketing speak, and how secondhand and often ugly our unconscious impulses still are. The need for speed encourages, as a willed style, the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested. (Not for nothing is the word blog evocative of vomit.) "So hot right now," the bloggers say. Or: "Jumped the shark." The language is supposed to mimic the way people speak on the street or the college quad, the phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satisfaction - "The Divine Comedy is SOOO GOOOD!" - or displeasure - "I shit on Dante!" So man hands on information to man.
By the end of the second paragraph, it seems clearer that the writer's not talking about us and our circle, exactly... But what do others think? (n+1 affiliated lurkers, if you still come by, encouraged to come out of the woodwork etc...)
(UPDATE: After reading Scott Kaufman's new post on all this at the Valve, and having clicked through to his links to actual "litblogs," I now can totally see n+1's point... I guess I was thinking that we are a litblog. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case....)
By CR | February 15, 2007 in Blogs | Permalink
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CR, thanks for sharing this. It is an interesting piece. But it seems like the author is taking general criticsm of "public discourse" and applying it to blogs. I am not an authority but I think there are plenty of examples where there is a great deal of thoughtful exchange and criticism. Putting Long Sunday aside, there are plenty of places on the web to read insightful analysis of world events, literature, philosophy or whatever. Just because there is also a lot of crap doesn't prove that "criticism as an art didn't survive." In fact, I think you are absolutely correct when you describe blogging as "a new form of writing whose form itself is part of its message." I think it would be very useful to develop this notion further.
Thanks again.
Posted by: Alain | Feb 16, 2007 10:34:47 AM
It's so transparent that he's talking about The Weblog. I suppose you were trying to be nice by not coming out and saying it, CR, but in practice it just turned out to be patronizing.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Feb 16, 2007 10:28:32 PM
If, for instance, you wrote the line "The language is supposed to mimic the way people speak on the street or the college quad, the phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satisfaction" on here, people would likely smirk a little bit.
Hail, hail! It's obvious who he's talking about -- so obvious we need not even mention it -- but you'd think that, given the willingness of the n+1 folks to interact with the lowly likes of us, they'd celebrate the positive instead of accentuating the negative. But what do I know? I'm too busy trying to figure out how to blog like The Hold Steady would, you know, if they did.
Posted by: SEK | Feb 16, 2007 11:02:56 PM
Doesn't the sentence CR quotes (and SEK quotes CR quoting) have a certain Lewis Lapham quality to it?
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Feb 16, 2007 11:11:13 PM
Repent
brethhhhhhhhhhhhren
and
turn towurds
The Big
Posted by: 01001010 | Feb 16, 2007 11:17:26 PM
Keith Gessen made some interesting pre-release comments on this article at the Valve. Long Sunday was specifically exempted from being the kind of blog criticized.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Feb 16, 2007 11:57:42 PM
I'm a subscriber, and so there's nothing altruistic in this: I wish n+1 the best. Surprisingly, however, despite its publication schedule and its editorial board, it is not always at its best. And its worst, like the worst blogging, merely apes what it promised to supplant.
Tellingly, "The Blog Reflex" exemplifies its worst.
Here's the pivotal sentence:
"But those things didn't happen, at least not often enough."
When a critic surveys a living genre or medium, the difference between "didn't" and "didn't always," between "none" and "some," is not minor, and the difference between "some" and "not enough" depends on whether we know where to find "more and better." For example, when I say "The New Yorker doesn't publish nearly enough interesting poetry," it might be because I often find more interesting poetry in Jacket. If there is any "literary blogging" whose material seems both worthwhile and unlikely to become accessible through any other avenue, then what's the comparison point for "not often enough"?
Offered a chance to explore the new -- or even to encourage "those things" to happen a bit more often -- n+1's anonymous writer instead conforms to journalistic habit and resculpts the punditry deposited by more established print organs. Expressing disingenuous disappointment along the lines of the "surprise" in my first paragraph, it re-affirms the already not-known: Nothing to see here; really a shame; well, let's move on....
It's an eerily familiar process. During a public back-and-forth with Jonathan Lethem some years back, it turned out that his Village Voice piece "The Failed Promise of Science Fiction" had originally been titled "Can't We All Get Along?" and had begun as an attempt to draw attention to Carol Emshiller's work. Despite the good intentions of any one editor or author, the pressures of professional and semi-professional journalism always push us to flatter ignorance, and, by so doing, snub the Ideal Reader of literature.
Which, among the bloggers I read, contributes much of the strange appeal of web self-publication.
Posted by: Ray Davis | Feb 17, 2007 12:57:34 PM
After realizing that I'd managed to screw up both of Lethem's titles (ain't that just like a blogger?), I put a corrected version of my comment onto my site....
Posted by: Ray Davis | Feb 17, 2007 1:23:20 PM
It's a bit rich for the author of those paragraphs to denigrate anyone for writing with "a willed style".
Posted by: ben wolfson | Feb 17, 2007 2:21:16 PM
I think there's always a vast generalization in the print media about bloggers. To some extent that's unavoidable--the blogosphere is as diverse as the world that spawned it.
But still--it's very annoying to hear the criticism that the blogosphere isn't intellectual, especially considering so many bloggers are academics and experts.
Posted by: AE | Feb 18, 2007 1:12:06 AM
"a willed style"...is there any other style? (Even in the act of quoting oneself, as Hitchcock defined it, there is an element of will.)
Suppose I share Ray's...disappointment(?), but all these comments are too quick to take offense and seem to miss the interesting parts of CR's ambivalence.
At the same time, while appreciating what CR is saying, wondering if the danger (on both "sides") isn't also in coming across as just a bit too "natural?" (something formulaic merely, as opposed to, say, coming by it honestly - always with some difficulty and further expenditure).
Some "blog-rearrangements" of voice, esp. as they are somewhat pervasive and archetypal, are definitely worth criticizing.
There's also a link in the 'graphs above with the (half-speculative) criticism of other related, epochal trends: perpetual re-design at the expense of content, linking as a mechanism to stop thinking, so on. Criticisms of hypertext are nothing new, of course, but they do seem to be becoming ever more relevant (cf. Mary Caponegro).
Posted by: Matt | Feb 18, 2007 12:58:35 PM
Dear Long Sunday!
Hello from n+1 headquarters. Before I wade again into the perilous waters of blog controversy, I'd like to make the following proposal: Will anyone who for whatever reason can't get their hands on an actual physical n+1 email me at nplusonepublicity at gmail and I'll send one along right away as a publicity copy? I sent one out to Men's Vogue the other day--who you'd think could have paid for one, right?--so I feel it's only right to send one to the good people of Long Sunday.
Let me add, for subscribers, that the publicity copies will be from our pile of slightly damaged issues. The pristine ones--and our affection, even if you don't like "The Blog Reflex"--are still reserved for you.
Best,
Keith
Posted by: Keith | Feb 19, 2007 12:06:45 AM
working backwards...
Keith,
That's very, very nice of you to offer. Thanks for doing it.
Matt,
At the same time, while appreciating what CR is saying, wondering if the danger (on both "sides") isn't also in coming across as just a bit too "natural?" (something formulaic merely, as opposed to, say, coming by it honestly - always with some difficulty and further expenditure).
"Natural" would never be the word that I would use. And of course you're right, to a point. Let me put it this way, though. One of the things that my "real work" focuses on is the relationship between discursive form and social form (for instance, the market(s)). One thing that's interesting about blogging, in this day and age especially, is the relative absense of need to satisfy market demand, and the effect of this fact upon the form of the writing. I don't blog under my own name. Unlike my "real work," I don't expect any financial compensation (direct or indirect) from this work. And that is one of the leading causes, I think, of the differences between the shape of my writing here and over there in the real world.
(Of course, this distinction doesn't apply to many, many bloggers. But it does to me, and many others, and perhaps forms the heart of the blog's potential...
Ray,
I largely agree with you, as usual. If there is a certain amount of passive-aggressivity in the original post, it comes of frustration that even if folks like us aren't the real target of the piece, a simple gesture in our direction would have broken the piece out of somewhat raw repetition of the conventional wisdom on blogging on any topic.
Rich,
Thanks for pointing that discussion out for all of us.
Posted by: CR | Feb 19, 2007 12:20:22 AM
the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested
Posted by: 01001010 | Feb 19, 2007 12:34:37 AM
CR,
I don't expect any financial compensation (direct or indirect) from this work. And that is one of the leading causes, I think, of the differences between the shape of my writing here and over there in the real world.
one would say "yes of course, naturally; and cheers to that." furthermore a certain lightness, especially, is essential to blogging. but then maybe there is a more real world yet (of 'literature') beyond the "real world" of journalism (which can still be serious) too, which the form of blogging/"live" hypertext discourages.
Posted by: Matt | Feb 19, 2007 7:54:03 AM
...or at least tends to discourage, and in new ways so.
Posted by: Matt | Feb 19, 2007 7:55:43 AM
Not to be the killjoy or anything. Maybe CR will agree that suffice to say it's a kicking debate still, re: hypertext (admittedly a broader topic than blogging, though one that clearly overlaps).
In any case, do take Keith up on the offer, Long Voguer Associates. For current literary/philosophy small magazines, one simply can't do better.
The latest issue has some interesting original stuff, I mean in addition to being steeped in philosophy and the honest best of literary theory, as per usual. There is also some probing psychoanalytic Theory, all without ever being obtuse or beyond the reach of a general, intellectual audience.
Posted by: Matt | Feb 19, 2007 7:13:37 PM
Hello All,
I'm not one to comment much here, although I've been a reader for some time. I like many of the writers of n + 1; I appreciated their critique of McSweeney's & Co. as one of the many symptoms of an American (pseudo)intellectual culture that confuses attitude with communication (call it Pitchforkitis), and I like many of the articles they run.
But, as they've pretty much made clear, their interest in "literature" means "fiction" and fiction of the often frictionless sort that tends to sell many, many copies and get in all of the Corpo-bookstores; I think that they want (as they've said on other occasions) lit. crit. that addresses the general paucity of anything of any sort of quality or interest in this sphere, U.S.-wise, and that cuts through some of the ridiculous blurbage and bombast that dresses up the same old tired neo-realist yawnmachines as "the next thing". So, not poetry and not small-press fiction (for the most part). That's cool; I agree with their assessment about contemporary fiction even if I disagree with their identification of novelists who have done something worthwhile (Jonathan Franzen? Huh?) I'm glad that somebody is excoriating American writers for the general abandonment of what 100 yrs. of modernism has made possible in writing (or, rather, their general capitulation to the cluelessness of agents and publishers). But in trying to, well, steal the middle-class, underemployed, post -liberal arts readership of The Believer, their taste ends up seeming pretty inadequate and pretty humdrum itself. Ah, the crisis of the popular! I'd prefer it if they just talked more trash. And focussed more on unknown writers, translations, forgotten figures of the past. Tone-wise and design-wise, The Believer may be pretty annoying, I'll admit. But they are beating n + 1 in terms of the adventurousness of their tastes (atrocious "art" features aside). Taking the broad view, N+1 is still looking pretty provincial. Step it up, Keith!
It's worth mentioning that poets, and poets who consider themselves critics, have been camped out in the blogosphere for many a year now, and many of us do use blogs for discourse about the issues in contemporary poetry--reviewing, debating, historicizing, theorizing, etc., (in fact, all of the things the writer says we don't do are getting done every day). And, moreover, getting done in a manner that doesn't need to capitulate to the same often stale voice and style of, either, the book review or the academic essay. This isn't always, or even often, successful. But one or two hits a week is all you need. The point: said writer should try wandering a little farther off the beaten clickstream.
What many of us don't do, with maybe a few exceptions, however, is write anything that might be considered the work of an organ for "public intellectuals" of the sort that n+1 so desperately wants to be. When this article gets sad about the lack of literary criticism it means no lit. crit. that anybody with a general education could understand. She or he wants literary criticism that anybody, with any amount of background knowledge, can understand. This is a noble aim, and a desire I too share. But I must add that it's unclear what and how much relevance this kind of literary criticis has had historically in the formation of literary culture. Or rather, sure, it's good for readership, yes, for changing reading habits and reader's thinking. But writership? No, probably not. Most people would have been pretty fucking confused if they picked up a copy of Eugene Jolas' Transition in the 1920s. But not the writers!
One of the tasks of literary criticism and theory is to be a free education for writers. This is an education that blogs have been providing, outside of the provicial intellectual institutions of the academy, and of a sort that street culture hasn't probably been providing very consistently for a long while. Is it La Revolution Surrealiste or Athenaeum? Probably not. But it's not The New Yorker either.
Posted by: Jasper Bernes | Feb 19, 2007 8:55:09 PM
Jasper,
An excellent comment. Your point on the (possible) relationship between literary criticism and the development of art now is extremely relevant. In fact, I am trying to turn my own academic work in this direction - one that has been almost completely abandoned by the academic establishment, if it was ever taken up in the first place. The sense that this might be possible may be the only thing that keeps me working (other than, of course, the need to keep my job... I can't really see any further benefit from the deployment of literary study as social critique... If we are to do anything that might matter in the slightest, it seems to me the only path open is the one that you suggest.
That said, I really do value n+1 because of its attempt to do just this. I see the problem that you describe (trying to write criticism for the common reader and revivify art at the same time)... It is a tough, tough charge that they have taken up. I am willing to be patient and see what comes of their approach.
I wish, in short, that we could work towards the development of a new aesthetic or new aesthetics that would be at once true to the modernist precedent and able to reach a wide readership, to register in the cultural sphere. This is what makes me happiest about n+1, even if there is a way to go.
Posted by: CR | Feb 19, 2007 10:51:23 PM
Matt,
I certainly don't think I'm extolling the blog at the expense of any other form, just arguing that it should receive the room to grow that it, because of its potential as a medium, deserves.
but then maybe there is a more real world yet (of 'literature') beyond the "real world" of journalism (which can still be serious) too, which the form of blogging/"live" hypertext discourages.
I'm not sure I see how blogging blocks the development of these other forms? You mean by shifting the bloggers time away from the others? Stealing eyes? Cultural airspace? Explain more fully, Matt.
Posted by: CR | Feb 19, 2007 11:02:40 PM
Time is certainly part of it, yes. I was really thinking more along the lines of various criticisms of hypertext generally (including hyperfiction).
As I believe someone once mentioned before, generic statements about "blogging" are mostly rather useless, as the medium itself encompasses everything from friendly circles of poets to poetry criticism to book seminars/symposiums to Michelle Malkin to Jewcy to virtual testimony or fiction to automated spam.
Posted by: Matt | Feb 20, 2007 1:07:09 AM
[...From Marginal Utility: Megablogging...]
Posted by: | Feb 24, 2007 2:07:00 PM
Rather late to this thread, I wanted to first thank CR for the initial post and for his recent posts on the site, generally. As one of the authors of the "blog reflex," I want to say, too, that I'm not fully happy with the examples I used, and that CR's criticisms, minus the perhaps over-literal reading of my metonymic "college quad" (and they do still exist in at least a few universities where, as CR's latest post points out, students have undergone a Hausmannization of the mind) strike me as having hit on a weak spot in the piece. This kind of instant criticism is, as the piece does argue, one of the better functions of the blog and one that LS often performs admirably. To be fairer, I ought to have drawn more precise distinctions between genres of blog, and there are now many genres. The implied targets of the piece are those mainstream print and web publications who now tell themselves they've got to get a piece of this blog action. And yet their ideas of a blog betray their contempt for human communication and expression and, yes, civilization. They believe it's a race to the bottom and they hate themselves for running it. There's a reason the New Yorker will profile Harvard and Columbia's virtual bathroom graffiti and not Long Sunday, and it's not entirely because what happens at Harvard and Columbia is more likely to draw the attention of NYrker writers and readers. It's because they believe that the blog is the dirty and vulgar Freudian unconscious of their beautifully civilized organ. But can that organ really be in such good shape if they believe they would be no better than bathroom graffiti posters minus the discipline and reward of writing for the New Yorker? So "willed style" meant the will to decivilize oneself out of bad faith. To make sense of that epithet, I admit, requires a certain charity from the reader. Read within the context of the entire Intellectual Situation and the earlier Intellectual Situations, I think the meaning is clear enough. Which brings me to the critique I'd wish I'd had space and time enough to make: the blog in general thrives on decontextualization and recontextualization. At the most vulgar level, say the celebrity gossip blog (the kind that make the most money b/c they get the most hits), this takes the 7th grade form of repeating someone's words in quotation marks. The very appearence on the site is meant to cue laughter and contempt. You could excerpt Kant's Critique of Judgment and post it surrounded by knowing asides and quotations and mock its pretensions and you'd get a string of posters agreeing with you. Of course this kind of irony is very close to the practice of criticism and the activities of the college seminar, but its the slight distance that matters. In the end, part of the purpose of "The Decivilizing Process" and the founding of n+1 was to cut through our anxieties and hopes for new technologies--partly by indulging them--and getting back to things that matter, like individual conduct. Whether the blog-o-sphere splits up into a majority of sneerers and an increasingly embattled minority of critics depends on the same complex web of education, incentives, committments, etc. that governs culture at large. It may already be too late to have avoided the same split that obtains in other spheres between cynicism and productive criticism (hence the past tense Ray objects to in his post). This doesn't mean that we shouldn't do what we can to encourage those who blog with their whole minds and hearts. One way to do this, oddly, is through polemic. If you recognize yourselves in the worst practices, you may cease from them. This may also mean becoming self-critical users of the technologies we've mostly been taught to believe will redeem us despite ourselves.
Posted by: Marco Roth | Mar 7, 2007 1:56:56 PM
Marco,
Thanks for the helpful comment. I hope it goes without saying that I'm a huge, huge fan of n+1. It really does inspire hope, seeing something like it out there amidst the ruins of public intellectual culture. I guess I was just worried that the piece, since it didn't make distinctions between different types of blogs, was likely to be counterproductive for those of us that you actually do like.
All of which is more or less to say: how about an LS name drop the next time this sort of thing comes around?
minus the perhaps over-literal reading of my metonymic "college quad" (and they do still exist in at least a few universities where, as CR's latest post points out, students have undergone a Hausmannization of the mind)
Sorry about that! A bit of a cheap shot, I admit. I'll further admit that I spent my formative academic years traipsing across an Olmstead designed quad, likely one of the more beautiful ones in the US. I really haven't earned the right to talk quad smack yet - it's only my second year teaching at my current (and quadless) public uni.
Posted by: CR | Mar 7, 2007 9:46:29 PM
(...insert boilerplate Adam Kotsko joke here.)
One way to do this, oddly, is through polemic. If you recognize yourselves in the worst practices, you may cease from them.
...underestimates, I feel, the obvious preference of to see only condescension (call it the (mis)detection of cant, gone wild, when it overpowers any potential for interesting new sincerity/self-reflection. Or sometimes may just be the laziest of flattery.) But thanks for wading in, Marco.
Posted by: Matt | Mar 8, 2007 7:49:20 AM
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