What is especially awful is the seemingly high-brow attack on "bloggers" (Lord, how I hate that word).
Owing to its vastness and its velocity, no medium of communication and publication ever depended more desperately on “content”--the lifeless business expression for words and ideas--than the Internet. Some people celebrate this as a historic breakthrough for literariness in its various forms. They rhapsodize about the democratization of the writing life, about the demise of the “gatekeepers” and their institutions, about the pure and perfect autonomy of blogging and “self-publishing.” Who needs The New York Times if I can arrange for you to know what it is in my heart at this instant?
You read any writer on becoming one, and you see again and again, "a writer writes, and there's no way around it." The advent of the internet no doubt does reduce the mean intelligence of written material overall; it also offers opportunities for some to write. Some fewer gain an audience. Some fewer still actually manage to make something of a living at it.
All the same, Wieseltier's lament over the decrepitude of our culture is really nothing more than the realization that the barbarians are at the gates. I would feel bad for him, but I don't. The simple reality is that internet writing of all kinds attracts a relatively small audience. Most sites tend to play to a particular audience; they are nothing more than examples of market segmentation. The demise of the craft of writing as a paid profession is a bit overwrought because, as things continue to shake themselves out, there will be rewards in the form of pay for those who do the job well. Others, such as myself, are content enough to do what we do for the love of craft.
As a side note, Wieseltier's nostalgia for his avante-garde youth is disgusting. There never has been, nor ever will be, a "decent poverty". The very thought is vile.
2 comments:
Fools like this one annoy me.
Yea, the internet has caused a major decline in the writer's pay (i.e. short stories still sell for $250--on average--which is what Hemingway and Fitzgerald made in 1920). It causes the rise of these 15 dollar for five hundred word article engines, but . . .
Serious types will use these things to their advantage. Blogs provide practice, and possibly help build an audience for the future book contract. Those horrid penny-per-a-word engines help church mice (like me) pay utilities on occasion. Okay, to be honest I probably bought groceries, utilities, and subway passes too. They aren't great places to write for, but . . .
Elitism oozes from every nook and cranny, every pore, and every paid and un-paid writer. Not all writing is worth reading, even those from the houses, but none-the-less . . . This elitist has forgotten his history. These same arguments surfaced with the rise/birth of pulp fiction, romance, true crime, comics, editorials and so forth. Yet, literature has continued to survive, and for the better or worse great and sub-par publications have continued to stir offspring.
As for decadent poverty . . . seriously, I survived for many years in mold ridden basement apartments, with leaks, sometimes no heat, and one with a roof leak. Poverty is not decadent. Rolling pennies and dimes--literally-- to pay the bills is not fun. It is stressful and reminds you just how much on the edge you really are living. The life of the writer is not all about the "big" paycheck, wine, and clothes.
Yea, these types irk me . . .
Some books that are considered classics, either in genre fiction - Dune is a great example, as is Asimov's Foundation Trilogy - or literary fiction - Crime and Punishment and most of Dickens' earlier works - were originally published as serials in literary periodicals. Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov were paid about a penny to a penny and a half a word for the works that eventually became their classics (although, in his autobiography, Asimov admits that he never planned the Foundation series to become a single whole; it was his editor who pointed it out to him).
As for the question of the internet as practice - that's exactly my point. We don't get editorial assistance, to be sure, except perhaps in comments threads, but we do get the practice of sitting down and doing the basic grunt work of writing - putting our fingers on a keyboard and making clear what floats in the murk of our skulls. I use to hope this would be a platform for something larger; I am quite happy with my quiet corner now, and figure I'll be like T. S. Eliot, who spent his life working in a bank in England so he could take care of his sickly wife.
Wieseltier's whimsical attitude toward his own youthful penury, I think, can be understood more clearly if we grant that Wieseltier believed himself, even then, to be destined for something greater. He endured because he saw it as a fleeting moment of life. He probably could turn rolling pennies and dimes to pay bills in to something sweet because in his own mind, he knew he would one day have research assistants and editors who would swoon over his words.
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