The consolations of reading, the consolations of friendship (draft) (26 Nov 2010)

I imagine a book would not be blurbed this way anymore. This is on the front cover of the Bantam Windstone edition of Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, which I found in a cardboard box out in front of thrift store in Astoria: "I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly -- this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." I found that idea appealing in a contrarian way: Here's the anti-page turner, a book that will stop my attention-deficit-driven cultural consumption in its tracks, tame it, discipline it while honing my ability to focus, to luxuriate in well-turned prose, in lapidary lines lazing their way toward nowhere in particular. And the novel hasn't disappointed in that regard; I'm halfway through it and I still don't know or even care what it is about. I just have come to trust that it is shot through with these precise observations of how a peculiar mind might register things -- a mind that, it turns out, is not so unlike my own since I recognize these observations as apt, as true. It gives me an earned but fleeting sense of empathy, and possibly with a character who is supposed to be crazy.

But I can't ignore my eagerness to be done with Housekeeping and be on to the next thing. I fidget with the book, idly riffle the pages, anxiously look ahead for the end of the chapters, try to cram extra pages into smaller spaces of free time, on the commute or during lunch breaks, when most of my fiction reading gets done. Sometimes I even get annoyed with the more eloquent passages: "Fine, I'll read that again; I know I should read that again because I barely gleaned half of it."

Maybe I'm extrapolating too much from my own experience, but I tend to associate my personal impatience in situations like these with a more general, cultural one. I suspect the existence of a free-floating ideological imperative (consume more! consume more!) that manifests in these moments of annoyance at information that comes to me not predigested. Don't they know how much I feel I must keep up with, how much information I "have to" process? Aren't they aware, as I am, acutely, of how much is out there? I sense the book dragging me away from the data stream, and I find myself resisting and resenting it, as if it were taking me away from life and from the world.

Digitization has of course made access to consumable culture a lot easier, and the internet and social media have made us aware of a lot more stuff that would feasibly interest or enrich us. On the surface, this is enormously beneficial. But this makes me aware of the shortness of my time; it works as a perpetual, low-level intimation of mortality, the opposite of Wordsworth's Ode. ("Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?")

In that poem -- very Thanksgiving appropriate, by the way -- Wordsworth rhapsodizes about "that immortal sea" of eternal truth (or something) that for him is available through contemplative reflection. He claims that "the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." It seems to me that instead of being transported to that sea, contemplation of the sort prompted by Robinson's book or that poem itself makes me feel cut off, as if I am dropping down a shaft. I find I don't want to go down into the well of deep aesthetic appreciation like I used to. It's lonely down there. Social-mediatized books (via) may help, but will likely make reading the sort of books that can take you to such a contemplative, slow place beside the point. Why read difficult books when you can read Facebook updates and chat, if what you are looking for is a sense of communion, of what Facebook calls sharing? Who needs the consolations of reading anymore?

This essay by Amanda Smith Regier touches on a related problem, the feeling of isolation that now seems inescapable if one removes oneself from Facebook. After quitting Facebook for a while, she basically concedes defeat in the face of Facebook's having made conducting social life easier -- as if the point of friendship were convenience.

While deleting myself from Facebook sounded like a liberating “eff you” to technology and the constraints of modern social expectations, in fact, it just made it harder to enhance that “real social life” I had idealized.

I don't know. I dutifully try to keep up. I try to "enhance" my social life with Twitter and Facebook, which has turned that social life into another stream of information, data crammed into spare moments rather than moments lost from time, glimpses of disconnected eternity. I'm afraid that Facebook has basically made friendship less like Housekeeping and more like housekeeping. It's obligatory but largely mechanized and demands less of our active attention, though the more we do, the more there seems to be that needs to get done. But we don't expect friendship to disconnect us from the stress and pressures of everyday life. The consolations of friendship suddenly seem superfluous too. We all just stay connected, for what that's worth, scanning the social media horizon for mentions of ourselves, for signs of our life.

Nothing's gonna stop the flow (27 July 2010)

Alan Jacobs, responding to Peggy Nelson's celebration of the flow, asks:

In the Flow, are “listening” and “consuming” distinguishable activities?

That's an interesting distinction: Listening, if I'm reading Jacobs right, is way of appropriating knowledge that is not simultaneously productive or at once situated in an exchange process, as the word "consuming" implies. The digitally mediated flow seeks to make any noneconomic responsiveness to art or culture or anything else in life more or less impossible -- or at least ideologically undesirable. Why just attend a lecture when you can liveblog it and "add value" with your coverage?

The implied imperative in Web 2.0 is to make all consumption productive and allows us to avoid the ignominious fate of becoming a passive consumer -- the straw-man figure of our era who represents the inauthentic conformist couch potato who has surrendered all agency. Perhaps no subject position has been more demonized than that one in late-capitalist consumerism, as various investigations of the rebel consumer illustrate.

The flow basically eliminates the lag time that listening presupposes, the space in which a more considered response can germinate (if warranted). You might call it the space that makes a deliberate aesthetic possible. (Ross Douthat suggests this space for contemplative reading is becoming a luxury, a class-based privilege contingent on being to afford a distraction-free retreat. I would add that it's also a matter of class whether one feels impelled to be relevant through accelerated productive consumption or whether one will be confident of one's relevance as a matter of habitus.) If the immediate aesthetic response is simply a coded form of obedience to existing relations of power, the social order inscribing itself on our hearts as Eagleton argues, then obviating the space of rumination reinforces the aesthetic's ideological function. We can't dispense with the aesthetic, which allows for real experiential pleasure, a pleasure that seems to resound deep within us and call forth a certain holistic sense of ourselves that is wedded to enduring ideals of the good. But when we make our aesthetic response more deliberate, there is a chance to align our pleasure with our identity with consciously affirmed social ideals.

The real-time revolution, the rise of the flow, basically requires all responses be even more spontaneous than aesthetic approval or else be forgotten and ignored as everyone moves on with the tide of events. From the perspective of real-time hegemony, listening is an arrogant effort to arrest the flow of events rather than swim with them and contribute to the flow's momentum. Trying to stand still amid the flow, to stop and listen, to focus longer than the flow's pace permits, is to ask to be drowned as the flood washes over you.

Metablog blogging (2 Feb 2008)

I'm a poor judge, perhaps, but Sarah Boxer's chin-scratching piece about blogs for the New York Review of Books seems a few years behind the curve. Are people really only discovering now that writing in these so-called "blogs" is more spontaneous and unedited than finished, reported pieces? That it relies on a currency of "links" that take you from one "website" to another on what bloggers playfully call the "internets"? That people who write blogs like attention, which is often their only form of compensation? That blogging is performative?

Boxer was apparently commissioned to compile blog excerpts for a book, and she rightly notes that the idea is somewhat futile; the act of editing (as opposed to linking) blog material would tend to denature it and remove it from the base upon which it relies, the immediate access to the rest of the internet, even if its just to fact check some outrageous claim that's been made. There may be nothing outside the text, to paraphrase Barthes, but books still seek to create that illusion, while blogs are fully comfortable with intertextuality and their discourse is entirely enriched by it. I would personally find it inconceivable to be reading one blog in isolation -- reading blogs means diving into the blogosphere, as part of your routine, in small bites between other bursts of computer-assisted productivity. And it requires the RSS feed aggregator (like Google Reader, for example), which is the blog-equivalent of a book, only it is always growing and requires constant grooming and tending. It makes the idea of someone else compiling seem redundant and limited -- a book about blogs would only satsify someone who didn't really get them, thus all the books about blogs tend to condemn them and their offenses against language and "ethics," as if journalists would hold themselves to any standard without the threat of libel.

Boxer hails blogging as a realm of viturperative underdogs -- a version of the notion n+1 floated about Gawker:

Bloggers are golden when they're at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn't the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that's no way to blog.

Perhaps I am biased by the corner of the blogosphere that I tend to visit (I don't read gossip blogs, for example), but blogging is starting to be professionalized, with able bloggers being taken up by traditional publications seeking to develop an online presence -- Megan McArdle, Matt Yglesias, and Ross Douthat at the Atlantic, for instance. A career path will take shape for those who want to blog professionally, who want to be public thinkers responding in real time to events in a given field of expertise. And the unaffiliated and unpaid will sink to a backdrop, on social network pages, perhaps, and be read mainly by friends and acquaintances. And blog haters will be curled up with their Strunk and White somewhere, fighting the dumb fight against the evolution of living languages.

Truths from books (30 August 2006)

Brad DeLong pretty much sums up my experience in graduate school:

I observe that the idea that the best way to understand the political economy of the 1970s is through intensive, group, line-by-line study of an unfinished, inconsistent, and ambiguous text first drafted in the 1850s by a very smart, sometimes far-sighted, but definitely not divine human being -- that that idea is already a delusion peculiar to those who were a little too good in school in seeking truths from reading books rather than seeking truths from facts.

He's talking about reading Marx here, but I applied a similar approach to all the social theories I was exposed to, and to novels and poems as well. It seemed perfectly normal to dissect the words of Deleuze or Bakhtin or Freud to say something about the circumstances that produced Richardson's novels. The way to support a point you wanted to make was to cleverly interpret the words of some exalted text, not collect more information that bore it out. I chose to study literature probably because I preferred close reading to research and dull fact-finding. Facts? Bah. I would have straight-facedly made the case, borrowed from Mary Poovey that facts were in themselves socially constructed and a recently invented category anyway. And I wrote many a paper speculating on social conditions based on anachronistic readings of old texts. But slowly I began to turn away from this methodology, perhaps because I began reading more widely in other disciplines or perhaps because the winds of academic fashion were blowing a different way. I yearned for rigor and began a project to read all the novels published in England from Clarissa to Burke's Reflections, imagining the tedium and ascetism of this translated into a devoutly serious studious mission -- something that would shift me away from the performative, near improvisional nature of English studies (where it seemed you carried over your arguments by the force of your creativity or the obscurity of your theoretical touchstones) to something more plodding and grounded. It didn't help. How was I to know that what I was calling the "anxieties generated by incipient capitalism erupting in fictional texts" was not something else entirely, not an anachronism I was imposing? I had already lost the thread when I lost faith in the idea that I could peer into these texts and magically perceive something of the world that produced them by making intuitive interpretive leaps. And it occurred to me that it was far more pertinent and vital to try to make sense of the world I lived in rather than one from two centuries ago, and that my interpretive intuitions would be much closer to valid when limited to the contemporary framework, which produced my hidden biases and assumptions in the first place. (Still, if you'd like my analysis of The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph, just let me know.)