I’m, Like, Trying to Write, Okay?
posted by Frank Pasquale
You’ve probably all seen the New Yorker cartoon with Poe-on-Prozac remarking to a raven, “nice Birdie!” In the Chron of Higher Ed, Evan Eisenberg has a humorous riff in this direction, imagining how a 21st century Emily Dickinson might ditch poetry for blogging and social networking. Here’s a mash of entries:
How Boring Is Amherst?
Let me put it this way: On some days, the most exciting thing that happens is when a fly gets through the hole in the screen and starts buzzing around my room.
So I started writing a poem (yes a poem) with same rhythm as that Coke ad. I got as far as the first line —
We never know how high we are
which I thought was not too lame — for a poem, I mean — but then Suzy sent me this YouTube link where some dude catches sunglasses with his face — LOL, trust me — and then I started checking out some of the other clips, and by the time I got back to the poem I kind of forgot what the point was.
How can educators respond to the brave new world of millennials‘ multitasking?
Here’s some advice from Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, as related by Michael Dirda:
“Will unguided information lead to an illusion of knowledge, and thus curtail the more difficult, time-consuming, critical thought processes that lead to knowledge itself? Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another’s inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?”
Wolf never fully answers these questions, though they strike me as the basis for a much needed book. Still, like any parent with a child transfixed by flashing screens, she is troubled by what she observes. She urges that we “teach our children to be ‘bitextual’ ” or ‘multitextual,’ able to read and analyze texts flexibly in different ways” so that our sons and daughters don’t end up as mere “decoders of information,” distracted from the “deeper development of their intellectual potential.” Early on in Proust and the Squid, she had noted that infants and toddlers who aren’t told stories by their caregivers, who aren’t read to from a very early age, nearly always fail to learn to read well themselves. By implication, it may already be too late for many young people: They will never be able to read with the same thoughtfulness and comprehension as their parents.
Some sobering thoughts on the hidden effects of a technological society.
Photo Credit: Icanhascheezburger.com.
September 13, 2007 at 11:24 am
Posted in: Culture, Google & Search Engines
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Responses (5)
Neil Richards - September 13, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I was wondering about this earlier in the week, when my First Amendment Theory seminar students and I were examining Milton’s Areopagitica, a foundational free speech text that is very hard work. We were able to understand the argument, but many of the classical allusions were completely over our heads (mine included). We wondered how long it would be until such a difficult text would be completely inaccessible to even a graduate school audience outside of a classics department. I don’t have any answers, though I do worry that due to technological advances and intrusions, we as academics also lack the space for contemplation and slow thought we need to do our jobs properly.
John Armstrong - September 13, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Maybe we shouldn’t hold up the detritus of modern communication against a recognized great poet? How much day-to-day communication from Dickinson’s time have we forgotten because it’s just so forgettable?
Besides which, why should we even hold up poetry as a great art form now because it was a great art form then? We might as well look at the early impressionists and mourn their work’s lack of realism.
The whole thesis here compares ripe oranges to stale apples, and further assumes that oranges are categorically preferable to apples anyhow.
Frank - September 13, 2007 at 6:26 pm
John, I don’t mean to compare the blog post to “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” I just mean to say that the blandishments of contemporary culture may be drawing people away from intensive engagement with a situation, people, or nature.
I think you’re right to suggest there will be wholly new art forms developing out of the present age. That’s one reason I really enjoyed an exhibition of digital art at the Whitney. And frankly, the egalitarian side of me applauds this evolution–a work on the web is far more accessible than one hung in a museum (or reproductions trapped, via clunky copyrights, behind a wall of permissions and inconvenience).
But I would like to preserve the sense that art or literature can decline. Otherwise, wouldn’t the very expression “dark age” be meaningless?
Frank - September 13, 2007 at 7:45 pm
and for an example of the new forms, this is interesting:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070912094045.htm
“What happens to poetry in the Digital Age? In one of the first academic works in the field, Swedish researcher Maria Engberg has studied how the ability of the computer to combine words, images, movement, and sounds is impacting both writing and reading.
***
She has analyzed works by English-speaking poets such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Thomas Swiss. The focus is on space, time, movement, and word and image constructions. The poems were written, or rather created, with the help of computer technology and published on the Internet or CDs, for instance.
Some of the works can be experienced as three-dimensional installations, created in space using so-called vr-cubes and augmented-reality environments. Maria Engberg examines how the forms of the poems construct different reader roles that challenge traditional views of poetry and reading, formed by the visual conventions of the printed page. “
Patrick S. O'Donnell - September 13, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Art, or at least the nature or quality of aesthetic experience can indeed decline: “No longer the privileged domain of aesthetic experience, as critical aesthetes and modernist prophets as diverse as Walter Pater, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenberg argued, art is no longer the hard-won ’scrap of critical freedom of thought against external pressure to conform and internal fear,’ to use Alexander Mitscherlich’s words. I submit that aesthetic experience is the momentary, personal, exhilarating–to use Greenberg’s word–form of this nonconformist, fearless scrap. It is a delicious, if brief taste* of critical freedom not unlike what D.W. Winnicott called an ‘ego orgasm’**–a eureka-like experience of restorative ‘creative apperception’ involving the conscious feeling of being intensely alive. It transforms alienation into freedom and adversariness into criticality [the 'ego-ideal'?]. This is a ‘fragile achievement of the ego,’ to use Mitscherlich’s words, that nonetheless strengthens it, allowing it to transcend its social identity and conformity.”
“Protest artists fail to realize that beauty is the ultimate protest against ugliness, which is why the absence of beauty in their works show that they are not critical. They are in fact creative failures. Indeed, the inability to imagine beauty is a sign of the creative inadequacy of post-aesthetic modern art.”
Does contemporary art routinely allow or foster that heightened form of sense experience that is “inherently beautiful and affords pure pleasure”?
“In a post-aesthetic art world the work of art becomes a bully pulpit, and the artist tries to bully the spectator into believing what the artist believes. He becomes a self-righteous bully preaching to us (or rather at us) about what we already know–the ugliness and injustice of the world–without offering any aesthetic, contemplative alternative to it. [....] Most disastrously, the supposedly moral use of art as meliorative criticism and social advocacy abandons the civilized idea that art is the privileged space of contemplation, and as such a reprieve and sanctuary from the barbarism of the world–however much that may be its subject matter–and thus a psychic space in which we can own ourselves and survive, that is, realize autonomy, however aware we are of the special and limited conditions in which it is possible. It ignores the ethics inherent in aesthetics and beauty. Aesthetic contemplation–as distinct from art as a kind of social practice and even theorizing (manque) about the world–is a way of caring for one’s psyche. Art will serve the mental health of whomever turns to it in pursuit of aesthetic experience and beauty.”
“It took little more than half a century to undo Kandinsky’s idea that art was the last bastion of spirituality against materialism. It seems no accident that it was an American artist [Andy Warhol] who elevated commercial art–art that is a means to a commercial end, that is, art that exists to make money–over high art, that is, art which remains an aesthetic and existential end in itself, however much money may appropriate it.”
Arthur Danto’s comments are rather revealing: “It is a matter of some irony in my own case that while the aesthetics of Pop Art opened art up for me to philosophical analysis, aesthetics itself has until now had little to contribute to my philosophy of art.” And, “Things began to change somewhat in the 1990s. Beauty was provocatively declared to be the defining problem of the decade by the widely admired art writer Dave Hickey, and this was hailed as exciting thought. My sense is that it was exciting less because of beauty itself, than because beauty was proxy for something that had almost disappeared from most of one’s encounters with art, namely enjoyment and pleasure.” And then: “Beauty is but one of an immense range of aesthetic qualities, and philosphical aesthetics has been paralyzed by focusing as narrowly on beauty as it has. But beauty is the only one of the aesthetic qualities that is also a value, like truth and goodness. It is not simply among the values we live by, but one of the values that defines what a fully human life means.” From Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (2003). Cf. Crispin Sartwell’s Six Names of Beauty (2004).
*Incidentally, or not, the term for this from Indian aesthetics is rasa, ‘aesthetic relish’.
**Cf. Indic aesthetics, in which the “heart” is the locus of “emotional, intellectual and intuitive integration, a point of refined emotional realisation and one that can lead the individual to a transcendent state.” The purifed state of rasa experience might favorably be likened to this “ego orgasm,” although for the former aesthetic tradition, it amounts to transcendence of the ego, the pleasurable aspects of the experience rightly connoted by reference to “orgasm” (the rough Sanskrit equivalent for which is ‘ananda,’ or ‘bliss’).
The quoted material is from Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art (2004).
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