| an extended quotation from Erik Davis |
[May. 5th, 2009|10:44 am] |
Just as I don't have a home internet connection so as to give me time to focus on books (when not hunched over my laptop to write things to post to the blog later), I resist a good many autobiographical posts (which given the number of them that actually appear may make you singularly thankful). But for those of us without our own website, the blog is an unstable intermediate form between essay and autobiography.
I note that Erik Davis has recently flagged a bit on posting fresh essays online (other than the ones also appearing in print media), for the reasons with which he prefaced a recent record review. For the author of Techgnosis this is a particularly interesting admission: "friend of mine, a poet and novelist and a bit of a hermit, recently decided to ditch his home Internet service. He still surfs at work, where he follows news and opera stuff, and hunts down movies to add to his excellent DVD collection. But he was sick of the tension he felt at home between the physical machine that served as a multi-pronged typewriter for his creative efforts and the seemingly infinite virtual machine that lurked behind the screen. Every Google search or headline scan seemed a boastful and unspoken reminder of the enormous disparity between the halting, solitary, vulnerable work of writing and the overbearing and profligate obscenity of the global chatter brain.
"I have been thinking a lot about my pal, and about how shocking his decision first seemed, and how sad I am that a decision like that would seem shocking, to anyone really but especially to me. Actually, I have been feeling singularly uninspired about writing online of late (April was a new low in posts). I am tired of slogging it out in the memetic meat market, of the hamster wheels and the meta-tweets and the log-rolling circle jerks and the endless and nauseating self-shilling. Is this what being a writer means now? I don’t want to become an outright crank like my pal, who doesn’t own a cell phone and thinks digital cameras have ruined the work of personal memory that physical film sustained. But that’s the slippery slope I have been scooting down of late." |
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