Tag Archives: Writing

What Motivates the Critic of Technology?

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Last year I wrote a few posts considering the motives that animate tech critics. I’ve slightly revised and collated three of those posts below.

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Some time ago, I confessed my deeply rooted Arcadian disposition. I added, “The Arcadian is the critic of technology, the one whose first instinct is to mourn what is lost rather than celebrate what is gained.” This phrase prompted a reader to suggest that the critic of technology is preferably neither an Arcadian nor a Utopian. This better sort of critic, he wrote, “doesn’t ‘mourn what is lost’ but rather seeks an understanding of how the present arrived from the past and what it means for the future.” The reader also referenced an essay by the philosopher of technology Don Ihde in which Ihde reflected on the role of the critic of technology by analogy to the literary critic or the art critic. The comment triggered a series of questions in my mind: What exactly makes for a good critic of technology? What stance, if any, is appropriate to the critic of technology toward technology? Can the good critic mourn?

First, let me reiterate what I’ve written elsewhere: Neither unbridled optimism nor thoughtless pessimism regarding technology foster the sort of critical distance required to live wisely with technology. I stand by that.

Secondly, it is worth asking, what exactly does a critic of technology criticize? The objects of criticism are rather straightforward when we think of the food critic, the art critic, the music critic, the film critic, and so on. But what about the critic of technology? The trouble here, of course, stems from the challenge of defining technology. More often than not the word suggests the gadgets with which we surround ourselves. A little more reflection brings to mind a variety of different sorts of technologies: communication, military, transportation, energy, medical, agricultural, etc. The wheel, the factory, the power grid, the pen, the iPhone, the hammer, the space station, the water wheel, the plow, the sword, the ICBM, the film projector – it is a procrustean concept indeed that can accommodate all of this. What does it mean to be a critic of a field that includes such a diverse set of artifacts and systems?

I’m not entirely sure; let’s say, for present purposes, that critics of technology find their niche within certain subsets of the set that includes all of the above. The more interesting question, to me, is this: What does the critic love?*

If we think of all of the other sorts of critics, it seems reasonable to suppose that they are driven by a love for the objects and practices they criticize. The music critic loves music. The film critic loves film. The food critic loves food. (We might also grant that a certain variety of critic probably loves nothing so much as the sound of their own writing.) But does the technology critic love technology? Some of the best critics of technology have seemed to love technology not at all. What do we make of that?

What does the critic of technology love that is analogous to the love of the music critic for music, the food critic for food, etc.? Or does the critic of technology love anything at all in this way. Ihde seems not to think so when he writes that, unlike other sorts of critics, the critic of technology does not become so because they are “passionate” about the object of criticism.

Perhaps there is something about the instrumental character of technology that makes it difficult to complete the analogy. Music, art, literature, food, film – each of these requires technology of some sort. There are exceptions: dance and voice, for example. But for the most part, technology is involved in the creation of the works that are the objects of criticism. The pen, the flute, the camera – these tools are essential, but they are also subordinate to the finished works that they yield. The musician loves the instrument for the sake of the music that it allows them play. It would be odd indeed if a musician were to tell us that he loves his instrument, but is rather indifferent to the music itself. And this is our clue. The critic of technology is a critic of artifacts and systems that are always for the sake of something else. The critic of technology does not love technology because technology rarely exists for its own sake. Ihde is right in saying that the critic of technology is not, in fact, should not be passionate about the object of their criticism. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that no passion at all motivates their work.

So what does the critic of technology love? Perhaps it is the environment. Perhaps it is an ideal of community or friendship. Perhaps it is an ideal civil society. Perhaps it is health and vitality. Perhaps it is sound education. Perhaps liberty. Perhaps joy. Perhaps a particular vision of human flourishing. The critic of technology is animated by a love for something other than the technology itself. Returning to where we began, I would suggest that the critic may indeed mourn just as they may celebrate. They may do either to the degree that their critical work reveals technology’s complicity in either the destruction or promotion of that which they love.

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Criticism of technology, if it moves beyond something like mere description and analysis, implies making what amount to moral and ethical judgments. The critic of technology, if they reach conclusions about the consequences of technology for the lives of individual persons and the health of institutions and communities, will be doing work that rests on ethical principles and carries ethical implications.

In this they are not altogether unlike the music critic or the literary critic who is excepted to make judgments about the merits of a work art given the established standards of their field. These standards take shape within an institutionalized tradition of criticism. Likewise, the critic of technology — if they move beyond questions such as “Does this technology work?” or “How does this technology work?” to questions such as “What are the social consequences of this technology?” — is implicated in judgments of value and worth.

But according to what standards and from within which tradition? Not the standards of “technology,” if such could even be delineated, because these would merely consider efficiency and functionality (although even these are not exactly “value neutral”). It was, for example, a refusal to evaluate technology on its own terms that characterized the vigorous critical work of the late Jacques Ellul. As Ellul saw it, technology had achieved its nearly autonomous position in society because it was shielded from substantive criticism — criticism, that is, which refused to evaluate technology by its own standards. The critic of technology, then, proceeds with an evaluative framework that is independent of the logic of “technoscience,” as philosopher Don Ihde called it, and so they become an outsider to the field.

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“The contrast between art and literary criticism and what I shall call ‘technoscience criticism’ is marked. Few would call art or literary critics ‘anti-art’ or ‘anti-literature’ in the working out, however critically, of their products. And while it may indeed be true that given works of art or given texts are excoriated, demeaned, or severely dealt with, one does not usually think of the critic as generically ‘anti-art’ or ‘anti-literature.’ Rather, it is precisely because the critic is passionate about his or her subject matter that he or she becomes a ‘critic.’ That is simply not the case with science or technoscience criticism …. The critic—as I shall show below—is either regarded as an outsider, or if the criticism arises from the inside, is soon made to be a quasi-outsider.”

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The libertarian critic, the Marxist critic, the Roman Catholic critic, the posthumanist critic, and so on — each advances their criticism of technology informed by their ethical commitments. Their criticism of technology flows from their loves. Each criticizes technology according to the larger moral and ethical framework implied by the movements, philosophies, and institutions that have shaped their identity. And, of course, so it must be. We are limited beings whose knowledge is always situated within particular contexts. There is no avoiding this, and there is nothing particularly undesirable about this state of affairs. The best critics will be self-aware of their commitments and work hard to sympathetically entertain divergent perspectives. They will also work patiently and diligently to understand a given technology before reaching conclusions about its moral and ethical consequences. But I suspect this work of understanding, precisely because it can be demanding, is typically driven by some deeper commitment that lends urgency and passion to the critic’s work.

Such underlying commitments are often veiled within certain rhetorical contexts that demand as much, the academy for example.  But debates about the merits of technology might be more fruitful if the participants acknowledged the tacit ethical frameworks that underlie the positions they stake out. This is because, in such cases, the technology in question is only a proxy for something else — the object of the critic’s love.

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*Ultimately, I mean love in the Augustinian sense: the deep commitments and desires which drive and motivate action.

Writing, Academic and Otherwise

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Passing through the process of academic professionalization is, in part, not unlike the process of learning a new language. It is, for example, the sort of process that might lead me to write discourse in place of language to conclude that first sentence. Learning this new language can be both an infuriating and exhilarating experience. At first, the new language mystifies, baffles, and frustrates; later, if one sticks to it and if this new language is not utter nonsense (as it may sometimes be), there is a certain thrill in being able to see and name previously unseen (because unnamed) and poorly understood dimensions of experience.

I suspect the younger one happens to be when this initiating process takes place, the more zealously one may take to this new language, allowing it to become the grid through which all experience is later comprehended. This is, on the whole, an unfortunate tendency. Another unfortunate tendency is that by which, over time, academics forget that theirs is a learned and often obscure language which they acquired only after months and possibly years of training. This is easily forgotten, perhaps because it is only metaphorically a new language. It is, if you are American, still English, but a peculiarly augmented (or deformed, depending on your perspective) form of the language.

This means, usually, that when academics (or academics in training) write, they write in a way that might not be easily assimilated by non-academics. This is, of course, entirely unrelated to intellect or ability (a point that is sometimes missed). A brilliant Spaniard, for instance, is no less brilliant for having never taken the time to learn Swahili. This is also a function of the tribal quality of academic life. One gets used to operating in the language of the tribe and sometimes forgets to adjust to accordingly when operating in other contexts.

Again, I think this is very often simply a matter of habit and forgetfulness, although, it is sometimes a matter of arrogance, self-importance, and other such traits of character.

I mention all of this because, if I were asked to verbalize why I write this blog, I would say that it was in part to translate the work of academics, critics, and theorists into a more accessible form so that their insights regarding the meaning and consequences of media and technology, so far as those insights were useful, might be more widely known. After all, the technologies I usually write about affect so many of us, academics and non-academics alike. Anyone who cares to think about how to navigate these technologies as wisely as possible should be able to encounter the best thinking on such matters in a reasonably accessible form. I don’t know, maybe there is a certain naïveté in that aspiration, but it seems worth pursuing.

I’m fairly certain, though, that I don’t always achieve this goal that I half-consciously maintain for what I do here. I’m writing this post mostly to remind myself of this aspiration and renew my commitment to it.

I should be clear, I’m talking neither about dumbing down what there is to know nor am I suggesting anything like condescension ought to be involved. The challenge is to maintain the depth of insight and to resist the over-simplification of complexity while at the same time avoiding the characteristics of academic language that tend to make it inaccessible. It’s a matter of not ignoring the non-academic reader while also taking them seriously.

I’m reminded of some comments that David Foster Wallace made regarding the purposes of literature. I’ve cited this passage before, quite some time ago, and it has stuck with me. It’s a bit long, but worth reading. Wallace is discussing literature with the interviewer, David Lipsky, and they are debating the relative merits of traditional literature and less traditional, more avant-garde writing:

Huh.  Well you and I just disagree.  Maybe the world just feels differently to us.  This is all going back to something that isn’t really clear:  that avant-garde stuff is hard to read.  I’m not defending it, I’m saying that stuff — this is gonna get very abstract — but there’s a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us.  There’s maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about.  But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell “Another sensibility like mine exists.”  Something else feels this way to someone else.  So that the reader feels less lonely.

There’s really really shitty avant-garde, that’s coy and hard for its own sake.  That I don’t think it’s a big accident that a lot of what, if you look at the history of fiction — sort of, like, if you look at the history of painting after the development of the photograph — that the history of fiction represents this continuing struggle to allow fiction to continue to do that magical stuff.  As the texture, as the cognitive texture, of our lives changes.  And as, um, as the different media by which our lives are represented change.  And it’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along.  And that’s what’s precious about it.

And the reason why I’m angry at how shitty most of it is, and how much it ignores the reader, is that I think it’s very very very very precious.  Because it’s the stuff that’s about what it feels like to live.  Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.

Maybe it is ill-advised to make this comparison, but I think what Wallace has to say here, or at least the spirit of what he is saying can apply to academic work as well. It can also be a way of representing what it feels like to be alive. I tend to hold literature in rather high esteem, so I don’t think that non-fiction can really replicate the experience of more literary writing, but it can be useful in its own way. It can help make sense of experience. It can generate self-understanding. It can suggest new possibilities for how to make one’s way in the world.

It’s too late for new year’s resolutions, but I’m hoping to keep this goal more clearly in focus as I continue to write on here. You can tell me, if you’re so inclined, how well I manage. Cheers.

“I Was Born To Stand Outside Myself”

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Last summer I posted a few thoughts on Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War which I had then begun reading. As it turned out, I set the book aside for a few months for no particular reason, but I’ve recently returned to it and finished it. I stand by my initial characterization: the novel is a meditation on beauty, and a lovely one at that.

Near the end, the main character, Alessandro, meets up with a talented, intelligent, articulate man named Arturo who is nonetheless thoroughly unsuccessful and unaccomplished. In conversation with Alessandro, Arturo sums up his life thus: “I was born to stand outside myself.”

This struck me as a remarkably evocative line. Now I confess that I’m going to take this in a direction that Helprin neither intended nor imagined. That said, the line immediately suggested to me the manner in which we are made to virtually stand beside ourselves in our (social) media environment.

There are perhaps two senses in which this is true. I’m thinking of the way that our social media profiles stand beside us in a rather apprehensible manner. We can look at them, manipulate them, experience them; they are us but not us. In this sense, I’m still inclined to think of our social media profiles as virtual memory theaters, at least in part.

The other sense is the manner in which the presence of our second self impinges upon our lived experience. We not only stand beside our past self as it is represented online, we also stand beside our potential future self as it will be represented online. This other potential self haunts our present from the future. Several months ago I posted a synopsis of Michel de Certeau’s observations about the way the past layers over certain places and haunts them. Places capture memories and those places cannot be divorced from those memories in lived experience. Perhaps if he were alive today, de Certeau would suggest that the future as well as the past now haunts our present. We live with our virtual memory theaters and we live with future memories as well. We are born to stand beside ourselves, actual and potential. And, perhaps most significantly, the potential self we live with is imagined within the constraints of the platform through which it will represented.

On this latter point, I would also point you to Nathan Jurgenson’s fine essay reprinted in The Atlantic: “The Facebook Eye.”

It does occur to me that this standing beside ourselves did not itself emerge with the advent of social media. One could argue that it is a function of all representation. Certainly it is a feature of writing itself. Walter Ong made much of the way in which literacy alienates. Among the many separations effected by writing Ong includes the separation of the known from the knower, the past from the present, and being from time.

So we might conclude that social media only augments a long standing trajectory. But my sense, as it often is with efforts to situate present phenomena within a historical trajectory, is that this threatens to miss the significance of present developments. Changes of degree may amount to changes in kind. As I’ve heard it put somewhere or other, a hurricane is not merely an unusually strong breeze.

Social media, and the technological ecosystem on which it depends, radically augments the alienation of writing if only by its mere ubiquity. But perhaps more importantly, it does so by making our second self that stands beside us also a public self that presents itself to a myriad of others. It’s the difference between an old-school diary and your Facebook profile. It is no small difference and we are all in the process of sorting out the personal and social consequences.

De Certeau concluded that “haunted places are the only ones people can live in.” Walter Ong was also sanguine about the alienations wrought by writing:

“To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it . . . By distancing thought, alienating it from its original habitat in sounded words, writing raises consciousness.  Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for fuller human life.  To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance.  This writing provides for, thereby accelerating the evolution of consciousness as nothing else before it does.”

Now the question is whether the standing beside ourselves effected by social media will carry similarly salubrious consequences. Discuss amongst yourselves. Here’s the prompt to get you going: Has social media continued to accelerate the evolution of consciousness or self-consciousness? Is there a difference?

Writing To An Imagined Audience … Suggestions Welcome

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Audience, as the etymology suggests, originally involved hearing and, hence, speaking face-to-face; in which case you would know exactly who you were communicating to and, presumably, to what end. The paradox of referring to the “audience” of written communication reminds us of the more difficult task of communicating when the parties involved have been abstracted from one another in space and time.

So who’s my audience?

I know a few personally, I’ve come to know a few virtually through comments, but for the most part it is an invisible audience that I nonetheless find myself wanting to address in a meaningful manner.

Having said this, I’m curious to know why you take the time to read The Frailest Thing.

I was reminded by a comment today that most of the readers of this blog are “silent readers,” and that is fine of course. I’m not a very loud reader myself. But as I think about what to write, it couldn’t hurt to have some ideas of the kind of posts that readers find most helpful. What would you like to read more about? Which posts do you just skip over? What can I do to improve the quality of posts? Are there topics I don’t write enough about? Topics I write about too much? In short, what would make this a better blog? No need to pull punches.

If you have the time to spare, drop me a comment below or send me an email — LMSacasas at gmail dot com.

And of course, for whatever reason you do so, thanks for reading!

Embodied Art

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Annie Dillard on the embodied nature of art:

“The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, ‘It is only the trade entering his body.’ The art must enter the body, too. A painter cannot use paint like glue or screws to fasten down the world. The tubes of paint are like fingers; they work only if, inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, part of the brain changes physical shape to accommodate and fit paint.

You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of a paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint.”

“It is only the trade entering his body.” Love that.

From The Writing Life.

The Book That Began My Love Affair With Reading

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I was, throughout childhood and adolescence, not much of a reader. I did not exactly dislike books; from time to time I would flip through them, particularly books on history and space. But there was no love there. Throughout four years of high school English, Honors mind you, I managed A’s without actually fully reading a single book. There was one exception, The Count of Monte Cristo, which I did read with great pleasure, but this exception did not break the rule. During my first year or so of college, my reading habits remained more or less the same. I read to access knowledge, or merely data I’m now tempted to say, but not for pleasure. It was a rather mercenary and joyless  affair.

Sometime during my sophomore year of college, all of this changed and it did so because of one book. I found myself wandering the aisle of a large bookstore, Barnes & Noble most likely, and I decided on a whim that I would buy a book.  Enjoying American history as I did, I made my way to the History section, and for reasons that escape me, I picked up a 1,100 page tome on the life of Harry Truman. I’m sure at the time I had no sense of what would be the enduring significance of that purchase. It would sound melodramatic if I said the book changed my life, but it is arguably true.

David McCullough’s Truman transformed my mercenary sort of reading into a labor of love and it did so largely by immersing me in a fascinating story, remarkably well told. I enjoyed every bit of the nearly three and a half pound book. I was fascinated by Truman and his times which, through McCulllough’s prose, now seemed to come alive. McCullough had captured the man and his era through the stories he wove together page after page. It was a magnificent literary work, well deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it garnered, and it primed me for a lifetime of reading.

Those who have read any of McCullough’s work on topics ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, to the childhood of Theodore Roosevelt and the life of John Adams, and most recently to the story of Americans in Paris in the nineteenth century, know that he is a gifted storyteller above all. I knew also — from listening to McCullough’s narration of Ken Burns’ Civil War and from recordings of lectures that I had stumbled across from time to time — that his story telling gift was not confined to the written page. And so I was delighted to discover that he would be delivering a public lecture at a local college.

McCoullough did not disappoint. He effortlessly and artfully wove one captivating vignette after another into a compelling brief for the value of history, education, and hard work. His distinct cadence and intonation simultaneously infused gravity, passion, and joy into crisp, clear, vivid sentences that built one upon the other to create anecdotes that always hit their mark and memorably so.

With logic that rang experientially true to me, he explained that students, above all, register the teacher’s attitude, which means that teachers must love their subject; and to love it they must know it, really know it. Enough with the methods courses he seemed to say. He told us about teachers in his own life and teachers in the American past that transformed lives through their passion. The great nineteenth century Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, for example, who again and again urged his students to look at their fish. And he reminded us of Charles Sumner who, while visiting France, observed blacks and whites learning together in a classroom and who, coming back to America, became one of the leading voices of abolition and was infamously beaten near death for his convictions — all of it because of what he saw in a classroom.

McCullough’s praise for teachers was matched by his gentlemanly restrained frustration with contemporary politicians and popular culture. Harry Truman read Latin for pleasure. Adams and Jefferson, having put old enmities aside, passed their long retirements in sustained correspondence discussing ideas and history and the details of Greek translation. Stop talking about sports and television he urged, playing the self-avowed crank. We too must talk of history and ideas. Revive dinner table conversation. And revive the ideal of work. Commercial society, he said, has promoted the false equation of ease and happiness. In truth, happiness more often accompanies hard work. Every one of his subjects was happiest when they were working the hardest and overcoming adversity. But none of them did it on their own; there are no self-made men he told us more than once.

And time, we should remember, watches over all of us. In a story that fits well with the themes of this blog he explained that he disliked digital watches because they only ever told you what time it was in the present. Analog watches bore testimony to time past and time future. In the old House of Representatives congressmen could check the time on a clock that hung over the door of the chamber, and when they did, they also would see a statue of Cleo, goddess of history, in the act of writing on her scroll. When they looked at the clock, the congressmen would be reminded that there was another time, historical time, by which they would be judged.

McCullough fits his own description of the best sort of teacher. He is unabashedly passionate about his subjects and his passion is of the infectious sort. This passion leapt from the pages of Truman into my own mind and heart many years ago and for that I owe McCullough a great deal, more perhaps than even I realize.

About John Adams, McCullough wrote that he went to Harvard and there discovered books and read forever. I was very pleased to tell him last night that Truman had been my Harvard.

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You can listen to David McCullough lecture on his latest book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, at the Library of Congress here.

Weekend Reading, 10/16/11

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A little late, but it’s technically still the weekend right?

Here are a couple of pieces on the history of the Internet, or at least facets of Internet related technology, from Ars Technica:

“Cutting the Cord: How the World’s Engineers Built Wi-Fi” by Iljitsch van Beijnum and Jaume Barcelo. It gets a bit technical, but I’m not sure how that could be avoided in telling this story.

and

“Before Netscape: The Forgotten Browsers of the 1990s” by Matthew Lasar: Before Netscape? How many people even remember Netscape? Interesting retrospective complete with screenshots.

“The Grand Map” by Avi Steinberg at Paris Review: You’ve probably heard about the driverless cars that Google deploys to gather street-view images for Google Maps, some of you may even have seen one. But what else do these indiscriminate eyes gather into their field of vision? Quite a bit, and a good deal of it is decidedly not pleasant. Fascinating, but be advised some images lean toward disturbing.

“The Consequences of Writing Without Reading” by Buzz Poole at Imprint. Title pretty much describes the piece. Nice reflection on the reading, writing, and solitude in a media-rich age in which solitude is viewed as a punishment of sorts. “Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to use your imagination without wanting to know how.”

And finally, a couple of Infographics:

“7 Disruptive Innovations that Turned Markets Upside Down” from the folks at Mashable: Borders on providing a bit too much information, but otherwise an interesting, compact take on Google, Netflix, Pandora, and four others.

“Google and Your Memory” from the staff writers at Online Colleges. A representative of Online Colleges emailed me about their well-conceived and balanced info-graphic after coming across my recent post, “Don’t Offload Your Memory Quite Yet.” Take a look.

Weekend Reading, 9/16/2011

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A little bit of politics, religion, parenting, plagiarism … you know, all the stuff you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table.  Plus one surprise for you at the end. Hope you have a lovely weekend.

“Pew’s Must See Picture of US Politics” by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative: Dreher provides an overview of the recently released Pew Center Political Typology Report, its first since 2005. Some interesting, counter-intuitive findings. Follow his link to the Pew page and you can take the survey to find out where you are in the Pew Typology.

“Varieties of irreligious experience” by Jonathan Rée in New Humanist: “The dividing lines between religiosity and secularism, or between belief and disenchantment, are not getting any clearer as time goes by, and if there has been a lot of traffic travelling from the camp of religion to the camp of disbelief in the past couple of centuries, it has followed many different paths, and is bound for many different destinations.” Well written piece in a Jamesian key on the subtleties of dis-belief in traditional religion.

“The Evolution of Data Products” by Mike Loukides at O’Reilly Radar: Helpful piece on the evolution and future trajectory of data and data products. “Data products are striving for the same goal: consumers don’t want to, or need to, be aware that they are using data. When we achieve that, when data products have the richness of data without calling attention to themselves as data, we’ll be ready for the next revolution.”

“What if the Secret to Success is Failure” by Paul Tough at the NY Times Magazine: Longish piece on efforts to instill character education in schools. “This push on tests is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.” “Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents.”

“Uncreative Writing” by Kenneth Goldsmith at the The Chronicle of Higher Ed: Be warned, this piece may make you angry. Author argues the virtues of plagiarism claiming that writing must adjust to the conditions brought about by the computer, although there is a trajectory leading to this moment that pre-dates the computer. Some interesting points — it’s not a “crazy” piece — but my response is mixed.

And, last but not least, an impressive and surprising rendition of the national anthem from someone you wouldn’t have guessed could pull it off: watch it here.

Writing Cannot Be Taught, But It Can Be Learned

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Serendipitously, I encountered two book reviews yesterday containing very sound advice on the art of writing.  I expected as much out of the first review in which Joseph Epstein, whose prose I’ve long admired, politely begs to differ with Stanley Fish on how one ought to go about the process of writing well.  The second piece, a review of two books on higher education by Louis Menand, himself a more than competent stylist, offered its comments on writing incidentally to its main point.  I took both to be very near the truth of the matter.

Epstein opens his review of Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence with the following  observations:

After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping. A. J. Liebling offers a complementary view, more concise and stripped of paradox, which runs: “The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.”

Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed? Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.

A bit further into the review he adds:

First day of class I used to tell students that I could not teach them to be observant, to love language, to acquire a sense of drama, to be critical of their own work, or almost anything else of significance that comprises the dear little demanding art of putting proper words in their proper places. I didn’t bring it up, lest I discourage them completely, but I certainly could not help them to gain either character or an interesting point of view. All I could do, really, was point out their mistakes, and, as someone who had read much more than they, show them several possibilities about deploying words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, of which they might have been not have been aware. Hence the Zenish koan with which I began: writing cannot be taught, but it can be learned.

In “Live and Learn:  Why We Have College”, Louis Menand reviews two recent books on the state of higher education and along the way offers his own well-considered thoughts  on the subject.  One of the two books, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic (which began its life as an article in The Atlantic)  contained, in Menand’s estimation, sound thoughts on writing:

When he is not taking on trends in modern thought, Professor X is shrewd about the reasons it’s hard to teach underprepared students how to write. “I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.” This makes sense. If you read a lot of sentences, then you start to think in sentences, and if you think in sentences, then you can write sentences, because you know what a sentence sounds like. Someone who has reached the age of eighteen or twenty and has never been a reader is not going to become a writer in fifteen weeks.

For Menand and Epstein, the secret, if there is one, of good writing appears to be attentive reading, and a lot of it.

My Year, More or Less, in Blogging

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It’s not precisely one year on two counts.  To begin with, The Frailest Thing existed in its first iteration as early as September 2009.  I was then a true rookie blogger and working on another platform which shall remain nameless (rhymes with Frogger).  That effort never quite got off the ground.  By June 2010, however, I was ready to try again, and that is when the present version was launched.  Secondly, the first post on this site was published on June 2, so we are actually at a year and a few days.  Nonetheless, being a glutton for nostalgia, I’ve decided to take a retrospective glance back at the past year on the blog.  I realize this will likely be of little interest to anyone but myself, but here it is anyway.

First, some highlights:

The Most Viewed Post:   The Cost of Distraction:  What Kurt Vonnegut Knew

A look at the downside of digital distraction through the lens of Harrison Bergeron, this post was featured on Freshly Pressed over a weekend last August and garnered  not only the most hits on record, but also the most comments.

Runner Up:  Is Sport a Religion?  My first post to be featured on Freshly Pressed was inspired by the World Cup.  At the time, still relatively new to WordPress, I was unaware of the Freshly Pressed feature.  It was a fun surprise.

The Most Viewed Post (Without the Help of Freshly Pressed):  Gods of Love and War

A reflection on technology through the myth of Hephaestus, the lame Greek god of metallurgy.  You’d be surprised how many people search for Hephaestus.

Runner Up: Life Amid the Ruins.  A lot of people search for Vanitas Art as well.

The Most Thoughtful Comments: PerpetuallyFrank

Not that all who comment are not always thoughtful (clearing throat), but I must express my appreciation for the frequent and engaging comments provided by PerpetuallyFrank.  Cheers!

Thanks as well, of course, to all who comment including to those friends who I know will at least read out of some sense of fraternal obligation, but have also generously plugged this blog (Messrs. Ridenhour, Fridsma, Greenwald, and Garcia, for example, among others).

The Most Intriguing Comment Thread: Agitate For Beauty

The aforementioned PerpetuallyFrank and my colleague Chris Friend engaged in a very intriguing exchange on the subject of telepathy.  Go read it for yourself.

The Best Compliment:  Tom Fox

“I have to tell you, Michael, you are one of the best writers I’ve never heard of before. Please take it as a compliment.”  I did. On When Words and Action Part Company.

The Links I’ve Appreciated:  Tie

Thanks to Adam Thierer at The Technology Liberation Front for mentioning me in the same breath as Peggy Noonan and to McLuhan Galaxy for re-posting McLuhan, Chesterton, and the Pursuit of Joy.

In fact, many thanks to all of you who have seen fit to link back here and list The Frailest Thing on your blog rolls.

The Most Underrated Post (By Which I Mean the Post I Rather Liked That Got Relatively Little Traffic):  Tie

Reinvigorating Friendship

Shared Sensibilities

That Was Teaching

It’s not too late, they’re out there, just waiting to be read.

The Most Frequent Search Term Leading Here: “Don Draper” and some variation on Martha Nussbaum

The former presumably leading to Don Draper on Prozac and the latter to The Ends of Learning

The Oddest Search Term Leading Here:  Unmentionable (at least on a classy blog such as this!)

I guess that’s what happens when you have a post titled Gods of Love and War in which you refer to the sordid sex lives of the Greek gods.

Moving on, it is always a bit of a surprise when the author of some piece I’ve blogged about drops a comment.  This has happened on a few occasions, and has usually been positive.  So my thanks to following for dropping in.

Linda Stone and Adam Thierer on Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World

Mark D. Bowles on Warning:  A Liberal Education Leads to Independent Thinking

Steve Myers on Finding Digital White Space in a World with 50 Billion Connected Devices

Arikia Millikan on “The Storm is What We Call Progress”

Tom Scocca on Obama Talks with a Computer

Elizabeth Drescher  on Multitasking Monks

And finally, some thoughts.

Some one must have come up with a law of writing whereby the ease of composition varies inversely to the obscurity of the audience.  If not, there it is.  Writing a letter (I know, who am I kidding, just fill in whatever — email, text, etc.) to someone you know:  generally easy.  Writing a blog post to whoever happens to read it:  less so.  It probably doesn’t help matters that I tend to be introspective, perhaps to a fault (case in point).

Writing in a more public venue, however, has forced me to be a little more rigorous with the writing and thinking.  I realize that this is still a rather informal space, but someone may read what I am writing and that generates a sense of responsibility to the reader.  If someone is going to invest a few minutes to read a post (as you are presumably doing right now) I owe it to them to avoid careless or confusing writing.  And besides, on a more self-interested note, no one wants to come off as an idiot when they write something others will read.

As far as the content, the first two or three months featured a wider variety of topics than what I end up posting these days.  Not surprisingly my own context ends up guiding a good deal of the writing process.  I am a  graduate student and so there is a certain compulsion toward writing about what I am reading which tends to revolve around technology, writing and reading, and, lately, memory.  Perhaps I’ll try to expand the scope a bit moving forward.  I’m torn between finding a niche and falling into a rut.  Hopefully, there’s a nice middle ground between the two.

I have also been a teacher for over ten years, s0 on here I hope to make much of what I read in an academic context a little more accessible, which is not to say that I aim to dumb it down.  Ideally, I imagine that there is this broad and generous space between the arcane and the simplistic.  That’s the target area I’m aiming for.

Feel free, of course, to let me know how well I’m managing that!

Cheers, and thanks for reading.  I think I’ll give this a go for another year.