Reading and Writing in The Age of Sand

From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan's wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. Smith's work has remained in archives until now. The Jazz Loft Project is dedicated to uncovering the stories behind this legendary moment in American cultural history.

The exhibition evokes the jazz loft through more than 200 images, several hours of audio, and 16mm film footage of Smith working in the loft. Setting the scene are Smith’s gritty photographs of the loft and his pictures of the flower district below his fourth-floor loft window. Viewed alongside his master prints, Smith’s 5x7-inch work prints further indicate the breadth and depth of the loft story. Listening stations give access to remastered selections from Smith’s reel-to-reel tapes, which caught everything from rousing jam sessions to historic radio and TV broadcasts, loft conversations, and street noise. Concerts and other programming will supplement the exhibition experience.

Posting this as much a reminder to myself as anything, this is an exhibit at the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts through May, 22nd, then traveling.

Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.

The lesson? There’s value in obscurity.

In my house we have so much crap - toys, books, arts and crafts, etc - that we now have to devote time and money (to buy boxes, shelves) to handling all the stuff.

Participants in social media now have to devote a certain amount of time and energy to figuring out what to do with all the apps and sites and information. And what's more, a large part of social media now is basically spam from all your friends: links to a really interesting article, a new event, links to your blog post (this one will automatically hit twitter, like most people's these days - a blog post doesn't exist unless its tweeted and it's not good unless its re-tweeted).

As I mention in my Posterous profile in the sidebar, this site (Chekhov's Mistress/BudParr.com, i.e. my personal site) is going through an upheaval, so this is an issue I'm thinking about as I do that. Do I go along with the flow, or shoot for obscurity. Do I pick a topic and stay with it, do I write about what comes to mind?

I think what I'm searching for here is a way to get back to the conversations that we had several years ago solely through blogs and email. I still know a lot of the people from those days, but the conversations have gotten bigger, there are so many more sites, for many the stakes are much higher. I don't feel* very much apart of it and have very little interest in getting involved in one of many projects going on (although infinite summer and the 2666 reading are very much like what we did with gaddis drinking club and 400 windmills and these new iterations have been tempting).

I also want to get back to thinking in the blog format. I think there are enough people filtering. I used to write somewhat long posts that required a lot of thought. That's not possible now for a variety of reasons. What I am thinking about is taking several themes or topics and exploring them through an ongoing set of posts. Sometimes that may be a book, a theme or a particular topic. That's not terribly new, but it presents a different way of thinking for me. I've long thought that the blog was a great notebook, but notebooks really shouldn't be shared - so frankly I'm not sure how to do that in a way that's readable. I've seen lots of attempts, but none terribly successful. I'm also wondering if those themes should be done on one site or completely separate sites. With Posterous that's easy, or I could do it on my own. It doesn't really matter any longer how many sites you have.

* "feel" sounds whiny and complaining. It's not that, really just lack of direction.

A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger.

I have no idea when exactly this essay by Rebecca West was written, but it should suffice to say that it was many years before the Snark Wars of '03-04 and before the blogs won over the hearts and mind of the critical establishment.

You can guess what she would say today, but I can only imagine she wouldn't deign to give the matter much thought, brushing off the noise of the internet, thinking that no one was left who cared.

But it brings to mind an important aspect of writing online - that is the fact that nothing that is written is in a vacuum. In Ms. West's day, even if writing in a well known publication, opportunities for discussion and rebuttal were limited.

Now of course the opposite is true and for people who are serious in any way about criticism the people who they write about may very well be their technological next door neighbor, releasing their fury (as we saw with two recent incidents), or rebutting the very next moment after something is published, either in their own space, comments, or some other venue.

It's an interesting dynamic, one that I would hope would make people more thoughtful, but that's still not always the case, particularly with the wild variety of backgrounds, temperaments and time constraints of all of us writing online.

I think as I get older I am more susceptible to being a harsher critic. Partly that's from writing and blogging for a while - I "think" it made me think better - and partly from exposure to more literature, whereas a decade ago my reading was confined to a much more safe class of literature.

I recently read a book by Alejandro Zambra. There was much to recommend about the book (and the fact that this Chilean writer was even published here made him still a relatively safe bet having been through the gauntlet of two markets), but the flaws in the book made me angry when reading it. I haven't written about it yet because the onus of writing critically is much more difficult than cheer-leading. I know the publisher of that book, both online and offline, but even if I didn't, I know that what I write may very well be read by them. Whether or not they care is another matter, but is influenced by not only by the venue it's written in, but how thoughtfully or valid the writing is.

But still, there's the question that should I just not write about something if I don't have the time to be thoughtful? The literary world of Ms. West was much smaller. For whatever its flaws, Zambra's book is likely better than 9/10s of the books being published today. Shouldn't I promote that book, being enthusiastic about literature in translation or good literature in general in a world that always seems to be losing out to the cultural black hole? Well these are the thoughts her article dredged up in my mind.