DA Adnkronos) - Nel 2011 lo scrittore inglese Ted Hughes (1930-1998) avra' un posto d'onore permamente nel Poets' Corner dell'abbazia di Westminster a Londra. Come ex ''poeta laureato'' del Regno Unito, per volere della sovrana Elisabetta II, e come lirico che evocava nei suoi versi il mondo naturale, Hughes e' stato a lungo celebrato come uno dei grandi poeti del suo tempo. Una campagna di intellettuali ed artisti, conclusasi con successo, ha fatto di Hughes un ''letterato immortale'', tanto da meritarsi una targa alla memoria tra i grandi scrittori britannici commemorati a Westminster nell'''angolo dei poeti''.
sabato 27 marzo 2010
Ted Hughes riposera' accanto a Shakespeare ed Eliot a Westminster
DA Adnkronos) - Nel 2011 lo scrittore inglese Ted Hughes (1930-1998) avra' un posto d'onore permamente nel Poets' Corner dell'abbazia di Westminster a Londra. Come ex ''poeta laureato'' del Regno Unito, per volere della sovrana Elisabetta II, e come lirico che evocava nei suoi versi il mondo naturale, Hughes e' stato a lungo celebrato come uno dei grandi poeti del suo tempo. Una campagna di intellettuali ed artisti, conclusasi con successo, ha fatto di Hughes un ''letterato immortale'', tanto da meritarsi una targa alla memoria tra i grandi scrittori britannici commemorati a Westminster nell'''angolo dei poeti''.
Mexico's Fuentes criticizes ban of his novel in PR
Mexico's Fuentes criticizes ban of his novel in PR
DA AP
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — One of Latin America's most prominent contemporary writers accepted an honorary doctorate Friday on this island where the government recently banned his novel from public high schools.
Carlos Fuentes called dropping "Aura" from the curriculum an arbitrary decision that amounted to an "antidemocratic, anticultural" act.
He spoke to reporters briefly before addressing dozens of professors and students at the University of Puerto Rico.
The author of "The Death of Artemio Cruz" and "The Old Gringo" said that even at age 81, he is still working on several books — including one about Colombian guerrillas that he struggles with because current events constantly render it outdated.
Fuentes also urged journalists not to wait until they encounter a totalitarian government to defend freedom of the press.
"We take it for granted," he said.
His visit comes six months after Puerto Rico's education secretary announced a ban on five books — including "Aura" — because of "coarse" language.
Fuentes said that while he has a certain responsibility as a writer to speak out against injustices, it is not his main job.
"A writer's responsibility lies with language, to maintain the vitality of language," he said.
DA AP
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — One of Latin America's most prominent contemporary writers accepted an honorary doctorate Friday on this island where the government recently banned his novel from public high schools.
Carlos Fuentes called dropping "Aura" from the curriculum an arbitrary decision that amounted to an "antidemocratic, anticultural" act.
He spoke to reporters briefly before addressing dozens of professors and students at the University of Puerto Rico.
The author of "The Death of Artemio Cruz" and "The Old Gringo" said that even at age 81, he is still working on several books — including one about Colombian guerrillas that he struggles with because current events constantly render it outdated.
Fuentes also urged journalists not to wait until they encounter a totalitarian government to defend freedom of the press.
"We take it for granted," he said.
His visit comes six months after Puerto Rico's education secretary announced a ban on five books — including "Aura" — because of "coarse" language.
Fuentes said that while he has a certain responsibility as a writer to speak out against injustices, it is not his main job.
"A writer's responsibility lies with language, to maintain the vitality of language," he said.
venerdì 26 marzo 2010
FLIGHTS OF ANGELS
DA THE INDEPENDENT
Flights of angels on the shelf: The literary revival of heavenly creatures
As Danielle Trussoni's thriller 'Angelology' lands to compete with Dan Brown, Peter Stanford looks at the literary revival of heavenly creatures – and the authors who claim to know them
Angelology is, as Joad Raymond points out at the start of Milton's Angels (Oxford, £30), a fairly ill-defined discipline, if indeed it counts as an academic discipline at all. Even the word is disputed. In the early modern period that Raymond chronicles in his study of the influence on Protestants of Milton's use of angels as narrators in Paradise Lost, they preferred angelomachy, angelographia or angelocracy. The earliest reference he can find in English to angelology comes in a 1663 philosophical book by Gideon Harvey who describes the three, apparently equally important disciplines of theology, psychology and angelology.
If the first two of that trinity have utterly eclipsed the third in the intervening centuries, then angelology seems to be making a come-back despite our secular, sceptical and scientific times. There have, of course, been other revivals. The Victorians were keen on angels to decorate their Christmas cards, the Pre-Raphaelites warmed to their beauty, and in the early 1990s a plague of cherubim infested calendars and candle-holders.
But this time round the manifestation is literary - or, to be more precise, in books. At the head, making as dramatic an entrance as the magnificent winged creatures it features in such abundance, is Danielle Trussoni's much-hyped and Will Smith-optioned blockbuster novel, Angelology (Michael Joseph, £12.99).
Trussoni – whose 2006 memoir Falling Through the Earth won plaudits in her native America – claims to have stumbled on angels by accident (or divine design?) after her marriage to Bulgarian writer Nikolai Grozni. He took her to the Devil's Throat Gorge in the Rhodope Mountains of his homeland, a place steeped in colourful legends of angel activity.
That, at least, is the romantic account she gives of how Angelology came about. A more pragmatic view might be to see it as the latest attempt to out-Dan Brown Dan Brown and produce a mass-market thriller based on a religious mystery. The Brown recipe is as simple as it is elusive. Pick an obscure but potentially sensational area on the margins of theological speculation, present it as wholly mainstream but obscured by the machinations of wicked clerics with something to hide, and then weave it into a complicated plot heavy on mystery and suspense.
Brown lighted on the Holy Grail legend; Trussoni hits on angels. The result is an entertaining page-turner that pivots on a stray, mind-boggling reference in chapter six of the Book of Genesis to the fallen angels, kicked out of heaven for anti-social behaviour and ambition. They descend to earth, mix with human women and create a race of giants, the Nephilim. Indeed, Angelology might just as easily be called Nepihilim, but that doesn't quite have the same ring.
Trussoni conjures up the descendants of the Old Testament Nephilim as a malign presence at the heart of modern society. The only reason we haven't heard of them is because their magnificent wings are handily able to retract into their bodies to avoid detection. It is only when cloistered with others of their kind in their gilded apartments plotting evil, self-serving deeds that they give them a flap.
In the other corner in this fight for the future of the planet is a militant band of angelologists. They bear a passing resemblance to the angelologists Gideon Harvey knew, spending part of their time in ivory towers studying the minutiae of their subject. But they also have a crusader side, taking the fight to their opponents and risking life and limb.
Trussoni's debt to Harry Potter is clear. Those who dismiss angels as nothing more than pretty pictures are the equivalent of the Muggles in JK Rowling's novels who think that magic stretches no further than Paul Daniels and Tommy Cooper. This overlap highlights the endearingly childlike quality of the novel. Yes, the violence and the suspense are, I suppose, meant for grown-ups, but the overall conceit is better suited to an imaginative 12-year-old keen on Doctor Who.
Trussoni may, however, be missing a trick, for a glance at the Mind, Body and Spirit section of any bookshop chain confirms that a different, decidedly 21st-century take on angelology is all the rage. Most will boast an "Angels" shelf overflowing with self-help therapy books. Their twist is to couch their mundane message of empowerment in terms of the traditional image of guardian angels, mystical creatures who descend from on high to watch over and encourage us in times of trial.
Doyenne of this comfort-blanket school of angelology is the American author Doreen Virtue, who describes herself as a clairvoyant and "fourth-generation metaphysician who works with the... ascended-master realms". I'm presuming the surname is made up, virtues being one of the ranks of celestial hierarchy in the time-honoured Christian calibration of angels, coming halfway between seraphim and principalities.
How To Hear Your Angels (Hay House, £6.99) and Daily Guidance from Your Angels (Hay House, £12.99) are the latest volumes to feature Virtue's trademark (and I mean legal trademark) philosophy – "angel therapy". This is "a non-demoninational spiritual healing method... to heal and harmonize every aspect of life". If others are prohibited from using the phrase, they do offer the same formula. Cassandra Eason, in Your Angel is Waiting to Help (Quantum, £8.99), stirs into the brew extra ingredients of witchcraft and magic, while self-styled "angel consultant" Jenny Smedley (Angel Whispers: Get Close to Your Angels; Hay House, £8.99) veers towards the spiritualist end of the spectrum with her expertise in "past lives". Her angels can reconnect you with previous incarnations and dead relatives.
These angel books all encapsulate a kind of religion-lite, well-suited to credit-crunched times when pollsters report that many, disillusioned by the promises of consumerism, are seeking a new, reassuring philosophy of life. Traditionally, organised religion would have been the obvious answer, but its denominations and creeds have been getting a bad press of late, and moreover require thorough-going commitment and membership of a structured organisation. They also include in their all-embracing worldview challenging beliefs about self-sacrifice, loving your neighbour and working for justice. Modern angelology, by contrast, is suited to the flaky, the busy and the dabblers. It is short on demands, all but silent on our obligations to others, and instead pedals an a la carte, feel-good philosophy cherry-picked from a variety of religious traditions and bolted on to the benign Christian picture of angels.
There is one notable exception. Lorna Byrne is a different sort of angelologist altogether. Her book Angels in My Hair (Arrow, £6.99) has been a huge word-of-mouth best-seller first in her native Ireland, then in Britain. It has now been published in 20 languages and conquered the mighty US market. It describes in simple, unadorned language how she has been able to see and communicate with angels for as long as she can remember.
I met Byrne, a 54-year-old mother-of-four from Co Kildare, when the book first came out. My instinct was to dismiss her as just another self-help author, cloaking herself in the latest fad of angels, but there is nothing cynical or self-seeking about her. When she described seeing a "spiral of light" behind each individual, their very own guardian angel, it sounded as if she was describing a long-forgotten Old Master painting or a scene from director Wim Wenders's 1987 flight of fancy, Wings of Desire, where gentle, trench-coated angels minister to war-scarred Berliners. "I live in a parallel world," she explained, "between spirit world and human world". In traditional Christian terms that would make her a mystic.
Indeed, down the ages, it has tended to be mystics who have developed the cult of angels. The institutional church always has done its best to discourage both. It distrusted mystics for many of the same reasons we now distrust the new breed of angelologists. We think they are either mad or manipulative.
But mystics always had a popular following, people convinced by their sincerity, in the flesh or in their writings, and willing to believe the apparently incredible things they described. That same quality seems to be at play now with Byrne. Those who read her or hear her are drawn to her, to her serenity and hence to her beguiling promise that, whether we know it or not, we each have an angel. Her follow-up, Stairways to Heaven, is published in September.
Each of these varieties of angelology requires some sort of suspension of logic and reason, which is fine for the 40 per cent of Britons who claim to believe in angels, but excludes the rest. There is, however, an angel book for them - David Albert Jones's Angels: A History (Oxford, £10.99). An academic in the school of theology, philosophy, and history (not angelology) at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, Jones offers a colourful and comprehensive historical overview of our fascination with angels. He asks not whether they exist but why people have wanted them to, and how that desire has manifested itself from the image of angels dancing on pin-heads and their supposedly distinctive aroma to exactly where those harps came from. Jones's prose may be a little dry, and he has taken out no trademarks on his ideas, but as a guide to the celestial realms, I would put my faith in him any day.
Peter Stanford's book 'The Extra Mile: a 21st- century pilgrimage' is published this month by Continuum
As Danielle Trussoni's thriller 'Angelology' lands to compete with Dan Brown, Peter Stanford looks at the literary revival of heavenly creatures – and the authors who claim to know them
Angelology is, as Joad Raymond points out at the start of Milton's Angels (Oxford, £30), a fairly ill-defined discipline, if indeed it counts as an academic discipline at all. Even the word is disputed. In the early modern period that Raymond chronicles in his study of the influence on Protestants of Milton's use of angels as narrators in Paradise Lost, they preferred angelomachy, angelographia or angelocracy. The earliest reference he can find in English to angelology comes in a 1663 philosophical book by Gideon Harvey who describes the three, apparently equally important disciplines of theology, psychology and angelology.
If the first two of that trinity have utterly eclipsed the third in the intervening centuries, then angelology seems to be making a come-back despite our secular, sceptical and scientific times. There have, of course, been other revivals. The Victorians were keen on angels to decorate their Christmas cards, the Pre-Raphaelites warmed to their beauty, and in the early 1990s a plague of cherubim infested calendars and candle-holders.
But this time round the manifestation is literary - or, to be more precise, in books. At the head, making as dramatic an entrance as the magnificent winged creatures it features in such abundance, is Danielle Trussoni's much-hyped and Will Smith-optioned blockbuster novel, Angelology (Michael Joseph, £12.99).
Trussoni – whose 2006 memoir Falling Through the Earth won plaudits in her native America – claims to have stumbled on angels by accident (or divine design?) after her marriage to Bulgarian writer Nikolai Grozni. He took her to the Devil's Throat Gorge in the Rhodope Mountains of his homeland, a place steeped in colourful legends of angel activity.
That, at least, is the romantic account she gives of how Angelology came about. A more pragmatic view might be to see it as the latest attempt to out-Dan Brown Dan Brown and produce a mass-market thriller based on a religious mystery. The Brown recipe is as simple as it is elusive. Pick an obscure but potentially sensational area on the margins of theological speculation, present it as wholly mainstream but obscured by the machinations of wicked clerics with something to hide, and then weave it into a complicated plot heavy on mystery and suspense.
Brown lighted on the Holy Grail legend; Trussoni hits on angels. The result is an entertaining page-turner that pivots on a stray, mind-boggling reference in chapter six of the Book of Genesis to the fallen angels, kicked out of heaven for anti-social behaviour and ambition. They descend to earth, mix with human women and create a race of giants, the Nephilim. Indeed, Angelology might just as easily be called Nepihilim, but that doesn't quite have the same ring.
Trussoni conjures up the descendants of the Old Testament Nephilim as a malign presence at the heart of modern society. The only reason we haven't heard of them is because their magnificent wings are handily able to retract into their bodies to avoid detection. It is only when cloistered with others of their kind in their gilded apartments plotting evil, self-serving deeds that they give them a flap.
In the other corner in this fight for the future of the planet is a militant band of angelologists. They bear a passing resemblance to the angelologists Gideon Harvey knew, spending part of their time in ivory towers studying the minutiae of their subject. But they also have a crusader side, taking the fight to their opponents and risking life and limb.
Trussoni's debt to Harry Potter is clear. Those who dismiss angels as nothing more than pretty pictures are the equivalent of the Muggles in JK Rowling's novels who think that magic stretches no further than Paul Daniels and Tommy Cooper. This overlap highlights the endearingly childlike quality of the novel. Yes, the violence and the suspense are, I suppose, meant for grown-ups, but the overall conceit is better suited to an imaginative 12-year-old keen on Doctor Who.
Trussoni may, however, be missing a trick, for a glance at the Mind, Body and Spirit section of any bookshop chain confirms that a different, decidedly 21st-century take on angelology is all the rage. Most will boast an "Angels" shelf overflowing with self-help therapy books. Their twist is to couch their mundane message of empowerment in terms of the traditional image of guardian angels, mystical creatures who descend from on high to watch over and encourage us in times of trial.
Doyenne of this comfort-blanket school of angelology is the American author Doreen Virtue, who describes herself as a clairvoyant and "fourth-generation metaphysician who works with the... ascended-master realms". I'm presuming the surname is made up, virtues being one of the ranks of celestial hierarchy in the time-honoured Christian calibration of angels, coming halfway between seraphim and principalities.
How To Hear Your Angels (Hay House, £6.99) and Daily Guidance from Your Angels (Hay House, £12.99) are the latest volumes to feature Virtue's trademark (and I mean legal trademark) philosophy – "angel therapy". This is "a non-demoninational spiritual healing method... to heal and harmonize every aspect of life". If others are prohibited from using the phrase, they do offer the same formula. Cassandra Eason, in Your Angel is Waiting to Help (Quantum, £8.99), stirs into the brew extra ingredients of witchcraft and magic, while self-styled "angel consultant" Jenny Smedley (Angel Whispers: Get Close to Your Angels; Hay House, £8.99) veers towards the spiritualist end of the spectrum with her expertise in "past lives". Her angels can reconnect you with previous incarnations and dead relatives.
These angel books all encapsulate a kind of religion-lite, well-suited to credit-crunched times when pollsters report that many, disillusioned by the promises of consumerism, are seeking a new, reassuring philosophy of life. Traditionally, organised religion would have been the obvious answer, but its denominations and creeds have been getting a bad press of late, and moreover require thorough-going commitment and membership of a structured organisation. They also include in their all-embracing worldview challenging beliefs about self-sacrifice, loving your neighbour and working for justice. Modern angelology, by contrast, is suited to the flaky, the busy and the dabblers. It is short on demands, all but silent on our obligations to others, and instead pedals an a la carte, feel-good philosophy cherry-picked from a variety of religious traditions and bolted on to the benign Christian picture of angels.
There is one notable exception. Lorna Byrne is a different sort of angelologist altogether. Her book Angels in My Hair (Arrow, £6.99) has been a huge word-of-mouth best-seller first in her native Ireland, then in Britain. It has now been published in 20 languages and conquered the mighty US market. It describes in simple, unadorned language how she has been able to see and communicate with angels for as long as she can remember.
I met Byrne, a 54-year-old mother-of-four from Co Kildare, when the book first came out. My instinct was to dismiss her as just another self-help author, cloaking herself in the latest fad of angels, but there is nothing cynical or self-seeking about her. When she described seeing a "spiral of light" behind each individual, their very own guardian angel, it sounded as if she was describing a long-forgotten Old Master painting or a scene from director Wim Wenders's 1987 flight of fancy, Wings of Desire, where gentle, trench-coated angels minister to war-scarred Berliners. "I live in a parallel world," she explained, "between spirit world and human world". In traditional Christian terms that would make her a mystic.
Indeed, down the ages, it has tended to be mystics who have developed the cult of angels. The institutional church always has done its best to discourage both. It distrusted mystics for many of the same reasons we now distrust the new breed of angelologists. We think they are either mad or manipulative.
But mystics always had a popular following, people convinced by their sincerity, in the flesh or in their writings, and willing to believe the apparently incredible things they described. That same quality seems to be at play now with Byrne. Those who read her or hear her are drawn to her, to her serenity and hence to her beguiling promise that, whether we know it or not, we each have an angel. Her follow-up, Stairways to Heaven, is published in September.
Each of these varieties of angelology requires some sort of suspension of logic and reason, which is fine for the 40 per cent of Britons who claim to believe in angels, but excludes the rest. There is, however, an angel book for them - David Albert Jones's Angels: A History (Oxford, £10.99). An academic in the school of theology, philosophy, and history (not angelology) at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, Jones offers a colourful and comprehensive historical overview of our fascination with angels. He asks not whether they exist but why people have wanted them to, and how that desire has manifested itself from the image of angels dancing on pin-heads and their supposedly distinctive aroma to exactly where those harps came from. Jones's prose may be a little dry, and he has taken out no trademarks on his ideas, but as a guide to the celestial realms, I would put my faith in him any day.
Peter Stanford's book 'The Extra Mile: a 21st- century pilgrimage' is published this month by Continuum
RIORY PERELMAN
DA THE INDEPENDENT
Shy maths genius leaves million dollar prize money on the table
Russian recluse holed up in apartment urged to give unclaimed reward to charity
By Archie Bland
On the outskirts of St Petersburg among the dreary high-rises of the Kupchino district, lives one of the world's greatest mathematical geniuses in a tiny apartment that neighbours say is infested with cockroaches. But Grigory Perelman, 43, is no longer very interested in maths.
He has turned down jobs at several Ivy League universities, declared himself retired and done everything he can to avoid the limelight – most remarkably in 2006 by refusing mathematics' highest honour, the Fields Medal, for his work in solving a problem that had baffled extraordinary minds for 99 years.
This week Dr Perelman, a virtual recluse, was awarded the Clay Mathematical Institute's $1m Millennium Prize for his work. But he has refused to say whether he will accept the honour. "He replied that he needed to think about it," says James Carlson, president of the Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But the indecision that Dr Perelman may have hoped would make the world go away seems to have had the opposite effect – and he has come under fire from Russian charities who have urged him to take the money and give it to them. The Warm Home charity in St Petersburg has urged him to donate it to good causes across Russia, while the city's Communists have suggested they could use it to maintain Lenin's tomb in Red Square.
Journalists have this week been hammering on the door of his apartment. But as Dr Perelman resists the insistent overtures of the outside world, he may reflect that if he had hoped to avoid the public eye, he might have been better off taking the money.
Dr Perelman has always been an outsider. When he worked in the US, colleagues noted that his fingernails were several inches long, and that he lived on a diet of only bread, cheese, and milk. At the age of six, when most children are singing nursery rhymes, he was a lover of opera.
"He is someone who sees the world a little bit in black and white," says Marcus Du Sautoy, Oxford University's Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. "He doesn't really go for greys."
Dr Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture – a problem to do with the structure of three-dimensional shapes – in 2002, and sent his work to a group of scholars who had not heard from him in years.
The solution was so brief, and yet so complex, that it took his peers years to verify that it worked.
The $1m prize would be swiftly accepted by most mathematicians. But Dr Perelman, who turned down prestigious jobs in the US in favour of a $100 a month position in St Petersburg, sees things differently.
"I have all I want," he is said to have shouted, from behind a closed door, to a Daily Mail reporter this week. Meanwhile, his elderly mother, also from behind the door, was blunt with the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper: "We don't want to talk to anyone," she said. "Don't ask us any questions about the award."
Few people claim to fully understand Dr Perelman's rationale, but most agree that it has something to do with his perception of the moral failings of his peers. In 2006, a Chinese mathematician, Shing-Tung Yau, who also worked on the Poincaré conjecture, said that many of Dr Perelman's ideas were only "sketched or outlined", in a statement that many viewed as a shocking act of egoism. And Dr Perelman had fallen out with colleagues long before that.
In a rare interview, Dr Perelman once told The New Yorker that the mathematical community's ethics dismayed him: "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens," he said. "It is people like me who are isolated ... there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists."
Whatever the truth, those mathematicians long for the chance to welcome him back to the fold. "It's very, very curious," said Professor Du Sautoy. "We all want to celebrate what he's done."
Poincaré Conjecture: The riddle Perelman solved
*Henri Poincaré thought explaining the proof of his famous conjecture would take far too long. But even trying to explain the conjecture itself is not easy without recourse to visual props such as rubber bands, footballs and doughnuts. It's all to do with topology, the science of surfaces, or – as some would call it – "rubber sheet geometry".
One way of looking at Poincaré's conjecture is to imagine the surface of a football. Whether inflated or not, it stays the same, and in that sense it is said to be two-dimensional. Imagine stretching a rubber band around the circumference of the inflated football. It is possible to move the band towards one end of the ball without tearing the band or allowing it to leave the surface. In this sense, the surface of the football is said to be "simply connected".
Now imagine stretching a rubber band around a doughnut, a sphere with a hole in it. In this case it is not possible to move the band without tearing the doughnut. So the surface of the doughnut is said to be not simply connected. Poincaré proposed that all closed, simply connected, three-dimensional surfaces, those which lack holes and are of finite extent, were spheres. His conjecture was a way of stating this observation, but proving it mathematically had defied generations, until Perelman came along.
The conjecture has implications for cosmology, which is fascinated with the idea of the shape of the space-time continuum. The mathematics behind the conjecture could help scientists to determine the shape of the universe. Steve Connor.
giovedì 25 marzo 2010
HISTOIRE DE LA DEDICACE
DA LE FIGARO.FR
Dédicace
Par Etienne De Montety
Il faudrait écrire un traité de la dédicace. Disserter sur l'art de l'envoi que vont pratiquer les écrivains de tout poil au Salon du livre à partir d'aujourd'hui. De quand date cet usage ? Existe-t-il des dédicaces de Voltaire, Stendhal, Flaubert à de prestigieux contemporains ?
Il y a dédicace et dédicace. Dédicace de service de presse et dédicace de Salon du livre. La première est adressée à un critique ou à un juré. Elle a pour objet d'attirer l'attention et la bienveillance. Elle est toujours amicale, respectueuse. Elle peut être légèrement complice ou flagorneuse. Mais attention aux excès.
Certains écrivains doués du talent de dessinateur agrémentent leur livre de croquis. Anna Gavalda et Clémence de Biéville excellent au crayon de couleur. François Sureau à l'encre.
La dédicace de salon est plus délicate. Qu'écrire à un aimable chaland planté devant soi et dont on ne sait rien ? Faut-il faire l'important ? Le malin ? L'interroger pour obtenir quelques informations sur lui qu'on glissera habilement dans sa prose ? La banalité est souvent au rendez-vous et l'on se prend à assurer le premier venu de ses cordialités sans lendemain.
La séance de dédicace fait partie de l'emploi du temps de l'écrivain. Voire de son activité. Patrick Modiano, qui est quelque chose comme la Haute Autorité de la littérature contemporaine, a récemment raconté (à L'Express) qu'il avait commencé dans la vie en imitant l'écriture de Simone de Beauvoir et de Beckett pour donner du prix à des livres qu'il s'apprêtait à vendre.
On se rappelle aussi cet écrivain plein de culot à qui des amis bouquinistes apportaient des vieux romans signés de lui. Celui-ci se lançait alors a posteriori dans des dédicaces aussi prestigieuses que fantaisistes : à Jacques Chirac, à George Bush, à Slobodan Milosevic, à Tony Blair - c'était les années 1990. Il y eut certainement des crédules pour se laisser abuser. La littérature reste de bout en bout une entreprise de mystification.
THE POWER OF TEXT
Texts Without Context
Harry Campbell
FROM NYTIMES.COM
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.
THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
Even some outspoken cheerleaders of Internet technology have begun to grapple with some of its more vexing side effects. Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
WORRYING ABOUT the public’s growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload, of course, is hardly new. It’s been 25 years since Neil Postman warned in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that trivia and the entertainment values promoted by television were creating distractions that threatened to subvert public discourse, and more than a decade since writers like James Gleick (“Faster”) and David Shenk (“Data Smog”) described a culture addicted to speed, drowning in data and overstimulated to the point where only sensationalism and willful hyperbole grab people’s attention.
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”
TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has bestowed miracles of access and convenience upon millions of people, and it’s also proven to be a vital new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents; text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”
MSNBC’s new program “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which usually focuses on business and politics, has a “While you were working ...” segment in which viewers are asked to send in “some of the strangest and outrageous stories you’ve found on the Internet,” and the most e-mailed lists on popular news sites tend to feature articles about pets, food, celebrities and self-improvement. For instance, at one point on March 11, the top story on The Washington Post’s Web site was “Maintaining a Sex Life,” while the top story on Reddit.com, a user-generated news link site, was “(Funny) Sexy Girl? Do Not Trust Profile Pictures!”
Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.
Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.
Digital culture, he writes in “You Are Not a Gadget,” “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”
AT THE SAME time the Internet’s nurturing of niche cultures is contributing to what Cass Sunstein calls “cyberbalkanization.” Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.”
“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.
As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” Politicians and voters on the right and left not only hold different opinions from one another, but often can’t even agree over a shared set of facts, as clashes over climate change, health care and the Iraq war attest.
THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur.
As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.
As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups. Should the writers of television shows listen to fan feedback or a network’s audience testing? Does the desire to get an article on a “most e-mailed” list consciously or unconsciously influence how reporters and editors go about their assignments and approaches to stories? Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?
As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. In a recent Newsweek cover story pegged to the Tiger Woods scandal, Neal Gabler, the author of “Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” absurdly asserts that celebrity is “the great new art form of the 21st century.”
Celebrity, Mr. Gabler argues, “competes with — and often supersedes — more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays and TV shows,” and it performs, he says, “in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community.”
However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television, and memoir writing has become a rite of passage for actors, politicians and celebrities of every ilk. At the same time our cultural landscape is brimming over with parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of “appropriation art” — much of it facilitated by new technology that makes remixing, and cutting-and-pasting easy enough for a child.
It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.
All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.” Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna; many jukebox or tribute musicals like “Good Vibrations” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” do an embarrassing disservice to the artists who inspired them; and the rote remaking of old television shows into films (from “The Brady Bunch” to “Charlie’s Angels” to “Get Smart”), not to mention the recycling of video games into movies (like “Tomb Raider” and “Resident Evil”) often seem as pointless as they are now predictable.
Writing in a 2005 Wired article that “new technologies redefine us,” William Gibson hailed audience participation and argued that “an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product.” Indeed, he said, “audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”
To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
Harry Campbell
FROM NYTIMES.COM
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.
THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
Even some outspoken cheerleaders of Internet technology have begun to grapple with some of its more vexing side effects. Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
WORRYING ABOUT the public’s growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload, of course, is hardly new. It’s been 25 years since Neil Postman warned in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that trivia and the entertainment values promoted by television were creating distractions that threatened to subvert public discourse, and more than a decade since writers like James Gleick (“Faster”) and David Shenk (“Data Smog”) described a culture addicted to speed, drowning in data and overstimulated to the point where only sensationalism and willful hyperbole grab people’s attention.
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”
TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has bestowed miracles of access and convenience upon millions of people, and it’s also proven to be a vital new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents; text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”
MSNBC’s new program “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which usually focuses on business and politics, has a “While you were working ...” segment in which viewers are asked to send in “some of the strangest and outrageous stories you’ve found on the Internet,” and the most e-mailed lists on popular news sites tend to feature articles about pets, food, celebrities and self-improvement. For instance, at one point on March 11, the top story on The Washington Post’s Web site was “Maintaining a Sex Life,” while the top story on Reddit.com, a user-generated news link site, was “(Funny) Sexy Girl? Do Not Trust Profile Pictures!”
Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.
Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.
Digital culture, he writes in “You Are Not a Gadget,” “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”
AT THE SAME time the Internet’s nurturing of niche cultures is contributing to what Cass Sunstein calls “cyberbalkanization.” Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.”
“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.
As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” Politicians and voters on the right and left not only hold different opinions from one another, but often can’t even agree over a shared set of facts, as clashes over climate change, health care and the Iraq war attest.
THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur.
As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.
As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups. Should the writers of television shows listen to fan feedback or a network’s audience testing? Does the desire to get an article on a “most e-mailed” list consciously or unconsciously influence how reporters and editors go about their assignments and approaches to stories? Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?
As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. In a recent Newsweek cover story pegged to the Tiger Woods scandal, Neal Gabler, the author of “Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” absurdly asserts that celebrity is “the great new art form of the 21st century.”
Celebrity, Mr. Gabler argues, “competes with — and often supersedes — more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays and TV shows,” and it performs, he says, “in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community.”
However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television, and memoir writing has become a rite of passage for actors, politicians and celebrities of every ilk. At the same time our cultural landscape is brimming over with parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of “appropriation art” — much of it facilitated by new technology that makes remixing, and cutting-and-pasting easy enough for a child.
It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.
All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.” Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna; many jukebox or tribute musicals like “Good Vibrations” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” do an embarrassing disservice to the artists who inspired them; and the rote remaking of old television shows into films (from “The Brady Bunch” to “Charlie’s Angels” to “Get Smart”), not to mention the recycling of video games into movies (like “Tomb Raider” and “Resident Evil”) often seem as pointless as they are now predictable.
Writing in a 2005 Wired article that “new technologies redefine us,” William Gibson hailed audience participation and argued that “an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product.” Indeed, he said, “audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”
To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
Creepy-Crawly, Letter by Letter
DA NYTIMES.COM
INSECTOPEDIA
By Hugh Raffles
Illustrated. 465 pages. Pantheon. $29.95.
Creepy-Crawly, Letter by Letter
By JANET MASLIN
Hugh Raffles was taking a shower in his Manhattan apartment when a three-inch-long water bug dropped from the ceiling and landed at his feet. His first reaction was one that might be expected. “I admit it: I screamed,” he writes in “Insectopedia,” his new compendium of thoughts about the creepy-crawly. “Wouldn’t you?”
Then Mr. Raffles did something more unusual. He took this anecdote about the shower, labeled it “The Unseen” and made it the “U” chapter in his fluky, perversely appealing encyclopedia-style volume. There is one entry per letter of the alphabet, but why does this scream/shower/big-horrible-bug story become the “U” entry? As with all of “Insectopedia,” there’s no particular reason for what goes where. Arbitrariness is part of this book’s extremely peculiar charm.
At “N” (for “Nepal”), Mr. Raffles describes taking a trip with his friend Dan and smoking drugs with Dan all day long. “We lived in a state of sensuous, if not analytic, clarity,” he recalls. That’s more or less the mind-set of “Insectopedia,” which is not to say that Mr. Raffles isn’t lucid and full of interesting information. It’s just that a creature like the cricket can pop up anywhere in this book without warning.
Many crickets are here, even Jiminy Cricket. But not even he is anywhere near the “C” chapter. Jiminy shows up in “Il Parco delle Cascine on Ascension Sunday.” (What’s that? It’s the “P” chapter, for “Parco.”) Mr. Raffles tells the reader that he wishes he could quote the lyrics sung by Jiminy in “When You Wish Upon a Star,” from Disney’s “Pinocchio,” because this is “one of Hollywood’s most enduringly democratic lyrics, a lyric that brilliantly captures the emptiness, naïveté and consolations of the American dream.” But “the copyright holder wanted way too much money.” Most of “Insectopedia” is even buggier than that. Its “G” chapter, “Generosity (The Happy Times),” delves deeply into the weird world of Shanghai’s illicit cricket fights. This involves high-stakes gambling, issues of biosecurity, criteria for cricket excellence, special equipment like the cricket couple’s “marriage box” and Jia Sidao’s “Book of Crickets.” This last is a 13th-century book identified as “the unquestioned urtext of the cricket community.”
So what if this oddball foray into insecto-tourism coughs up occasionally empty passages? (“What is a cricket in these circumstances without its existence in culture? What is this culture without the existence of crickets?”) Mr. Raffles’s adventure succeeded in landing him in The Shanghai Evening Post as a visiting “Anthropologist Studying Human-Insect Relations, U.S. Professor Wants to Publish a Book on Crickets.” And he has learned that a male cricket will fight much better if pregame sex is part of his training regimen.
Mr. Raffles refers to sex-related insect lore as often as he can. Of course he does: he has to. Less attention would be paid to “Insectopedia” if its “S” chapter were not literal-minded enough to be called “Sex,” and if the brand of sex to which it refers were not so extra-special. Here is an opportunity to learn about the fetish that has prompted films like “Squish,” “Smush,” “Toad Trampler” and “Clogs and Frogs”: pornographic films in which small creatures (not all of them insects, but who’s counting?) are stepped on, films made for men who are excited by the thought of being messily crushed.
“What did it feel like?” the big-footed female star of one such film is asked. “It felt artistic,” she answers.
“Insectopedia” includes a close-up of a squashed critter on the sole of a shoe. This book’s photos are not in color.
So much for obvious sensationalism. Mr. Raffles, who is more philosopher than provocateur, reserves his most incendiary ideas for weightier subjects. The “J” chapter is simply called “Jews.” It describes and analyzes the virulent strain of anti-Semitic propaganda that invoked images of pernicious lice. (Mr. Raffles does not mince Heinrich Himmler’s words when he quotes Nazi invective.) The “C” is short for Chernobyl and introduces Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, whose paintings of deformed insects were published by one Swiss newspaper under the headline “When Flies and Bugs Don’t Look the Way They Should.” “M” is for “My Nightmares.” Name a slithering, burrowing, swarming thought about insect life and it has probably enlivened one of Mr. Raffles’s dreams. “D” is for “Death,” which prompts him to wonder what it would be like if all the insect specimens in a museum were suddenly able to come back to life. Answer: it would be like an out-take from the “My Nightmares” chapter.
There are also some lovely thoughts here, like the “B” chapter called “Beauty.” But even the supposedly sweet visions here have their unappetizing side, especially in the “O” chapter, which can lay claim to the most far-fetched title in the book. “On January 8, Abdou Mahamane was Driving through Niamey...” is set in Niger and describes that country’s great influxes of crickets and locusts. What are they, plagues or nutrition? Mr. Raffles cites the popular local idea that they fry up nicely and have a peanutlike flavor.
“Insectopedia” itself qualifies as food for thought. Though it sometimes threatens to come unstrung, this is a collection of imaginative forays into what, for most readers, will be terra incognita. (Mr. Raffles incidentally loves to invoke Latin whenever he can.) Its ideas are unified by the author’s genuine fascination with his material and his eagerness to follow it wherever it leads, even when it goes half-mad. “The insects are all around me now,” he writes on the book’s last page. “They know we’re at the end. They’re saying, ‘Don’t leave us out! Don’t forget about us!’ ” No problem. Whether you’re wide awake or fast asleep, they aren’t easy to forget.
INSECTOPEDIA
By Hugh Raffles
Illustrated. 465 pages. Pantheon. $29.95.
Creepy-Crawly, Letter by Letter
By JANET MASLIN
Hugh Raffles was taking a shower in his Manhattan apartment when a three-inch-long water bug dropped from the ceiling and landed at his feet. His first reaction was one that might be expected. “I admit it: I screamed,” he writes in “Insectopedia,” his new compendium of thoughts about the creepy-crawly. “Wouldn’t you?”
Then Mr. Raffles did something more unusual. He took this anecdote about the shower, labeled it “The Unseen” and made it the “U” chapter in his fluky, perversely appealing encyclopedia-style volume. There is one entry per letter of the alphabet, but why does this scream/shower/big-horrible-bug story become the “U” entry? As with all of “Insectopedia,” there’s no particular reason for what goes where. Arbitrariness is part of this book’s extremely peculiar charm.
At “N” (for “Nepal”), Mr. Raffles describes taking a trip with his friend Dan and smoking drugs with Dan all day long. “We lived in a state of sensuous, if not analytic, clarity,” he recalls. That’s more or less the mind-set of “Insectopedia,” which is not to say that Mr. Raffles isn’t lucid and full of interesting information. It’s just that a creature like the cricket can pop up anywhere in this book without warning.
Many crickets are here, even Jiminy Cricket. But not even he is anywhere near the “C” chapter. Jiminy shows up in “Il Parco delle Cascine on Ascension Sunday.” (What’s that? It’s the “P” chapter, for “Parco.”) Mr. Raffles tells the reader that he wishes he could quote the lyrics sung by Jiminy in “When You Wish Upon a Star,” from Disney’s “Pinocchio,” because this is “one of Hollywood’s most enduringly democratic lyrics, a lyric that brilliantly captures the emptiness, naïveté and consolations of the American dream.” But “the copyright holder wanted way too much money.” Most of “Insectopedia” is even buggier than that. Its “G” chapter, “Generosity (The Happy Times),” delves deeply into the weird world of Shanghai’s illicit cricket fights. This involves high-stakes gambling, issues of biosecurity, criteria for cricket excellence, special equipment like the cricket couple’s “marriage box” and Jia Sidao’s “Book of Crickets.” This last is a 13th-century book identified as “the unquestioned urtext of the cricket community.”
So what if this oddball foray into insecto-tourism coughs up occasionally empty passages? (“What is a cricket in these circumstances without its existence in culture? What is this culture without the existence of crickets?”) Mr. Raffles’s adventure succeeded in landing him in The Shanghai Evening Post as a visiting “Anthropologist Studying Human-Insect Relations, U.S. Professor Wants to Publish a Book on Crickets.” And he has learned that a male cricket will fight much better if pregame sex is part of his training regimen.
Mr. Raffles refers to sex-related insect lore as often as he can. Of course he does: he has to. Less attention would be paid to “Insectopedia” if its “S” chapter were not literal-minded enough to be called “Sex,” and if the brand of sex to which it refers were not so extra-special. Here is an opportunity to learn about the fetish that has prompted films like “Squish,” “Smush,” “Toad Trampler” and “Clogs and Frogs”: pornographic films in which small creatures (not all of them insects, but who’s counting?) are stepped on, films made for men who are excited by the thought of being messily crushed.
“What did it feel like?” the big-footed female star of one such film is asked. “It felt artistic,” she answers.
“Insectopedia” includes a close-up of a squashed critter on the sole of a shoe. This book’s photos are not in color.
So much for obvious sensationalism. Mr. Raffles, who is more philosopher than provocateur, reserves his most incendiary ideas for weightier subjects. The “J” chapter is simply called “Jews.” It describes and analyzes the virulent strain of anti-Semitic propaganda that invoked images of pernicious lice. (Mr. Raffles does not mince Heinrich Himmler’s words when he quotes Nazi invective.) The “C” is short for Chernobyl and introduces Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, whose paintings of deformed insects were published by one Swiss newspaper under the headline “When Flies and Bugs Don’t Look the Way They Should.” “M” is for “My Nightmares.” Name a slithering, burrowing, swarming thought about insect life and it has probably enlivened one of Mr. Raffles’s dreams. “D” is for “Death,” which prompts him to wonder what it would be like if all the insect specimens in a museum were suddenly able to come back to life. Answer: it would be like an out-take from the “My Nightmares” chapter.
There are also some lovely thoughts here, like the “B” chapter called “Beauty.” But even the supposedly sweet visions here have their unappetizing side, especially in the “O” chapter, which can lay claim to the most far-fetched title in the book. “On January 8, Abdou Mahamane was Driving through Niamey...” is set in Niger and describes that country’s great influxes of crickets and locusts. What are they, plagues or nutrition? Mr. Raffles cites the popular local idea that they fry up nicely and have a peanutlike flavor.
“Insectopedia” itself qualifies as food for thought. Though it sometimes threatens to come unstrung, this is a collection of imaginative forays into what, for most readers, will be terra incognita. (Mr. Raffles incidentally loves to invoke Latin whenever he can.) Its ideas are unified by the author’s genuine fascination with his material and his eagerness to follow it wherever it leads, even when it goes half-mad. “The insects are all around me now,” he writes on the book’s last page. “They know we’re at the end. They’re saying, ‘Don’t leave us out! Don’t forget about us!’ ” No problem. Whether you’re wide awake or fast asleep, they aren’t easy to forget.
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