The Digital Writer |
The higher synthesis creates the future.
And what has changed for the digital writer since the Net came along? The writing he thought lost has been found. The ambition he thought lost has been found. The desire he thought lost has been found. An extraordinary range of people have been found. Resources thought lost have been found. The threads thought lost have been found.
One gets lost in a machine culture as assuredly as they get lost on the vast plains of the Antartic. What machine culture demeaned was mind and spirit. So, it is ironic that machines will now liberate mind and spirit. After all, what is left when the bubble bursts?
The primary glee for the digital writer is very simple. He has before him a medium that allows him to build anything with his talent and resources. He has before him a medium that encourages him to build out, from the inside, to an amorphous but real world outside. He wouldn't go so far to say it's easy, whatever that may mean. But the promise is immense.
There is disappointment. But then, in one period of time we live in pleasure, the next in disappointment. Life is a strategy to deal with these things.
I'm sure after the Golden Gate Bridge was built, after the elation and soaring pride, the builders were disappointed in it as they crossed for the thousandth time. Part of that is the presence of the anonymous faces passing on cars that don't have a clue about the building of the bridge, the difficulties, the despair wrought out of its stupendous ambition. No, they simply use it and are not curious why its there or how it got there.
It's not digital versus print. It is a golden opportunity for the writer to become exactly what he or she wanted to become, before the market opens so to speak. The economy, culture, and history will determine the role the computer plays in the world of publishing. Many dramas will play themselves out. The digital writer is concerned with his own drama and tries to account for it the best he can.
Writing is as much strategy as anything else that attempts to do something in the world. If, for instance, the writer see's that the types of novels he wants to write can't be written in his era and he would be foolish to try, then he must adapt a strategy of resistence to the era and choose a form appropriate to that. The era despises literary work. Very well, then I will choose what the era despises and have a bit of fun. It took me a long time to understand this and I never understood it through the publishing establishment. I understood it by my interest in classical music. And my introduction to classical music came about in this fashion: I was working in a wharehouse in the industrial section of Berkeley. It was a computer company that sold transistors, diodes, knick-knacks, and assorted materials to mainframe computer companies. I would spell the shipping clerk when he didn't show up: Hans, the German student who use to ride his bike to work. In the back of the wharehouse was the bench where old Suzy worked. She was Japanese and had been put in internment camps and was about 80 years old. She had the most difficult job in the place; assembling the parts as orders came in. Most of the time I was trying to organize the wharehouse with the foreman, a Vietnam vet. The wharehouse was airy and spacious. Most of my fellow workers were decent types; one was a school teacher who had recently moved from Idaho and used to smoke his pipe and stroll leisurely around the wharehouse as if he was still in school. As in most workplaces there was always one nut-case who was loud and off in a corner mumbling to himself. At any rate, in this wharehouse smelling in faint traces of oil and burning wire, they used to play classical music. I would usually open the wharehouse up, get the lights on, put the coffee on and then the foreman would put the stereo on the classical station and leave it there the whole day. If someone changed the channel, there would be an cry of, "don't change the goddamn station!"
He claimed it cleared his mind of bad memories. So we cleaned ourselves of bad memories while working for the entrepreneur who had started the company. Some of us, at that time, had nothing but good, nearly perfect, memories.
The music seduced me. Even if it was written for the royal mistresses of venereal noblemen, I found enormous meaning in it. It made my recently departed rock days appear so low and provincial that I didn't return to them until I started to hear the old songs in Safeway stores. I was ashamed I had spent so much time listening to the music of my youth. And, after shame, change. It was during that time that I took all my rock albums and sold them to two record stores: Rather Ripped Records and Rasputin Records. I think I got $75 for the whole pile and one was rejeced because it had become warped. I only regretted selling off three of those albums: Disreali Gears, Electric Ladyland, and Let It Bleed. All the rest went down the crapper and good riddance to them.
When the music of one's own era loses meaning, then what?
My interest in classical music grew through the years, even after the job ended. And I began to realize that classical music was the music of their era. Their era had demanded it. And if someone were to sit down now and try to write like Mozart or Beethoven it would sound silly. And that is where the era becomes significant.
The digital writer faces the same dilemma as the print writer. Is writing a form of criticism or a form of constructive principles? Literature has labored for a long-time under the assumption that is was social criticism. The novel was conceived as a vast satire of human foibles. The great novel emerged out of great disgusts. But what form of criticism has not been laid against every object, every institution? Doesn't it get rather tired? Perhaps. Nonetheless, the writer is attracted to the prospect even as he sees the necessity to celebrate the good in a culture and to demonstrate the alchemical process of seperating the good from the bad. This rides alongside the will of the writer and he is always torn and always forced to choose between them.
As I keep emphasizing, it's not a contest between print and digital. One of these days that will happen. Digital publishing is a possibility and attracts those who like possibility. For myself, the new digital publishing system got a lot of work up off the floor and into some space where it could be read by others. With some perspective I can see that the digital publishing system is in the beginning stages of its existence and will evolve through this century in ways we can hardly imagine.
For my part, I ask some simple questions:
- Does the digital publshing system inspire me to write at an excellent level?
- Can the digital publishing system exist side-by-side with print publishing?
- Will the digital publishing system improve, increase in the future?
- Is there a possibility of recovering cost and, even, making a profit on the Net?
As long as the answers to those questions are affirmative I have no problem with my presence here.
As I allude to, habits are hard to break. And the reader owes the writer nothing in terms of how the material is presented.
It's important to note the struggles that newspapers and magazines are having in the middle of a dramatic downturn in advertising revenue. As is usually the case, staff is hit first and hardest. That means less significant content for these vehicles and a loss of readership. The digital writer is one of many who offers their content and links to richer content, practically for nothing. Even the dreaming, impractical digital writer has the business acumen to understand a transitional era as he passes through one.
In fact, this author laments that newspapers aren't being read anymore and tries to find out why. If the newspaper goes the way of the Dodo bird it will be due to the methodical learning curve citizens are embarked on, adjusting to the enormous fragmentation and specialization of modern media. The one hope: Citizens will be aggressive in their pursuit of information rather than passive. The Net, like freedom, is what you make it to be. The citizens will have to learn how to use all the resources that permit them to advance up a mighty learning curve; hills and mountains of information and opinion, to reach a pinnacle of understanding. This could very well be the next great act of a liberal, democratic culture.
The digital publishing system will be fueled in the first generation by every single talent in the world that can't get into the mainstream. And, in a fair evaluation of things, that's the majority of talented people. Talent of every stripe will get on the beast and create the first seed of its development, until the efficiencies, intermediaries, and capitalization necessary to sustain anything will occur. The digital writer celebrates the former and laments the latter but the process will roll out in that way.
The digital publishing system is a perfect American invention since it makes an end-run around established channels. As long as the Net is a reading screen and netizens are nimble enough to negotiate it fruitfully, it will represent a new publishing channel. Officialdom won't descend on it until it's proven that it will make money for them. And most officialdom is adapting it into their budgets, to wean it along, until that magical moment arrives.
And the established channels are perfectly outlined in this essay from the Partisan Review by Robert Brustein. In the final anaylsis, the channels are clogged and choked off, making the heart starved and the brain rather crazed as it tries to figure out what's going on. Of course, the digital writer believes we are at the beginning of something, not the end.
The strategic position tells a great deal.
Personally, I blot out everything but the well-told tale and magical incantations. I have made my computer an epic!
No writer, no thinker can ignore the beast.
At the same time, there's no need to be overly distracted by it either. The process of change will be slow. It must be used wisely. It's not the perfect publishing machine. The writer has to put up with a great deal of frustration and understand that he or she may have adapted to it but the vast majority of people have not.
One thing a writer, digital or otherwise, has to confront is whether his emphasis will be technique or content. Too much technique becomes a parody of an era manipulated every which way by technique. One can never have too much content when the mind is disiplined enough to be prudent before crossing a raging river.
I like the idea that the same energy used to create a book or novel can be used to make a Net presence. Perhaps culture itself will revive through new energy released from the necessity to make books and novels for the marketplace.
No less than Robert Bly has commented on "too many poetry books published," as a source of dilution of that art form.
Novelists! Get rid of the horrible burden of writing novels that the professors instruct you to write and put your creative energy into constructing resourceful web sites. The future will be much more thankful to you than for the thin, gassy novel you're being paid too much to write. If you can't come up to the level of Cervantes, Doestoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, then forget it.
One thing that becomes apparent. The cultural wars in the 21st Century will have little to do with gender, race, fundementalism, secularism. It will have to do with technologists and humnanists. The imaginative spirit is finally going to say, "you have turned my imagination into a toy," and do something else.
A telling story comes out of the Frankfort Book Fair where the chairman makes the extraordinary claim that, "The industry depends on two young men: Jesus Christ on the one hand and Harry Potter on the other..."
The digital writer was raised in an atmosphere of change. He had the fortune of being able to study change and accept it and rationalize it before it did its dirty deeds. Change could be an imperial army rushing down the mountainside to capture, rape, and pillage the cities below. The people who survived were rounded up and sent into slavery. At that moment, change sowed the seeds of its own destruction. However, change, like old wars could be stimulating and, in fact, the ability to stay in front of change was becoming a status symbol.
It's very interesting that a computer company once saw orchestras as a competitor for talent because of the ease in which music majors could be turned into programmers.
David