The Digital Writer |
The Digital Writer still loved the technology of print. But, the old print publishing system had become so successful it started to look like an arrogant, royal potentate. It had produced a cash cow of sorts by harvesting writing talent from colleges and professions, selling the content back to students and professionals, while creating buzz through reviewers and TV pesonalities. The result was a very predictable, dumbed-down written product, moved through the system like a carton of cigarettes. So, it was utterly necessary that a new publishing system arise to challenge print at every level. Only through this clash could the act of writing and reading, the act of learning and doing, be improved in a culture that needed it badly. The digital system, then, played the role of innovator and would play that role for decades. Most of creativity would be pulled toward the new, innovative medium and give over to the old medium the vain and mediocre, who still thought print gave them legitimacy.
He could see all this very clearly but, in one sense, he didn't care. "Give me a medium where I can build what I want to build, with production value and easy distribution." That suffices.
Innovative writing and publishing needs innovative readers.
At a particular stage of development he made up a mantra as he poured through all the dense material available, "if I can not read them, I can't write them." He could no longer read long, popular novels that had made some fame and, even, fortune for the author. He could read Don Quixote or Brothers Karamazov. He could read Kafka and Faulkner. He could no longer read straight up short stories. He could read poetry and aphorisms. He could read sublime lines and wisdom. He could not read 98% of the things in magazines.
The novel was successful when print was a privileged space; when, in other words, there were no movies, TV, radio, rock concerts, professional sports that would be an immense part of the reader's consciousness. This was why, often, the modern mind picks up a novel and reads a few pages and puts it down because, "it doesn't seem real," or, "it doesn't ring true." The academics haven't caught up with this fact, despite McLuhan. Of course, movies, TV, radio, rock and pop, pro sports are in the same boat. We can already detect a migration of loyalty of people away from entertainment as the world becomes very serious. It's more a case of absorption than anything else. Fully absorbed by electronic media and the self-reference becomes boring. We want more. But, not like that. We want something better, not that. And on and on.
The Digital Writer had spent a few nights in a strange bed. On a bookshelf he had found a tattered copy of Hardy's, "Tess of the d'Urberville's" and began to read to divert his mind from pressing matters. The story could not be written today but what lives in the story? It is the architecture of the language; a language that is threatened with elimination by the imperial camera. It fortified, again, his belief that the camera had destroyed language and thus, the novel and so, literature had to begin again, at the beginning, with poetry.
What made literature so special was the fact that it was the expression of the highest development of knowledge and experience; therefore, it could teach. It did not try to capture and manipulate, it sought to liberate.
In the strange bed, he wrote. He scratched a few notes in a piece of paper he had found in a drawer.
My aesthetics were formed by the ocean.
I praise a nation that can free the writer to do what he wants to.
There has been never been an epoch like this one: I'm so happy to participate in it.
People in the future will trace themselves back to this very moment.
A writer is nothing without a Muse.
Disavow your knowledge of everything but how to build things and have fun.
The Digital Writer is conscious of how experience and knowledge operates in his own mind and how much potential is contained there. He also experiences the modern world like anyone else. He has the same experiences and is in relation to the same problems, grief's, challenges. So, a novel could still be produced by a writer who had full experience in the culture, yet was fully knowledgeable and approach the art as something to be mastered.
He doubted it would be produced in the print publishing world. The salesmen had taken over and humiliated the heroism of art and literature by raising above their heads the novels by 3rd rate romances and extolling them while being embarrassed by greatness. The Digital Writer's first role: Annunciate all the ways the print publishing world has diminished the art of writing. Ah, it had been done already!
Print publishing had become nothing more than the sidewalk sale of derivative art, presented in the suburban mall with bored and, somewhat shamed-faced "artists" charging their pieces on major credit cards. It worked as long as they all thought the same. But then, what credibility does an intelligent crowd have that, "thinks the same?" At that instant, they lost their credibility and were consigned to the dust bin of generations who had produced this sameness. Pity the poor talents caught in the Web!
Ah laughter, you are a mighty spirit!
The sheer size and amount of activity on the Net will do a fine sensiblitiy in after a time. Stay the course. Ignore the sirens on the rocks. Develop and push the envelope. Resist the negative and learn principles of construction.
They say that people go up on the Web to scour for useful information. I don't doubt it but as they get more experienced, the useful information will become rarer and they will search for the most rare of resources; mainly wisdom and beauty. We can't wait for them.
David