Even if we had a perfect archive, it still wouldn’t tell the whole story
November 26, 2023 1:45 AM Subscribe
For 30 years, writers have been using blogs, social media, and email to do things with words that are difficult or impossible to do inside books. They have immersed us in stories still unfolding, created personas that interact with readers, woven their writing into inboxes and feeds, and used code to write at a distance. The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down. from Poets in the Machine
I'm still mad that Usenet history has effectively been disappeared by Google's buying and later burying DejaNews.
posted by mhoye at 4:49 AM on November 26, 2023 [11 favorites]
posted by mhoye at 4:49 AM on November 26, 2023 [11 favorites]
This was a thought-provoking read. I especially appreciate the way that the author focused on the limiting effect for authors working in multiple media who are compelled (for whatever reason) to publish born-digital electronic texts in book format.
The thought of what's lost is unnerving, though I feel like a lot of what the author is lamenting is more due to online eyeballs being dragged wildly in different directions than a gatekeepery or snobbishness thing. The sea of books is large, but it's only so large, and many well-loved books exists -- there is no parallel mass of electronic literature that's widely well regarded and easily accessible. What mhoye is talking about, writ very large! For every group on Usenet, there were ten thousand online literary experiments that the author/s lost interest in, didn't know how to promote, or that got nuked due to platform changes or whatever.
I do feels like this article is one in a long line of articles that appear regularly about why we haven't and should take new electronic literary genres (and formats) seriously. They typically (a) ignore the decades-long bibliography of articles, books, blog posts, and tweets about the subject, (b) silently pass over the massive technological challenges and costs of digital preservation, (c) pretend that there is a public readership slavering for a more serious approach to inherently ephemeral content, and (d) don't tend to address the labor that would be required by everyone from authors to reviewers to critics to all sorts of publishers to make their dreams come true. That last part feels like the biggest one to me -- resources are finite, including attention.
posted by cupcakeninja at 11:09 AM on November 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
The thought of what's lost is unnerving, though I feel like a lot of what the author is lamenting is more due to online eyeballs being dragged wildly in different directions than a gatekeepery or snobbishness thing. The sea of books is large, but it's only so large, and many well-loved books exists -- there is no parallel mass of electronic literature that's widely well regarded and easily accessible. What mhoye is talking about, writ very large! For every group on Usenet, there were ten thousand online literary experiments that the author/s lost interest in, didn't know how to promote, or that got nuked due to platform changes or whatever.
I do feels like this article is one in a long line of articles that appear regularly about why we haven't and should take new electronic literary genres (and formats) seriously. They typically (a) ignore the decades-long bibliography of articles, books, blog posts, and tweets about the subject, (b) silently pass over the massive technological challenges and costs of digital preservation, (c) pretend that there is a public readership slavering for a more serious approach to inherently ephemeral content, and (d) don't tend to address the labor that would be required by everyone from authors to reviewers to critics to all sorts of publishers to make their dreams come true. That last part feels like the biggest one to me -- resources are finite, including attention.
posted by cupcakeninja at 11:09 AM on November 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
Stopping to say this article explained some confusion I had about Patricia Lockwood the other day. Because even her bio on Wikipedia starts with her "published works" while her very very long history as a writer online gets a single paragraph.
posted by muddgirl at 11:11 AM on November 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by muddgirl at 11:11 AM on November 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
I would add (e) you can’t archive something if it depends on transience.
Possibly we should try, but alternatively we should instead protect the circumstances that foster transient art forms.
posted by clew at 12:18 PM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
Possibly we should try, but alternatively we should instead protect the circumstances that foster transient art forms.
posted by clew at 12:18 PM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
On a more basic level, I've been reading a bunch of papers about ancient Egypt lately and they still cling closely to page layouts that were needed when text was hand set and images were printed on separate plates. Papers written in the last 20 years still tend to have all the images ganged together and then referenced in far flung text. It's a PITA.
posted by brachiopod at 2:45 PM on November 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by brachiopod at 2:45 PM on November 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
This was a really interesting essay. I think Megan Marz is absolutely correct about autofiction being close to blogs. The positive spin would be that those writers wanted to bring some of the energy of blogging, its immediacy and intimacy, to their writing. The counter-take is that writers wanted to take what were essentially blogposts and dress them up as fiction.
Personally, I think autofiction misunderstood both the appeal of blogging, which is the feeling that you’re getting people’s truthful recounting of events that happened to them, and the wonder of fiction, which is that the reader gets to step into a small part of a larger world, which extends far beyond the borders of the text.
In autofiction we instead had testimony which told the reader upfront that it wasn’t trying to be truthful, and fiction which had no hinterland, nothing to suggest that the fictional characters had any existence other than as portraits of real people.
That said, I’m most interested in her discussion of tweets and poetry. Patricia Lockwood (MeFi’s own) writes tweets and poetry with the same methods. She can short-circuit language in ways that feel very current, and very of its moment, but I think will be news that stays news. I don’t think she’s unique in this, there are more than a few poets whose practice draws from Internet discourse in very fruitful ways.
That said, there aren’t that many, not enough to feel like a real paradigm shift. If I think back to genuinely transformative moments in literature for comparison, it doesn’t feel like there’s a before and after, like there was a before and after romanticism, before and after symbolism, before and after modernism. For better and worse, literature is still operating along the same lines that were essentially worked out over the course of the 50s, 60s and 70s, which was the last real revolution. I’m not saying nothing’s changed since then, but the general parameters of style, content and classification have broadly remained in place.
For all its energy, internet writing hasn’t kicked any doors down yet. Which is probably why there hasn’t been any major critical engagement with it. I’ve done my fair share of internet writing in my day, and read a whole damn lot, and in my more optimistic moods I feel that there are signs of something struggling to be born, but the monster isn’t out into the world yet.
But… Megan Marz makes a really good case for it being more significant than I’m maybe willing to give it credit for, and I’ll have to think about it for a good while. Thanks for the post, chavenet.
posted by Kattullus at 2:24 PM on November 27, 2023
Personally, I think autofiction misunderstood both the appeal of blogging, which is the feeling that you’re getting people’s truthful recounting of events that happened to them, and the wonder of fiction, which is that the reader gets to step into a small part of a larger world, which extends far beyond the borders of the text.
In autofiction we instead had testimony which told the reader upfront that it wasn’t trying to be truthful, and fiction which had no hinterland, nothing to suggest that the fictional characters had any existence other than as portraits of real people.
That said, I’m most interested in her discussion of tweets and poetry. Patricia Lockwood (MeFi’s own) writes tweets and poetry with the same methods. She can short-circuit language in ways that feel very current, and very of its moment, but I think will be news that stays news. I don’t think she’s unique in this, there are more than a few poets whose practice draws from Internet discourse in very fruitful ways.
That said, there aren’t that many, not enough to feel like a real paradigm shift. If I think back to genuinely transformative moments in literature for comparison, it doesn’t feel like there’s a before and after, like there was a before and after romanticism, before and after symbolism, before and after modernism. For better and worse, literature is still operating along the same lines that were essentially worked out over the course of the 50s, 60s and 70s, which was the last real revolution. I’m not saying nothing’s changed since then, but the general parameters of style, content and classification have broadly remained in place.
For all its energy, internet writing hasn’t kicked any doors down yet. Which is probably why there hasn’t been any major critical engagement with it. I’ve done my fair share of internet writing in my day, and read a whole damn lot, and in my more optimistic moods I feel that there are signs of something struggling to be born, but the monster isn’t out into the world yet.
But… Megan Marz makes a really good case for it being more significant than I’m maybe willing to give it credit for, and I’ll have to think about it for a good while. Thanks for the post, chavenet.
posted by Kattullus at 2:24 PM on November 27, 2023
« Older 50,000 years ago, Australia had vultures | TURKULES FOR PRESIDENT 2024 Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
That I learned something new in the article’s second paragraph bodes well, and I can’t wait to get back to it, but unfortunately writing a single, properly cited paragraph on Wikipedia consumed my lunchtime. I remember listening to Megan Marz, the author of the essay, on a podcast, and clearly I should look up more essays by her. But, in the blogging tradition of including superfluous personal detail, first I’m off with my kids to a museum.
posted by Kattullus at 3:10 AM on November 26, 2023 [3 favorites]