Today's brief offering transcribes another scrawled entry in my notebook, which records more of Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street (which had its own origins in barely-legible notes). In the context of the year-and-decade-end inbox avalanche of advice on how to optimize, maximize and monetize one's blog, this comes, to me at least, as sweet relief and bracing reminder.
"Standard Clock"
To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling that their lives have thereby been given back to them. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor. Around it he draws a charmed circle of fragments. "Genius is application."
(Selected Writings, vol. 1, 446)
Herewith fledgling's first guest post of the new year - make that first guest post, period. The author is Phil Jackson, a noted authority on (among other things) health policy, British punk and post-punk music, Indian cooking and the legacies of Marxism. To my mind the post exemplifies the kind of intelligent, incisive curation of writing and images for which this blog strives.
At least a minimal awareness of current affairs in Canada will be required to appreciate the critique embedded here.
And so prorogation… and the new Holy Tunic.
“ Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s successor, by springing constant surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d’état in miniature every day – Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848,… while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous. The cult of the Holy Tunic of Trier he duplicates in
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852
The new year appears to be off to a fine start. I'm fortunate enough to be blogging from a gorgeous small hotel in Toronto, where I'm ensconced en famille, ipod cranked as the kids watch a movie (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) as the snow falls softly on the other side of the windows and I embark on my first post of 2010. This time last year I wasn't yet a blogger; with nearly 100 posts under my belt, I'm feeling at least legit. As I mentioned two or three posts back, my idea is to take as a point of departure for the next several posts the question of what Walter Benjamin has to teach us, in our time - for example, about blogging. For the most part, I'll simply quote his writings, adding commentary where appropriate.
I begin by returning to a work that I cited recently: One-Way Street, which is translated and collected in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 1996, vol. 1, 444). This is the first section of the text, entitled "Filling Station." Its pertinence to blogging seems to me self-evident.
The construction of life is at present in the power far more of facts than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions. Under these circumstances, true literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework; this is, rather, the habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book - in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards [and blog posts, and tweets... - ed]. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment. Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
As the year winds down, I have been thinking, in passing, about the nature of New Year's "resolutions," and specifically whether they are of the order of promises, which is to say, of contracts. Does it matter whether resolutions are made public (which would imply consequences of some sort if they were not made good down the line), or can they remain vows, made and kept internally? In any case I expect to see lots of resolutions on my Twitter feed in the next few days.
And herewith I make good on a tacit promise made in my last post, namely to reproduce Walter Benjamin's "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses," which I leave to the reader to align with Stephen King's tips for writers, addressed earlier. Benjamin's theses appear in One-Way Street, which is included in Volume 1 of his Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 1996, 458-459). I thank my dear friend Tom Levin for flipping them to me nearly instantaneously following an email query just now.
I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.
II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.
V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.
IX. Nulla dies sine linea -- but there may well be weeks.
X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
XII. Stages of composition: idea -- style -- writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.
As a holiday bonus (since so many bloggers seem to be offering them), I will append Benjamin's theses on the critic's techniques, which also number thirteen.
The Critic's Technique in Thirteen Theses
I. The critic is the strategist in the literary battle.
II. He who cannot take sides should keep silent.
III. The critic has nothing in common with the interpreter of past cultural epochs.
IV. Criticism must talk the language of artists. For the terms of the cenacle are slogans. And only in slogans is the battle-cry heard.
V. "Objectivity" must always be sacrificed to partisanship, if the cause fought for merits this.
VI. Criticism is a moral question. If Goethe misjudged Holderlin and Kleist, Beethoven and Jean Paul, his morality and not his artistic discernment was at fault.
VII. For the critic his colleagues are the higher authority. Not the public. Still less posterity.
VIII. Posterity forgets or acclaims. Only the critic judges in face of the author.
IX. Polemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studies the better. Only he who can destroy can criticize.
X. Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
XI. Artistic enthusiasm is alien to the critic. In his hand the art©work is the shining sword in the battle of the minds.
XII. The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
XIII. The public must always be proved wrong, yet always feel represented by the critic.
This seems to me a fitting offering at the threshold of a new year and decade. One of my resolutions, made here for the first time, is to take Benjamin's work as the starting point for several posts to come. Another is that I will not be watching Anderson Cooper on New Year's eve, which happens to be an important anniversary in my life. The others will not be made public - at least not here.
All the best in the New Year, Anderson.
Having said that (cf. my post from earlier today), I did break down and read a few of the posts in my inbox promising to make me a better blogger in 2010, and actually found a list that made some sense. I'm pasting it below for my own reference as well as for readers who might find it of interest. You can find it at http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/book-review-13-blogging-lessons-learned-from-stephen-kings-on-writing/ I'm thinking of revising my avoid-reading-Stephen-King-at-all-cost in light of what follows.
Stephen King’s book On Writing is a very good read. It is targeted towards writers and wanna-be writers, but it is a very inspiring book for anyone.
As bloggers are writers, this book can teach you several lessons and can inspire you in your blogging. Here are the 13 lessons I have picked up from reading Stephen King’s On Writing.
And yes, bloggers are (for the most part) writers. Nothing more and, importantly, nothing less.
Memo to self: retrieve Benjamin's tips for writers for an upcoming post
In the half hour or so that I have to devote to this blog today, I thought I'd try to put myself in a position to be able to contribute something by way of a gloss on or supplement to Clay Shirky's "Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority" (http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/11/a-speculative-post-on-the-idea-of-algorithmic-authority.html ) I've been thinking about it off and on for a couple of weeks now, and more intensively since my reading of the flurry of posts on the menace of "content farming" (cf "'Content farms'? Can we parse this before we start to worry?", posted yesterday). Clay's "rough and ready" idea is summarized in the final words of his speculative post: "algorithmic authority handles the 'Garbage In, Garbage Out' problem by accepting the garbage as an input, rather than trying to clean the data first; it provides the output to the end user without any human supervisor checking it at the penultimate step; and these processes are eroding the previous institutional monopoly on the kind of authority we are used to in a number of public spheres, including the sphere of news."
Clay is clearly (obviously and with lucidity) working through the crux of the problematics that, to my mind, are obscured by the language of "content farming." In an effort to follow in his footsteps (no easy task, I recognize) and earn for myself the insights he is making available to others [NB people: reading Cliff's Notes is no substitute for reading the original. Reading Terry Eagleton is no substitute for reading Marx or Derrida or anyone else of significance], I decided to resort to an established authority whose basis is not, on the face of it, algorithmic - a source I have never failed to find productive in some way. Thankfully, one can now access the Oxford English Dictionary without having to go to the reference room of the nearest library, or having to manoeuvre it from shelf to table at home and use the handy magnifying glass to read the miniscule print of the compact edition, less legible with every passing year.
With the online version it's as simple as copy and paste. I wanted to check the definitions of "algorithm" independently of Clay's work in any case, since my 11-year-old daughter asked me about it a couple of weeks ago, and I wasn't entirely confident of my reply. (They're doing algebra in grade 6 - I will soon be unqualified to help with math homework. Hallelujah.)
Herewith the OED definitions, with my highlighting for future reference:
1. =
2.Math. A process, or set of rules, usually one expressed in algebraic notation, now used esp. in computing, machine translation and linguistics.
3. Med. A step-by-step procedure for reaching a clinical decision or diagnosis, often set out in the form of a flow chart, in which the answer to each question determines the next question to be asked.
1. a. Power or right to enforce obedience; moral or legal supremacy; the right to command, or give an ultimate decision.
b.in authority: in a position of power; in possession of power over others.
2. a. Derived or delegated power; conferred right or title; authorization.
(The relation to sense 1 is seen in ‘by the (king's) authority, by authority of the King.’)
b. with inf. Conferred right to do something.
3. Those in authority; the body or persons exercising power or command. (Formerly in sing. = Government; a Local Sanitary Authority or similar body is also spoken of as ‘the authority.’)
II. Power to influence action, opinion, belief.
4. Power to influence the conduct and actions of others; personal or practical influence.
5.Power over, or title to influence, the opinions of others; authoritative opinion; weight of judgement or opinion, intellectual influence.
6. Power to inspire belief, title to be believed; authoritative statement; weight of testimony. Sometimes weakened to: Authorship, testimony.
7. The quotation or book acknowledged, or alleged, to settle a question of opinion or give conclusive testimony.
8. a. The person whose opinion or testimony is accepted; the author of an accepted statement. b. One whose opinion on or upon a subject is entitled to be accepted; an expert in any question.
Above is a grateful nod to my blog platform. Below are the passages from yesterday's notebook pages (cribbed from http://www.theplayethic.com/2009/08/macro-meso-blogging.html) that I have highlighted for future reference:
If I want to be aphoristic, or be immediately useful with a one link-reference (which can, of course, be to my macro-blog entry), I go to the land of the Fat Wee Bird. The Moses of the Net, John Perry Barlow, recently described Twitter as a place where "genius last ten minutes... Twitter is casting pearls before mayflies". Funny, but only half-true: tweet a link from a macro-level blog, and it can operate as a gear changer, moving people down a few speeds from their skittery cybernetic loop.
But if we posit the poles of micro- and macro-blogging, there must perforce be many gradations in between - what we could call "meso-blogging". 140 characters is indeed valuable for the concision it imposes, and the haiku-like or newspaper-headling-like editing it compels. It's also a kind of input that, with the right device, can easily happen in the tiniest interstices of a busy day. But what happens when what you have to say spills over that long-lost telco engineer's arbitrary text limit? When you have a small story to tell, or a sequence of sound or movement to bear witness to? How do we gently ease out from the limits of 140, yet still retain our spontaneity, our responsiveness to our environment, our thrill of instant publishing?
One can easily imagine another modality of blogging coming through this kind of platform - one that's more experience-and-affect based. Capturing epiphanies at arts, sporting events or family gatherings; enabling a richer record of holiday, tourism, expeditions; presenting rich, personal and multimedia records of practice or craft.
I'm also wondering whether meso-blogging might also interleave with the long, tottering fall of mainstream journalism. Is the hyper-local, super-specialised media that Jeff Jarvis keeps
imagining actually awaiting richer blog platforms and smarter devices - where localities narrate themselves across a range of media streams, and journalists modularise and editorialise these flows (seeking, as ever, the elusive ad dollar...difficult to do with socialist infrastructure, I know...)
Here, in a modest curatorial exercise of my own, are some excerpts from recent posts on Dave Winer's blog on scripting.com:
"Posterous and Tumblr are next" (November 23, 2009) http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/11/23/posterousAndTumblrAreNext.html
There is a position between the lightweight Twitter and the heavyweight WordPress. And Tumblr, Posterous and now TypePad are positioning themselves right there. I expect this sweet spot to become more important over time. Twitter is, no doubt, introducing a great number of people to the joys of blogging. When they want more, some of them will certainly move to these "lite" blogging tools.
"Tumblr and Posterous" (November 25, 2009) http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/11/25/tumblrAndPosterous.html
Meanwhile, TechCrunch has caught onto the idea I borrowed from Steve Rubel, almost. They noted that WordPress was growing while Twitter's growth has (perhaps temporarily) stalled.
The phenomenon is not, as some have said, the "death" of blogging (I hate that word!) -- rather huge growth in blogging at the low-end as NBBs discover its joys through Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps very few of them will want more, but even a few is a lot! Expect a huge surge in medium-range and high-end blogging in the coming years, with products like Tumblr and Posterous and WordPress perfectly poised to capture the growth.
Two things the Twitter guys should, imho, be thinking about:
1. How can they capture this growth as people move up-scale? Should they have a blogging network of their own? Or...
2. As people branch out they're not going to want to give up their networks on Twitter. An alternate to #1 is to fully open the Twitter architecture before the flow around it builds. The Internet routes around a funnel, which is largely what Twitter is, because it's too limiting for what users want to do. Maybe not today, but it's easy to see the day coming.
Historically it always seems to work this way. A company boots up a new activity, then people get familiar with it and want all the power and don't need the training wheels. An industry appears where there used to be a company.
More news.. The TypePad guys have also gotten in touch with news that they have a new simplified REST-style API coming for their new "micro" service. I was actually looking for it.
I totally get the sense that there's a critical mass developing. All these companies are competing fiercely, and they're sharp and focused and hungry. And attaining some success.
I got a note from David Karp at Tumblr saying that for the first time his site is in the top 100 of all sites on the Internet. That's pretty amazing and something to be proud of. Congrats!
One step at a time. This has been a pretty good week for getting things to work together.
I'll keep you posted as things progress.
And a third contribution from Winer's blog: "How (slowly) we add metadata to tweets" (November 25, 2009) http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/11/25/howSlowlyWeAddMetadataToTw.html
Why make an exception for geographic data or which app created the tweet or which tweet it's in response to, or that it was retweeted by 7 people and who they are? Or who wrote it? And when?
These bits of data all live outside the 140 character "limit."
Every good idea people come up with for Twitter involves latching a new piece of metadata to a tweet. And in the middle you have a conflicted, slow and arbitrary (and opaque) decision-making process, controlled by one company.
Shouldn't the architecture of tweets be open to any kind of data that anyone thinks of?
If you make a Twitter client please, start pushing your users' updates to a RSS feed on a server outside of twitter.com. It's just a backup. That's the first easy small step down the path of free evolution. Once someone does that, there are more steps.
To get an idea of what's possible, I recommend reading A better design for Twitter retweets. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to wait for Twitter Corp to try this out?
The link Dave provides is to a post by Alex Bowyer for bitcurrent.com, entitled "A better design for Twitter Retweets" http://www.bitcurrent.com/a-better-design-for-twitter-retweets/, which brings this cut-and-paste montage-fest of the last couple of days back to my posts from last week on the crisis in Retweeting.
Right, that's just about enough curation and montage for one week. As you are aware, these passages comprise my most recent notebook pages, offered here for your consideration (some will be available on my new meso-blog site, makurrah's posterous, which I hope can serve as a gloss on fledgling).
Now if you'll excuse me I've got a lot of unpacking to do (and I'm not talking suitcases). No rest for the weary.
In this post I will retrace the steps of what is becoming a typical trajectory for me: one in which the point of departure is a tweet or a blog post, usually from someone I follow, that directs me to another source that itself points elsewhere. Though I monitored Twitter at a distance for a time before I signed on and began taking part, I would not have guessed that a tweet could unfold in multiple directions worth pursuing, like a map of a place that you love folded origami-style into a tiny, enigmatic shape, and unfolded again.
This morning's example was a tweet from @jayrosen_nyu. which is typically straightforward in its framing of the link:
"Rebooting The News #34 with me and Dave Winer. Show notes and mp3 http://jr.ly/whnr (Google Wave, natural born bloggers, spot.us and more.)
Jay Rosen has more than once provided the link that set a blog post in motion, so I was prepared to follow his direction here, particularly because I am also inclined to want to hear what Dave Winer has to say, especially about "natural born bloggers" (cf. yesterday's post and my set-to with a "pro"). And I've been postponing an investigation of "Rebooting the News" for too long, mostly because I don't like watching video on my laptop screen. When I clicked through, I found #34 in the form of a post by Winer, some of which I'll reproduce here, with a brief gloss of my own.
For starters, Dave had something to say about Twitter's belated move from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" as the service's framing question, or prompt - a move announced on the Twitter blog last week. I addressed this at some length in "'What's happening?' Indeed," posted on fledgling several days ago. Here is Dave Winer on the matter:
Twitter’s new prompt
The official prompt Twitter offers users changed this week. From “what are you doing?” to “what’s happening?” is a shift toward… news! Or, from first person to third person.
Why did they make this shift? Dave: “They have a problem,” a wall, as they call it– converting all the people who sign-up into regular, active users.
I would only underscore that the change in formulation does signal a shift, and potentially a shift toward news, if by that we understand the chronicling of history as it unfolds - journalism in its most crucial function as contemporary historiography. After this virtual meeting of minds, I was delighted to read what these two mindcasters had to say about the concept of the "natural born blogger."
The natural born blogger
Dave wrote, “A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her hands.” This was a reaction to the film, Julie and Julia, which is about a blogger. But the real blogger was the elder one, Julia Child. She stuck her neck out, and disrupted the old system. “This may not be easy, but you can do it…” is the blogger’s true battlecry.
The natural born blogger (Dave says) is “someone whose nature is to do stuff without waiting for permission. To explain things, knowing they could easily be wrong. To go first. To err on the side of saying too much.”
Jay: An example of that in journalism was I.F. Stone. Bloggers aren’t intimidated by expertise or certification. “In rebooting the news we need people who can just look at what needs to be done, look at the tools they have for doing it, and just start in.” As with the political blog, Firedoglake, which sprung up when an ex-movie producer and a lawyer felt the Valerie Plame case simply wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. “They just started this blog because it needed to exist.”
Dave: “That seems like it’s a very American thing.”
Jay: “Jefferson’s idea was that talent was very broadly distributed.”
Dave: “Which is one of the reasons why you want to distribute the publishing tools… That’s what inspires me.”
As a Yank long ago transplanted to Canada, I can't fully endorse the "very American" part, even if Jefferson was right about the distribution of talent. But I'm inspired by Dave's being inspired by the distribution of the publishing tools (remembering the moment when I opened an email from Typepad granting me membership in their program for journos, which however oddly felt like a meaningful certification, and in that moment left the PhD and assorted acronyms of academe languishing in one of memory's less accessible drawers). So without hesitation I clicked through the link to Dave's blog in my quest to discover more about "natural born bloggers."
Sunday, November 22, 2009 by Dave Winer.
I've now seen two movies that had bloggers in leading roles.
1. State of Play. A remake of a brilliant BBC series that was so bad, that portrayed the blogger in such a superficial and humiliating fashion, that I actually walked out in disgust. (A movie has to be very bad for me to walk out on it.)
2. Julie and Julia. I saw it last night, and stayed to the end. I was just as angry at the way they portrayed the blogger, but it turns out for an opposite reason. In this case the dishonesty was reversed, the blogger wasn't at all heroic, and they misrepresented the hero, Julia Child, who was, in many ways more of a true blogger than the blogger! Kind of funny how that works.
A blogger isn't just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn't exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.
Julie used blogging, but Julia was a natural-born blogger.
The dishonesty in the story was how they portrayed Julia Child's reaction to Julie Powell's writing. They didn't explain why she disapproved. If you just went by what the movie said you could easily think she was bitter or closed-minded or jealous of young Julie. Luckily the archive is still on the web, and a simple Google search turned up the answer. Julia Child considered The Julie/Julia Project a stunt. She said of Powell: "She would never really describe the end results, how delicious it was, and what she learned." There's a lot more in a Publisher Weekly interview with Judith Jones, Child's editor at Knopf. Now, that makes sense!
I'd love to see a movie that captures the heroic spirit of blogging. Like all inspiration, it's rare, but that's why it's worth making a movie about. The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
I'm somehow skeptical that "the story of the nobility of blogging" could or should be told through a visual medium. But I'm still inspired, most days, by what I know of Dave Winer. And at some point I'll click through to the Google search for the Julia Child archive, and the interview with Judith Jones. (I saw the film, too. Hated the Julie character. Will never forget the final few frames, with Meryl/Julia opening the box that contains the first copy of her masterwork.)
If there is a persuasive image of Julia as blogger, natural born or otherwise, it looks something like this.
And I've no idea whether Meryl blogs, but I'm partial to photos of classy women with great skin having a smoke.
Professor of comparative literature and theory, writer, novice blogger
Recent Comments