opting out, revisited
Regular readers, if I have any regular readers, will know that this is the kind of thing I strongly disagree with:
Overwhelmed by all the noise, some have simply chosen to block it out — to opt…
In the late ‘90s I started an awkward—some might say excruciating and as-yet incomplete—transition from graduate student to freelance journalist. For the young, lordly know-nothing, this might seem like a natural progression: it’s not. Early on in your new career, you discover that no one gives a fig about your soon-to-be-former pretensions. They want your prose to be precise and matter-of-fact; they want you to get to the point, and briskly; and they don’t as a rule find you charming. Every word you write for a general interest publication is examined through the anticipated experience of an imagined ideal reader, leaving no eye whatsoever trained on your genius. It’s the best capstone to a liberal education one could ask for.
A justly famous scene from Tarkovsky’s The Mirror
Bruce Herman, “Little Gidding”, oil on wood
Research has been done on how the internet affects us, but because I don’t use the internet much now, I can’t google those experts’ opinions and reproduce their wisdom here. What I can report is how being disconnected has changed the pattern of my day and my life. Take my morning: I used to turn on the computer when I got up; with two children to get ready for school, what else could one squeeze into the craze of breakfast-cooking, lunch-packing, tooth-brushing, homework-hunting, but a few minutes of surfing the internet over a becalming cup of coffee? How happily surprised I was when I was proved wrong. The five or seven minutes spent reading some publishing gossip or an acquaintance’s acquaintance retweeting a joke turned out to be just the right amount of time for a chapter of War and Peace or an intense battle in the Iliad… .There is a downside of staying disconnected — I have accumulated too many emails, unread and unreturned; I have neglected people from time to time. I have relaxed my schedule a little, though if the internet functioned before as an addictive distraction, I now have the opposite problem: more than ever, I am addicted to reading, and the moment I have to get on to the internet I become impatient. But these symptoms, at least in my case, are happily relished.
does anything change anything?
does anything change anything?
Marshall Poe says that “the Internet changes nothing”:
The media experts, however, tell us that there really is something new and transformative about the Internet. It goes under various names,…
Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritises pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardised way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.
On the wall of a long-closed station of the Paris Métro
Agnolo Bronzino, “Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View,” ca. 1542–43, Charcoal and black chalk, with stumping, highlighted with white chalk; outlines partly incised for transfer; sheet: 11 5/16 x 8 ½ in. (28.8 x 21.6 cm), Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Paris
I would offer up ‘coolly extravagant’ to describe Bronzino’s vision. Above all, it is full of urbanity, which favors presence but renders it unapproachable. To appreciate these paintings, we must also strive to remember the vastly different senses of style and formality under which Bronzino worked. In her essay 'The Strange Elizabethans,’ Virginia Woolf comments that 'the familiar letters of the time give us little help’ in understanding their private lives, noting that even there the English diplomat Henry Wotton is 'pompous and ornate and keeps us stiffly at arm’s length.’ Woolf gets it right (although, it should be said, she is hardly one to talk), and she might have added that Wotton acquired his personal brand of stiffness in Italy. There were no casual Fridays at the Renaissance court, nor were its denizens in the habit of asking, 'Can I wear shorts to the restaurant?’ Our culture is comfy like a booth at Applebee’s; the Medicis’ was like a resin torch glittering in the eyes of a reptile.