Okay, back to thinking about writing...

Time to get ready for the summer seminar, and to think about writing a little more...both in the traditional sense and in the expanded way I was trying to get at in the last post.

I was interested in Laura Miller's Salon post, The Hyperlink War, that some how came to my attention yesterday. Now that I only write once in a very blue moon (I mean for people to read...), I have missed the raging debate she describes between those who feel that incorporating hyperlinks into the body of the writing is beneficial and those who find it too distracting and prefer them clustered at the end of the text.

There has been a lot in the media about being distracted lately, and about how the way information is coming to us is 'changing' us as a species. Steven Pinker poo-poos the idea in today's New York Times, the same paper that started the debate a few days ago with a review of The Invisible Gorilla (by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons) that made it sound like we have no freaking idea what's going around us. Another winner was Matt Ritchel's story of a profoundly distracted and horribly over-privileged family in San Francisco that cannot unplug for five minutes.

My personal favorite entry in this debate came out in the stone age - I mean, in 2008 - when the Atlantic ran an essay by Nicholas Carr that asked if Google was making us stupid. I like Carr's essay because I identify with his description of the Algernon-effect (notice I didn't stick a link there???) that comes with using the Internet to get at information. I think this is what Miller is bothered by, too - the way the texture of a piece of writing is disturbed by the inclusion of pointers beyond the boundaries of that piece of writing. (Okay, specifically, Miller thinks that using hypertext links in writing is lazy because it alleviates the responsibility to explain things in your own writing...but I see these things as connected.)

And while I can share in Carr and Miller's pique, I wonder if maybe writing (and therefore, reading) ought be recognized as fundamentally different from speech, just as pictures of spaces are fundamentally different form the spaces they depict. When I teach writing, I try to impress upon my students that 'good' writing works like perspective in visual art - it seems to rationalize the space in the text and make it continuous with our world, not to call attention to itself. I'm fascinated by style in writing and visual art, but more interested in it when it creeps up on me - when fantastic ideas and images are teased out of a world that seems connected to the one I know and understand, where the progree toward the strange and wonderful is barely noticed. When things begin in a strange and stylized space, they can seem mannered and thin. But I digress.

Clearly, we need better writing, better art, things that can capture our attention and hold it - not more that can apparently be consumed in seconds, making room for the next thing. Which brings me to an idea Robin Rice floated in a review of the Bravo's Work of Art.

Already, judges have floated the suggestion that successful art (like a successful television show) should clearly communicate something specific or should be marketable. This trivializes the potential of art; some of the best art, indeed, is murky and contradictory. The show is not likely to favor artists who are oblique or subtle or conceptual.

What is good writing, what is good art? These questions matter because writing and art matter to us - they embody our culture, the are the ways in which we pass things on to one another in our own time...nevermind future generations. We all have a stake in figuring out what is 'good' and why.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to do some work.