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Today's
Message
November
4, 2005
I
posted a poem here last week, Reviving
The Art of Correspondence, relating the contemporary
experience of digital letter writing between women. Today
I opened Sunday's New York Times to a review of "Women's
Letters", which sounds like a fascinating collection
of private correspondence from the Revolution to the present.
So much historical truth and cultural insight lies in the
personal and social realms (a la Howard Zinn's
People's History). The problem is, how will our progeny
sift through billions of Instant Messages and blogs, much
of it dashed off and trivial, to capture the intimacies
and historical insights that biographers and historians
have traditionally harvested from letters and personal papers?
That is, if these communications are even salvageable—they
are likely to be lost in cyberspace, or locked in code,
stacked up in insurmountable virtual landfills full of old
hard drives awaiting recycling...
Digital
technology will surely alter the nature of both artful correspondence
and scholarship. Biographers are pondering how writing on
computers might affect future efforts to understand the
intellectual and creative process of authors and historical
figures—when drafts are deleted, rather than penciled
with notations and stuffed into a strong box, what is lost?
On the
other hand, digital archives will broaden access to history
and literature. One of the hottest topics in the publishing
world today is the effort by various companies and nonprofit
coalitions to digitize "all of human knowledge."
Everyone from The Smithsonian to Harvard and Stanford, Google,Yahoo,
and Hewlett Packard is involved in projects to scan millions
of books and documents and make the entire contents available
to anyone with internet access (see the open
content alliance and google
print library). The idea is that everything that has
ever been published will ultimately be scanned and readable
online.
This
is a mixed blessing, of course, if you love books. It is
central to my sense of well-being to gaze across my wall
of books each day, as I pass them lined up on the hallway
shelves outside my bedroom office. I often stop to crack
a spine, just to briefly hold Willa Cather, mouth a stanza
of Richard Wilbur, wistfully recall Isabel Archer on the
continent. What bloggers refer to as pulp and ink is for
readers the private physical pleasure of turning those wood
fiber pages, those Leaves of Grass, in your hand.
I can
lose myself in words on a screen, and I relish the discovery
of hyperlinking my way through sources and voices and ideas
on the web. But in the end, I will not download and read
Mrs. Dalloway on a Blackberry as long as I can walk into
Canio's,
the invitingly overflowing, wood-framed bookstore down the
street, and dig out a worn, clothbound tome to tuck beneath
my arm, cradle against the chest.
I love
the idea that digital libraries will allow me to discover
an out-of-print book, wander the virtual stacks at Oxford,
or read the online journal of a woman living in Iraq. The
Internet poses a huge opportunity for scholarship. And it
greatly expands access to the conversation, making a democratic
platform for more voices to be heard. But it creates a vast,
overwhelming, volume of stuff. The Internet, like so much
in our society, offers us everything—millions of rambling
diaries, zillions of scanned books and documents. And each
of us is left trying to figure out where to look, what matters,
how to spend our own brief, ever-shortening days.
I'm
sure there are people designing algorithms to create meaning
from the avalanche of digitized correspondence in cyberspace:
there will be new search technologies and organizing schemes
to help you find what will interest you (like when Amazon.com
offers up "If you liked The Odyssey, you should
try The Aeneid!”)
It's
possible that there are programmers in cubicles right now
creating software that will enable scholars like the editors
of Woman's Letters to someday efficiently peruse
vast abandoned archives of emails by ordinary women and
future Emily Dickinsons. It may become possible to scan
a zillion messages by subject (search emails about relationships)
and perhaps even sensibility (locate expressions of melancholia).
But my grandchildren will not find my correspondence preserved,
like the letters my great grandmother Paula Romney sent
from Jamaica to her fiancé that my Mom chanced upon
when she inherited her grandfather's burnished pine lap
desk.
And
even if all the digital chatter is saved and stored, trying
to locate felt experience, personal truth, in a hundred
thousand search results will be a very different discovery
than opening a creased, yellowed paper, wrapped in ribbon,
that reveals a life wrought in painstaking cursive and meticulously
blotted ink.
October
27, 2005
I
Write Therefore I Blog?
If
you are a political pundit you write a blog to change the
world. Or rather, to get the credit you deserve for perceptively
articulating how the world ought to be changed. (That's
DailyKos,
Josh,
the pundit squads,
even that "I'm just looking to amuse" chick
on all the talk shows.) If you are a diarist,
you write a blog to share your intimate thoughts and personal
feelings. If you are a geek,
you write a blog to wax techtastic and wow your programmer
cohorts. But if you are a writer, you write a blog so as
to force yourself to write every day...
That
advice repeated ad nauseam: write every day, write every
day. That's like saying slam your head against a stone wall
(on a road diverged in a yellow wood) every day, and do
it again the next day. Work hurts. It usually sucks. This
essay probably sucks. In fact, I'm sure of it. (Maybe all
this slamming will finally knock some sense into me.)
Anyway,
I've been looking into the blogosphere, studying up on pings
and tags and trackbacks and permalinks. These are the digital
semiotics of blogging—necessary to enter search engines,
alert the blogosphere, to get heard and bookmarked and blogged
about on important blogs. There is blogger etiquette; there
are shared formats, accepted conventions.
And
I now realize just how ill-suited this medium is to lone
gunman craftspersons such as myself. Honestly, we don't
want to encourage comment threads, conversations, and social
networks
that categorize and list everything everyone else has to
say about everything.
We just
want to say what we have to say and do it so well you will
leave asking for more. We just want the time and space to
linger over words, balance compelling ideas, tiptoe into
deep water without drowning. We turn each word over like
a shell found on the beach, pensively weighing whether to
toss it back or slip it into our bucket. We wake up worrying
about the third paragraph; we push delete then regret it
and hope that "undo typing" will restore what's
lost. We sift through drafts and phrases that disappear
or appear like magicians' pennies, where did that metaphor
behind your ear come from?
This
week a newspaper editor called and asked me to make a carefully
honed, methodically trimmed essay longer to fill a space,
2 more column inches. It was as much work to push 100 words
back in as to birth the original 600. Maybe the piece is
better, but I sure as hell can't tell. Swim in language
too long and it just leaves you thrashing about, gasping
for air. Finding that sweet spot where you are actively
buoyant, where you can trust your body to the water, that's
some trick.
Tag
that "elusive streams of prose" or "voice"
or just another writer, daily writing.
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October
10, 2005
The
Best, Not Necessarily The Brightest
Having
just watched my first born graduate from Stanford University,
I was fascinated by Malcolm Gladwell's piece
in the New Yorker about the history of Ivy League college
admissions. WOW. Check it out: the truth behind the bizarre,
inscrutable system for anointing the academic elite is fascinating
and oh so American. In short, all the admissions essaying
and interviewing and rating candidates on a scale of 1-6
to create a "balanced class" began as a desperate effort
to keep those effete Jews with their smarmy studiousness
and irritatingly intellectual inclinations from diluting
the all-American, good ole, preppy, academic aristocracy.
Every
time people complain about SATs being unfair, I remind them
that entrance exams began as a way of letting people in,
not keeping them out. If it weren't for a chance to submit
stellar SAT scores my un-schooler daughter would never have
gotten into Stanford. Entrance exams were originally a progressive
concept: the idea was to create an objective means whereby
anybody who was smart, whether a public school immigrant
urbanite or a prep school Wasp, or in our case a kid who
didn't even go to school, would have an equal shot at passing
the test and getting in.
But
the gatekeepers at Harvard decided that this egalitarian
thing had gone way to far when they started getting classes
that were 20% Jewish. Gladwell reports that Jerome Karabel's
book "The Chosen" relays how Harvard, et. al., instituted
highly subjective, immeasurable criteria like "character,"
not to mention the personal interview and recommendation
letter, to screen out the high scoring, skinny, klutzy,
intellectuals (read Jews and gays) that were getting in
based on test scores alone. Hmm, this was in the twenties
and thirties, just as Nazism was percolating abroad. (Side
note: at elite Williams College in the 1930's when students
staged a parade to protest Hitler's book burnings, frat
boys crashed the parade and stole the protester's effigy
of Hitler to protect it from being burned.)
Granted
modern day SATs and the like are culturally biased and don't
actually measure much of anything meaningful (they don't
even really predict how well you will do in college beyond
Freshman year and they certainly don't measure how smart
you are), but at least no one looking at your test scores
knows that you are, as Gladwell sums it up, "short with
big ears".
Stanford
is the only school that my daughter got into (she didn't
apply to any back up schools since she wasn't all that convinced
that college was necessary; she was rejected by Yale, waitlisted
at Harvard). Stanford was also the only school she applied
to that doesn't do personal interviews. My husband opined,
not entirely whimsically, that perhaps they don't do interviews
because historically, as a West Coast School, they needed
some smart-alecky, east coast Jews. But seriously, my daughter
interviews very well—she's short but cute, and looks way
more like my Episcopalian Mom than her East European paternal
grandmother, and although she's more bookish than Yale might
like, she's remarkably personable when she has to be, considering
she's a total introvert—the Harvard interviewer even told
her she was "the right kind of person for Harvard"—so
why only the one school....
Okay,
I do think my daughter got into Stanford because Stanford
is awesome in appreciating independent thinkers (it prides
itself on being an entrepreneur incubator for goodness sake)
and Harvard probably gets way too many self-educated slam
poets applying these days.
But
I do know that George Bush took my husband's place at Yale
in 1964. A short orthodox Jew from Rochester, NY whose parents
never got through the 8th grade, my man had the test scores,
transcript, academic prizes and artistic achievements to
make a Bush blush, but he was waitlisted the year George
joined his skull and bones brother John Kerry and waltzed
through Yale's hallowed archways.
Of
course, I wouldn't want to be selfish here. We all know
it's still vitally important for the country, to the grooming
of a future generation of leaders, to have a "balanced"
class at Yale, don't you agree?
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