Maybe it’s just me, but the last several weeks seem to have been extremely busy with momentous events to which I cannot speak individually, let alone collectively: hurricane rain and flooding; the dedication and debate of the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial, the first memorial in Washington DC dedicated to an African-American leader; the ten-year anniversary of 9/11; the Dow is up, the Dow is down; looming government shutdown; shutdown averted; about twelve Republican pre-primary debates including one where the crowd booed a gay soldier for coming out and another in which the crowd cheered for an imminent execution; a stay of execution in Texas; and the execution of another man in Georgia whose conviction is all kinds of shaky. And, of course, the implementation of the “new” Facebook.
With all this going on, it’s amazing to me in many ways that the most strident comments I see on Facebook are about the new Facebook. I understand the sense of disruption, and I hope in some way the complaints about the new interface are ways of expressing frustration not just about the social networking locus but as well about every messed-up thing around. So perhaps it’s foolish of me to note that Facebook has changed its design significantly three or four times in the last few years and that each time people have been in an uproar, generating petitions, bemoaning the loss of the “old Facebook,” while the succession of updates, which always sneak in step-wise, means that the object of anyone’s particular nostalgia is several generations gone and probably only existed for about a week. But, hey, that’s capitalism, even when you’re not paying for it.
I’ll say it: I don’t mind the new Facebook. Except, that is, for this updating scroll in the upper right of the screen, which is looking a lot like TweetDeck, which I’ve decided not to use anymore: there’s a lot going on, or it appears that there’s a lot going on, all the time and everywhere, but the speed of the updating (which, yes, is a factor of how many “friends” or “connections” or “subscriptions” one has, which is probably too many, which is very much a motivating factor for the new design, I’m sure) suggests that you can’t care about anything for very long, except for the speed or flow of the info that rewrites one’s overwhelm every minute and, of course, for the site of this confrontation, namely Facebook.
So, I’ve come to love the fact that my new unmarked room in Emory’s Woodruff Library tower doesn’t have very good cell reception or reliable WiFi.
I’m working on a book about art that responds to events from the Civil Rights Movement, which means working through a lot of art books, which are unwieldy and extremely heavy, so I applied for a study, I got one, and now I disappear for a few hours every day. Entirely.
I assume, if you’re reading this, if you’re still reading this, you’ve got a decent attention span. If you’re coming to the Kenyon Review blog, you’re a reader, and you enjoy getting totally absorbed in a book, a movie, an installation piece, what have you. So you know the shutting off and shutting in, the silence that comes after you cut the TV off and the flood that comes after you start reading an essay, a story, a poem, a novel–which, I believe, is probably the appropriate response to the new new new new new Facebook. Or whatever.
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But, in passing, let me say, too, it may be remarkable–for however long this sense lasts, before we all become inured to the rush of that info in the Facebook space–that these relatively unimportant changes can make something also as unimportant as a blog post seem more literate or enjoyable.
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Does this tension I’m reading in the response to the new Facebook point to a broader tension between concentration and distraction and, through that, to our–readers and writers, I mean (I don’t know almost anybody else)–working through a process of balancing the medium of the bound book with the medium of the web? The web, like TV, seems devoted to change, to update, to motion; how else to explain the proliferation of 24-hour networks and their attendant news sites that still really tell you nothing? The web moves, so even when I rediscover a great interview on BOMB’s website, my first instinct, if I want to read it, is to print it out or, more telling yet, find a copy of the original magazine. The book, the horizontal plane instead of the vertical, is still (I’ve been reading too much Walter Benjamin maybe) the site of concentration for me.
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Walter Benjamin, from “One Way Street”:
Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form. If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular. And before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colourful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight. Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what is taken for intellect for city dwellers, will grow thicker with each succeeding year.
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That said, I’m grateful for the arrival of the iPad and the increasing availability of books and journals for the iPad, which allows me to read in the horizontal what I can access via the web.
And, of course, for well-thought and well-executed transitions from print to web.
Last year Shenandoah, the powerhouse at Washington and Lee University, ceased printing itself after sixty years and set about a move to the web. Now, they’ve launched their new website, shenandoahliterary.org, which marks a real milestone. Other journals were born online and have thrived there–Octopus comes to mind. A number of venerable titles, notably VQR and Poetry, have used their webspace as a broad archive, making past issues available anew. But Shenandoah’s relocation, like TriQuarterly’s, heralds a new era in which the print journal moves entirely the web, where the old horizontal sense can perhaps reshape the vertical.
Shenandoah is, I think, ahead of the game in many ways. Their archives are not as extensive as, say, Poetry’s, so their representation of “classic” material may stand out and, in the context of the “issue,” which is still the model for presentation in the online Shenandoah, make the framework of the timely literary journal more dynamic by graphing its relationship to the institution’s own past. It’s a remarkable return and a genuine step forward, a change I think we don’t have to complain about.