"Odds and Ends" by the Suburban Hick (D'Arcy)
What this section is about is, well, what it is. Skimming
through several books that I have picked up and read, I came
across several ideas that I'm going to compose into some sort of
Mosaic that I hope you'll enjoy...and understand. Where
applicable, I will intrude
Bless Carole Maso. She gave me the inspiration for this piece.
Oh, and, yeah, most of my citations are not in the MLA format. Not now, at least, but they will be in my "Works Cited" page.
"You are afraid. You are afraid, as usual, that the novel is dying. You think you know what a novel is: it's the kind you write. You fear you are dying.
You wonder where the hero went.
You wonder how things could have gotten so out of hand.
You ask where is one sympathetic, believable character?
You ask where is the plot?
You wonder where on earth is the conflict? The resolution? The denouement?"
(pg 50 of "Rupture, Verge and Precipice; Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not" by Carole Maso in Tolstoy's Dictophone)
Where is the Novel going? Where are our stories, and how will they be created, if everyone in the world seems to be writing them? How can we distinguish between the Real and the Nots of writers? Who IS a writer? What defines us, what is our definition? Poets are being overrun by Magnetic Poetry Sets and refrigerators. Should we congratulate and celebrate the resurgence of poetry, or stone to death the mis-users?
Who are the mis-usrers?
Where do we all live, now? We have homes, businesses--some of us have businesses in the home, and some of us live at our jobs--and homepages, email addresses, websites.
Homepages?
"Most server sites on the WWW have a master list of menus, like a table of contents, called its home page. Here we find an introduction to the site, its statement of purpose, and its personality. And almost every home page has a selection called Related Sites, giving connections to other sites considered important" (pg 18, The WEB Empowerment Book).
What is important, then? Who is, on the Web? We know who is important on Television because the Newscasters and E! and MTV tells us who. The Newspapers tell us who is also important, but not so much.
But now, anyone can live everywhere, see everything, and be anyone. Isn't that interesting???
"Why Traditional Publications Fail on the Web. You'll read out it in the Wall Street Journal, practically every week. Some well-funded Web publication venture goes under. Why? Chances are you're reading about an attempt to create a traditional magazine on the Web, something that might manage to attract enough hits to justify advertising" (54, Publish it on the Web!).
Byran Pfaffenberger (no, I did not make this name up), the creator of the above book, says that "The key to successful publishing on the Web is to realize that the Web isn't just a medium for making information available....it's also a technology for facilitating community-building and interaction" (54-55).
Do you feel the community here? Are you a part of MY community? Are you interacting with me?
And, does your MOTHER know???!!!
"One of the most important conventions for communications by way of any medium--whether through speech, print, or electronic discourse--is a statement of purpose, or an answer to the question Why and Who?, or an answer to a question from your WWW audience, such as Now that we are here, what are you going to show and tell us?" (56, Writing for the World Wide Web).
What am I going to show and tell you?? What do you want to see? What do you want to learn? What do you want to be TOLD? Do you want to be told what you're seeing? Or see what you're being told? What an interesting concept. Essays on the Web are just mumbles and jumbles of things from the real world, set into pixels, and danced in front of your eyes off a several-hundred-dollar machine that you probably can't afford just yet. Web pages, of course, are worse. Once a person gets into his or her head one of those IDEAS (a frightening concept), the ones that say "Hey, I can write--why don't I learn HTML?," and grabs one of those free home pages from those nice friendly servers, all sorts of havoc comes to pass.
Just like this web page. It's mine. I thought I could write it.
Victor Vitanza makes a lot of sense. I'm glad that I was introduced to him--pardon me, to his BOOKS--by my English Professor.
"Writing for print is old. Writing for the Web is new. Some people argue that writing for the web should not be done--though it can be done and is done--as if for print. Other people argue that it should be done and not as if for print.
What this alternative method of writing would be, however, has not yet been satisfactorily determined" (105).
"Writing for the Web is a very new craft and art. our concern with it has arisen in the past three or four years. Within a short period of time, people writing for the Web and commentators on such writing (and designing) have developed some conventions about what information should appear and how it should appear ona viewer's monitor" (180).
Don't you feel like you're listening to a Child's Reader?
I'm writing on the Web. Strange...How come I consider computer publishing something alien and totally idiotic, something that challanges my preconceived notions that the only REAL writing and publishing is that which is done on paper, and yet, here I am?
Hypocrites Unite!
I don't consider computer publishing an art, or a genre, or anything really great. Yet, once again, here I am, and, boy, do I enjoy the power!!!!
"My little buttercup, has the sweetest smile..."
Where is that song from? I know from what I hear, from what Professors tell me, and from what the News tells me, and from my Parents, and from that I know what I should know, or what others think I should know. This doesn't answer my questions, however. How does a buttercup smile? And why do people consider--in their minds, at least--that computers are sentient, thinking creatures that can act and react, and can SPEAK to them?
"Oh, yeah, by the way, I was talking with this guy on-line..." No, you weren't! You were TYPING at the Chat Room!!! Crazy.
(pg 7, Jonathan Frazen's "Scavaging" in Birkert's Tolstoy's Dictophone)
Did Tolstoy ever own a Dictophone, has anyone ever figured out???
Are you deaf and blind, too??
Computers and the internet are narcotics to a technology-drugged world. MORE MORE MORE! they scream when they are denied, when the servers go down, when laws are suggested to limit our speech on the internet. Oh, then, in the latter, they suggest less. Hypocrites?
"May we begin a dialogue there in the future. May we learn somethign from each other. Electronic writing will help us to think about impermanence, facility, fragility and freedom, spatial intensities, irreverences, experimentation, new worlds, clean slates. Print writing will allows us new respect for the mark on the page, the human mind, the erasure, the hesitation, the mistake" (59, Maso, Tolstoy's Dictophone).
Are you feeling the intensity that I speak?
"Easier. Easier to avoid the emotions that attends direct experience. One of phone culture's many results--ominous or convenient, depending on your outlook--is to dilute strong emotion, often to the vanishing point. To make everything personal feel, to some degree, like business--a development in keeping with our waning century's transformation of the planet into a giant quasi-corporation. The phone makes us businesslike; it makes us conduct our lives like cottage industries, with appointments, calendar juggling, quick jottings of memos, names and numbers" (131, Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "Only Connect?" in Tolstoy's Dictophone).
Easier. Do you feel on the Web? Can you FEEL the intensity? Can you feel it...easier? Pornography thrives on the Web because it makes people FEEL.
I don't think I should continue on that track. It's a bit too...ah...inappropriate. Let's just say that the feeling isn't quite what I had in mind.
Did that shock you? Shock you what I said? Or did it shock you that I did NOT say what was said? Hmm...
I wonder what my Professors think of that. But I'm not writing this for THEM.
I feel tired. I think I will stop. But, first, "The Fate of the Book" by Birkerts (another Tolstoy reference).
"In asking about the fate of the book, most askers really want to talk about the fate of a way of life. But no one ever just comes out and says so. This confirms my genderal intuition about Americans, even--or especially--American intellectuals. We want to alk about the big things but we just can't let ourselves admit it" (
or choose from these:
Established: Dec. 15, 1998; Last updated: Dec. 16, 1998