General impressions about this week’s readings below. Some of the reason for the note-form is that I was away for the weekend and the rest of the reason is because I don't have a lot to say about any one particular reading. So:
-I recently got a subscription to The Atlantic and I’m in love. Part pop-culture, part politics, part general interest, what I appreciate about the magazine is that it’s smart but not snooty, glossy but not overly so. Even the politics are leftist but not dogmatically so, the latter being is what I can’t stand about most publications of similar literary merit.
-Fallows’s piece strikes me as more of an essay than an article, the latter being what I expected. I wonder what other magazines are putting essays in their issues? More broadly, I’ve been thinking for quite some time about how the digital age is influencing essays—do things like blog posts count under that umbrella term? People so often associate the term “essay” with boring argument papers in high school or college, so I wonder if blog sites or forms like Wikipedia, which are often doing the same work as an essay in the traditional sense (though not always so eloquently, to be sure), are getting people to (inadvertently?) read complicated works again. That might not be giving readers enough credit, but I know even my eyes glaze over sometimes when somebody suggests I read an essay, or essay collection.
-Along those lines, I was impressed by the number and range of sources Fallows included, and how seamlessly. I’m thinking comparatively to D’agata, since he was just at Pitt. One thing I don’t like about D'agata's writing is that he includes full titles of reference works within the body of his texts—it ends up being incredibly distracting and it breaks up his language. (Maybe people in Structures and Techniques who read his work have something to say about that?) Fallows slides book titles in without a problem, maybe because pretty language isn’t his main goal. Just to pick one example:
-This quote from Fallows could easily be writing advice:
-To switch gears: I don’t understand all the talk about a post-9/11 culture. Is this really a thing, that the attacks changed America in some kind of irreparable way and literature, specifically, has to account for this? There seems to be a different discussion going on in fiction about this, but it reverberates into nonfiction too. I know Miller's piece was for the attacks' tenth anniversary and I suppose it could fall into that general interest part of the magazine that I lauded earlier, but outside of being a recorded testimony from someone who was there, I'm not sure why I'm reading it. When important events happen, the bigness of the event sometimes takes over the artful depiction of it and I think most of that issue of The Atlantic was one of those times. Are some things beyond art? Or were so many people in America so deeply affected by the attacks that we can't quite turn it into art yet? Do societies go through stages of grief and we're still in the documenting stage, the making sense and beauty to come later? Maybe I'm just callous. There's a whole lot of emotions behind 9/11 (and NYC in general) that I just don't get.
-Grantland doesn’t strike me as particularly distinctive content-wise, aside from maybe in voice (that to me, sounds like every other sport-oriented tone I’ve ever heard). The design is simple and pleasing, nonetheless. I might be the wrong audience, but it seems like a bunch of dudes writing about stereotypically masculine things. It seems like a pretty narrow audience if they’re trying to be one of the big players in the “new nonfiction forms” digital world. I really and truly don't want to enter the gender-divide arguments about writing because I find them mostly irrelevant, but I am interested in why sites that cater to women and are written by them--let's say Shine, for instance--are totally a-okay and a special market, but when a site like Grantland comes into being, it's somehow leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. I'm arguing with myself as much as anyone else here. Are we mad that sports feel like men's territory? That they're not and that Grantland doesn't have many female writers? How much should a start-up site balance who they're working with or bringing on to help define their focus and creating a diverse staff?
-Along those lines, 95% of the articles on Grantland look entirely unappealing to me, subject- and approach-wise. As a literary citizen, as someone who strives to read widely, do I have a responsibility to try anyway? This is utterly unrelated to anything we'll probably be talking about this week, but it's something I often wonder about, as the kind of picky reader who will quit a book midway through if I'm sick of it. In a world dependent on unique visitors and clicks, do we have some kind of obligation to "support" literary experiments even if we don't particularly like them? What does that look like anymore? What I'm really asking is: How do independent sites like Grandland stay around? Because people read them? It's not ad revenue. I suspect they don't make enough money from their bound issues either. That's of course the big problem of how to sustain anything when nobody's making money and I guess this extends to books too. I just get the impression that writers feel they have a duty to help sustain other writers and other writers' efforts--an impetus both touchingly small-village and maddeningly impossible.
-I recently got a subscription to The Atlantic and I’m in love. Part pop-culture, part politics, part general interest, what I appreciate about the magazine is that it’s smart but not snooty, glossy but not overly so. Even the politics are leftist but not dogmatically so, the latter being is what I can’t stand about most publications of similar literary merit.
-Fallows’s piece strikes me as more of an essay than an article, the latter being what I expected. I wonder what other magazines are putting essays in their issues? More broadly, I’ve been thinking for quite some time about how the digital age is influencing essays—do things like blog posts count under that umbrella term? People so often associate the term “essay” with boring argument papers in high school or college, so I wonder if blog sites or forms like Wikipedia, which are often doing the same work as an essay in the traditional sense (though not always so eloquently, to be sure), are getting people to (inadvertently?) read complicated works again. That might not be giving readers enough credit, but I know even my eyes glaze over sometimes when somebody suggests I read an essay, or essay collection.
-Along those lines, I was impressed by the number and range of sources Fallows included, and how seamlessly. I’m thinking comparatively to D’agata, since he was just at Pitt. One thing I don’t like about D'agata's writing is that he includes full titles of reference works within the body of his texts—it ends up being incredibly distracting and it breaks up his language. (Maybe people in Structures and Techniques who read his work have something to say about that?) Fallows slides book titles in without a problem, maybe because pretty language isn’t his main goal. Just to pick one example:
“Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative ‘earmarks,’ and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off.”It’s always a tough choice knowing where and how to include one’s sources and Fallows uses a fairly standard approach, but I think he made the right choice. Readers might want to pick up the books he mentions, might know the public figures he references. (To compare, I also like Grantland’s sidenote strategy; it’s so clean-looking and unobtrusive in a way that footnotes aren’t.)
-This quote from Fallows could easily be writing advice:
“I think the exercise is largely a distraction, and that Americans should concentrate on what are, finally, our own internal issues to resolve or ignore.The reason this comes up is that one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned lately is to stop worrying about what other people are doing. There was certainly a period where I needed to learn from other people (and that’s ongoing, of course), but there comes a point when consistently worrying about whether you measure up or not is unhelpful. There's your peek into my psyche for the week.
Naturally there are lessons to draw from other countries’[writers’] practices and innovations; the more we know about the outside world the better, as long as we’re collecting information calmly rather than glancing nervously at our reflected foreign image.”
-To switch gears: I don’t understand all the talk about a post-9/11 culture. Is this really a thing, that the attacks changed America in some kind of irreparable way and literature, specifically, has to account for this? There seems to be a different discussion going on in fiction about this, but it reverberates into nonfiction too. I know Miller's piece was for the attacks' tenth anniversary and I suppose it could fall into that general interest part of the magazine that I lauded earlier, but outside of being a recorded testimony from someone who was there, I'm not sure why I'm reading it. When important events happen, the bigness of the event sometimes takes over the artful depiction of it and I think most of that issue of The Atlantic was one of those times. Are some things beyond art? Or were so many people in America so deeply affected by the attacks that we can't quite turn it into art yet? Do societies go through stages of grief and we're still in the documenting stage, the making sense and beauty to come later? Maybe I'm just callous. There's a whole lot of emotions behind 9/11 (and NYC in general) that I just don't get.
-Grantland doesn’t strike me as particularly distinctive content-wise, aside from maybe in voice (that to me, sounds like every other sport-oriented tone I’ve ever heard). The design is simple and pleasing, nonetheless. I might be the wrong audience, but it seems like a bunch of dudes writing about stereotypically masculine things. It seems like a pretty narrow audience if they’re trying to be one of the big players in the “new nonfiction forms” digital world. I really and truly don't want to enter the gender-divide arguments about writing because I find them mostly irrelevant, but I am interested in why sites that cater to women and are written by them--let's say Shine, for instance--are totally a-okay and a special market, but when a site like Grantland comes into being, it's somehow leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. I'm arguing with myself as much as anyone else here. Are we mad that sports feel like men's territory? That they're not and that Grantland doesn't have many female writers? How much should a start-up site balance who they're working with or bringing on to help define their focus and creating a diverse staff?
-Along those lines, 95% of the articles on Grantland look entirely unappealing to me, subject- and approach-wise. As a literary citizen, as someone who strives to read widely, do I have a responsibility to try anyway? This is utterly unrelated to anything we'll probably be talking about this week, but it's something I often wonder about, as the kind of picky reader who will quit a book midway through if I'm sick of it. In a world dependent on unique visitors and clicks, do we have some kind of obligation to "support" literary experiments even if we don't particularly like them? What does that look like anymore? What I'm really asking is: How do independent sites like Grandland stay around? Because people read them? It's not ad revenue. I suspect they don't make enough money from their bound issues either. That's of course the big problem of how to sustain anything when nobody's making money and I guess this extends to books too. I just get the impression that writers feel they have a duty to help sustain other writers and other writers' efforts--an impetus both touchingly small-village and maddeningly impossible.
No comments:
Post a Comment