Archive for June, 2010

>The Solitary Writer in a Database World

Posted on June 14, 2010. Filed under: book cultures, Boston Review, Calvino, New Republic, photography |

>Italo Calvino wrote a short story back in the 1950s entitled “Adventures of a Photographer” published in his collection Difficult Loves.  In the story, the main character Antonino complains about the way we take photographs of only those happy moments in our lives, recording just fragments of a life lived (this was before life blogging).  So instead, he sets out to record practically every moment of his life, and specifically every moment of his new relationship with his girlfriend Bice who eventually gives up on his increasing obsession that verges on mania. So Antonio begins photographing his Bice’s absence, until, at the end of the story, he is left with only a pile of fragmented photographs and tenuous hold on reality.

“Man Writing” by Oliver Ray

I remembered this story when I read a review of Viktor Mayer-Schonberger Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Evegeny Morozov in the Boston Review.  The article raises questions about our ever-increasing data culture and the benefits and limits of forgetting: “Consider digital photography: we take lots more photos than we did in the analogue age. But is the global photo-orgy—3 billion photos are uploaded each month to Facebook alone—good for remembering? There is a good case to the contrary. The explosion of photos makes it harder to find what we need.”

It is not just photographs that we are swimming in each day to organize and reorganize.  At Publishing Perspectives Chris Kubic writes of the future book as “not as physical objects, but as relational databases.”  By this he means “something that stores information in a structured, organized way.”  But there is something suspicious  about turning the idea of a book into a database.  Perhaps this concept works better with those stuffy poorly written how-to manuals about planning for your retirement or building an outdoor deck, or even self-help books that promise a new life in seven easy steps.  But what of the more crafted, imagined works, where the fragments of sentences and words, of paragraphs and chapters are more than the their parts.  Would the creative book (fiction or non-fiction) become, like the cds, cut up and purchased in its parts?  Would we then begin to organize our own book lists (i.e. playlists) on our ipads and kindles?

from Publishing Perspectives

Jed Perl at The New Republic reflects on a different kind of “relational” experience in the act of writing:  that between writer and reader. Amid our conversations about texts and tweets and nooks, what has happened, Perl asks, to the place of the solidary writer? “Writing, initially a very private act, has the potential to become an overwhelmingly public act. I realize that this is part of the excitement of writing. I’ve experienced that excitement firsthand. But how a writer chooses to negotiate the transition between the privacy of writing and the publicness of reading will ultimately determine what kind of a writer he or she is. Writers who publish with small circulation magazines and tiny, non-commercial presses can sometimes achieve an astonishingly powerful presence, because they’ve acquired their readers gradually, incrementally, one by one.”

Perl wishes to recover some sense of the solitary, private act of the writing process, and to recognize that writing is a determined transition from the private to the public.  It may be a hopeful wish to hold onto this notion, for there are fewer discussions about the private act of writing (where are the new and innovative start-up money and grants to support the act of writing?)  as with the public expression, circulation and retrieval of such writing.   Perl’s ideas speak to the very premise of this blog:  writing in public–the way we write now.