Monday, June 22, 2009

Sweet concession.

From an interview on More Intelligent Life with Lewis H. Lapham, longtime editor of Harper's Magazine:

MIL: Some might say it’s moved to the blogosphere, although in your speech you seemed to disagree: “The technologies divide the American citizenry into constituencies of one and encourage the broad retreat into the pools of Narcissus where the summer nights are loud with the croaking of blogs.” And yet, the New York Observer reported that you plan to start your own blog. What sort of croaking do you plan to do and why the apparent change of heart?

LHL: I’m going to try and turn it into an art form. I think it can be done along the lines of a Japanese haiku. The internet lends itself to compression, to short form. There’s a wonderful new book by Eduardo Galeano called "Mirrors". I could teach myself how to write an entry along the lines of the kinds you see in the book—stories that have an aperçus. He can sometimes within the space of 600 words tell a small and illuminating story. I was maybe too hasty in my dismissal of the blog, in general. I do see it as a form that can be developed. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out in "Understanding Media", when moveable type came in at the end of the 15th century there are all kinds of dismissive remarks and outrage and scorn and ridicule from the literary class—suddenly you’ve got printing presses grinding out screeds in the vernacular. But it takes a hundred years before you get to Montaigne, Cervantes and Shakespeare.

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