Louis C.K. is a comedian with balding, red hair. He has a television show that I’ve seen a few times and I enjoyed. I don’t know what his initials stand for or why his show is called Louie and not Louis. My guess is this is a typo that no one noticed until it was too late, and then they were embarrassed to change.
Anonymity can be a positive force. The idea, as expressed by people like Google CEO Eric Schmidt, that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” just doesn’t hold up. It assumes an infinitely just world, and not simply in legal terms, but also in social norms and political interests. It ignores the fact that voicing opinions and unflattering facts can have consequences.
…Online, there is another good reason for protecting the anonymous commons: it increases the diversity of people who speak up. To speak publicly is to take a risk. What if you say the wrong thing? What if you insult somebody? What if your words are misconstrued? Every spoken phrase could be measured up against your current and future employers, your friends, your family, your reputation. Only those without much guilt or shame – either by way of purity, nihilism, or sociopathic narcissism – are left to voice their opinions. They control the conversation. Whereas in the anonymous world, there is no ego to feed. There are no Sarah Palins.
It’s funny that, despite my well-known antipathy to Plato, I derive so much pleasure from the contemplation of ideas for their own sake. A large part of what I love about the Internet is the ability to bypass all the sensory input I have no interest in and get right to the heart of the matter: words and thoughts. I love the pure democracy of it, even, the way any basement-dwelling “loser” or bored, unattractive cubicle drone can enrich and enliven my day by writing in their free time.
Despite the cultural lip service paid, most people don’t really love the interchange of ideas or the concept of free speech, though. Most people seek out affirmations and a hive-mind to comfort them, and treat dissenting ideas as a personal attack on their identity. Speak too freely, and you guarantee that someone will dutifully make note of your words in a dossier to be used against you should the need ever arise. It’s not that most of us have anything horribly repulsive to say anyway, but anonymity gives us the chance to speak off-the-cuff without suffering vindictive reactions from a culture in which giving offense has become a mortal sin.
If I could time-travel back to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, I would console Khakheperresenb with the familiar paraphrase of Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.” Or André Gide’s comforting remark, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Originality, after all, includes not only saying something for the first time, but re-saying (in a worthy new way) the already said: rearranging an old tune in a different key, to a different rhythm, perhaps on a different instrument. Has that been said before? No matter: on with the story!
Postmodernism held sway during the last few decades of the twentieth century and is the end of the Romantic emphasis on medium rather than content, the notion that outside of words there is nothing. Postmodernism is characterized by a fin de (vingtième) siècle weariness: all has been said, all done; we are merely adding footnotes to footnotes. Pastiche, as in the works of Walter Benjamin, was held to be the most profound artistic expression; doing literature in the voices of others (espoused by the Russian theorist Bahktin and exemplified in the ingenious fables of postmodernism’s patron saint, Jorge Luis Borges) was all we had left. Some of the postmodernists, to be sure, give the sense they’d like to be direct and fresh again, but can’t forget what they know: so academics tried unsuccessfully to blow up the walls of their ivory tower through the Marxist “cultural studies” of the 80s and 90s, focusing on Barbie and Princess Di instead of Tolstoy and King Lear. Yet making Barbie academic just brought Barbie inside the ivory tower and displaced the things already there, classics of art and literature (written, it was pointed out as if this were the deal-breaker, by dead white males); the meat changed but the smothering sauce of academic jargon, the lingua franca of the educated classes, made it all taste the same as before.
I wonder how much of our modern angst over originality in art is related to our conceptions of individuality, as in the individual personality, the one-and-only author, being responsible for this particular thought. Without that perceived importance of specific credit being acknowledged, does it matter how derivative a song or story is? It will still be new to someone.
“Names are loaded, full of pitfalls and possibilities, and can prove obstacles to writing…” Ciuraru explains. “A change of name, much like a change of scenery, provides a chance to begin again.”
With skilled research and palpable empathy, Ciuraru chronicles the lives of secretive storytellers – those who wished to communicate without being known. In our tell-all age, such shyness might seem strange, but there was a time when pseudonyms were common.
…But – as Nom de Plume reveals – pseudonyms can also facilitate honesty. Without fear of retribution, authors like George Eliot felt empowered to express their controversial views on religion and politics.
It’s like the Buddhist saying about the finger pointing at the moon: My everyday personality isn’t important, so I try to remove myself from the picture and let my words and ideas speak for themselves. Conversation will always gravitate toward gossip and irrelevancies, alas and alack, but goddamnit, I’m going to do my best to keep my little nook of the Internet focused on the life of the mind!
It’s true, though — I express myself more openly and honestly here than I do in everyday life. Why, you lucky few know more about me — the stuff I consider important, at any rate — than people I’ve known for years and seen on a regular basis. Don’t you feel special now?
Whatever kind of bizarre ideal one may follow, one should not demand that it be the ideal, for one therewith takes from it its privileged character. One should have it in order to distinguish oneself, not in order to level oneself. […] Whereas: true heroism consists, in not fighting under the banner of sacrifice, devotion, disinterestedness, but in not fighting at all – “This is what I am, this is what I want – you can go to hell!”
— Nietzsche
So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you’re reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don’t waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.
And please, despite what I said earlier, do not +1, tweet, StumbleUpon, like or comment on this article. You’ll only be making it worse.
In the last couple months, I’ve gotten a both a Twitter and blog link from a much bigger blog, as well as a couple of my posts being linked on Facebook and StumbleUpon. I certainly appreciate that something I wrote inspired someone else to want to show it to others, but I have to admit that it was an unsettling feeling to look at site stats for the week and wonder if I got re-routed into someone else’s account by mistake. I can accept that my small handful of regular readers are just warped individuals with terrible taste and a lot of time to kill at work, but if I ever got inexplicably popular, I’d start to worry that I might have to slip away quietly in the night to start a new blog under a different pen name. Never fear; you all are the inner circle. My posse. My peeps. My homies. I’d surreptitiously let you know where to find me should that ever become necessary. But please, try not to tell your friends about me. If you absolutely feel compelled to quote me, pretend you don’t remember exactly where you read it. Keep me safe from prying eyes. I work best toiling away in anonymity.
I hate, hate, hate having to go for nearly a week without writing, but I just finished a thirteen-hour day at work. Monday was a sixteen-hour day. Etc. I am a burnt cinder at the moment.
Having worked at night my entire adult life, I find it difficult to adjust to staying up late and sleeping for eight or so hours straight. So here I sit in pitch darkness, my face illuminated by only my computer screen, trying to find things to write about.
It has been fun, but I’ve also mostly just wanted work to be over, so I could do “real writing.” And that never happens unless you take a lot of time off, because otherwise your work writing uses up all your potential real writing juice. And then one day you’re old, and then shortly after that, you die.
…What’s your take on the romantic notion of the artist in isolation? Is a Henry David Thoreau laughable in this day and age? —KateOf course writers need solitude—that’s where the writing happens—but I’m with MacLeish: if you’re going to have anything worth saying, you’d better start by taking an interest in other people. That means living among them; sexting doesn’t count. The two big dangers for contemporary fiction, it seems to me, are people not reading enough and people not hanging out enough. These dangers were unimaginable in Thoreau’s time. His solitude is full of remembered texts and remembered conversations. His clean slate is a palimpsest. But to spend your days alone and online isn’t just bad training, it also makes for lousy material.
Henry was no hermit. Hardly even a recluse. His celebrated cabin at Walden Pond – some of his neighbors called it a “shanty” – was two miles from Concord Common. A half-hour walk from pond to post office. Henry lived in it for only two years and two months. He had frequent human visitors, sometimes too many, he complained, and admitted that his daily rambles took him almost every day into Concord. When he tired of his own cooking and his own companionship he was always welcome at the Emersons’ for a free dinner.
In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.
Brad Warner ain’t gettin’ paid.
I certainly hope IOZ’s cryptic post is just announcing a hiatus rather than an end to his blogging career. He’s long been one of my favorite writers on the web. His prose is alternately highfalutin and comfortably familiar, but always highly enjoyable and sometimes even breathtaking (I can easily find several instances in my own writing where I can clearly see his stylistic influence). I love his calm insouciance and even his disdainful sneering, especially when answering angry hecklers with quotations from The Big Lebowski. (I even watched that movie for the first time years ago so I could understand all the references.) And most of all, even though it was an acquired taste, I deeply appreciate the fact that he often forced me to think about things in a new way, not by being cheaply provocative or predictably contrary, but by being a genuinely iconoclastic thinker. I’ve often found myself uncomfortable and even pissed off by the things he wrote, especially early on, but I quickly came to realize that in many of those instances, it was because he was forcing me to confront my own intellectual laziness, that he had essentially zeroed in on something that I had been complacently accepting without careful scrutiny. It was the same sort of irritation that you feel when you’re comfortable on the sofa, and you’re asked to get up and move. Eventually, I came to eagerly anticipate and delight in the provocation, and even when I still disagree with him, I’m glad for having had the chance to be challenged. I imagine he must be a fun person to shoot the breeze with.
I don’t have anything to add to it, but I thought this was a pretty cool essay:
We are surrounded by magic, some good, some evil and some both at once—an excess of magic, a confusion of it. Solitary Kenko brushed his cranky, acerbic thoughts onto scraps of paper that survived through the centuries only by luck; they might just as well have rotted on the walls or gone out with the trash. But look at our magic now: you can Google Kenko, and if you have a Kindle or Nook or iPad or some other e-reader, you can reassemble all of Kenko or Dante or Montaigne electronically upon a thin, flat screen—from which it may also vanish at a touch, in a nanosecond.A trompe l’oeil universe: creation and un-creation—poof! Precious writers are miraculously diffused through the Web, you fetch them out of the air itself. And they may disappear more quickly than Kenko’s vanishing blossoms or shrouded moons. The universe is not a solid thing.Writing is—we have always thought—a solitary and even covert labor. Of course a great writer need not be a hermit. (Shakespeare was not.) I have wondered whether Montaigne or Kenko or (God help us) Dante would have been on Facebook or Twitter, gabbing and texting away in the gregarious solidarities of new social forms. Are there such things as exile or retreat or solitude in the universe of Skype, the global hive? Does the new networking improve the quality of thinking and writing? It undoubtedly changes the process—but how, and how much? We don’t know yet.
Wednesday, I guess it was, I saw an ad on my Blogger dashboard telling me that for the low, low price of $15, I could go to a site that would print my entire blog up as a book, hardcover or softcover, and all I had to do was pick out the cover image. Huh, I thought, that might actually be cool, partially for the ironic vanity of it, partially because I had actually worried recently about what would happen if some sort of tech problems ever caused Blogger to go down, or caused posts to disappear. I realized that I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, and I’m actually proud of a lot of it. It would be nice to have some sort of durable copy of it, even if there would be no way to include all the links.
For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post—almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.
…But the main reason is that the British way simply makes more sense. Indeed, since at least since the 1960s a common designation for that style has been “logical punctuation.
By far the biggest fount of logical punctuation today is Wikipedia, which was started by two Americans but whose English-language edition is by and for all English-speaking countries. The site’s style guide notes that “logical punctuation … is used here because it is deemed by Wikipedia consensus to be more in keeping with the principle of minimal change.” That is, if you put a period or comma inside quotation marks, you are wrongly suggesting that the period or comma is part of the quoted material, and thus you have “changed” it.
I’ve been doing this for quite a while now, and I honestly had no idea I was part of a community of like-minded individuals! I knew what the official rule was about punctuation and quotation marks, but since I’m just a ruffian blogger, a cyber-street urchin, I figured I would do what made obvious fucking sense to me and damn the style guides and rulebooks.
A thought occurred to me earlier, so I went back and checked, and I was right: I’ve barely written about politics at all in the past few months. Why, I’m quite proud of that fact.
But here is the thought that makes death formidable again: it is the moment after which I will never post to my blog again, after which I will never write another Facebook status update, I will never again tweet. My soul cries out: “But I can’t live without doing these things!” And death answers back: “No. But you can die.”This is to say that my life is wrapped up with an activity from which I will have to leave off at death. But it is also the activity, I am increasingly coming to think, of actively constructing my self, and this activity, when it leaves off in death, will leave an accurate and vivid trace of a life. My online activity is, as I already put it, both mask and gravestone at once.This may not be an entirely different experience than the one Robert Burton had when he brought out the fourth and fifth and sixth editions of The Anatomy of Melancholy. But the immediacy of blogging, and its lack of finality, make it much more like life itself than a book ever could be, with the backlogged publishers who promise it and the slow-churning presses that produce it. There is no publisher to blame if my blog is not sufficiently far along in its perfection at the moment of my death, no editorial wrangling or grinding production process. There is only me, and what I hope might be a mirror of me, diffused then through the Web of my culture by means I don’t understand: a mirror of me mirroring the world by sitting in a chair and looking at a screen and, every now and again, out the window.