This morning’s Australian also features a fascinating piece by Geordie Williamson about blogging, which attempts to resituate the deeply tedious debate about the value of online writing by asking some questions about the aesthetics of blogging, and how the form alters the way we write.
Before I go any further I should point out that Geordie (who’s a friend) says nice things in the piece about me and this blog, and in particular the posts I’ve got reproduced in Karen Andrews’ new anthology of Australian blog writing, Miscellaneous Voices (‘On Novels and Place’ and ‘The Day of the Triffids . . .’). But his kind words about me notwithstanding, I think the piece makes some interesting and valuable points, not the least of which is the manner in which many writers who operate in more controlled forms are made uneasy by the immediacy and gregariousness of the online environment, and the importance of recognising that for all its apparent openness, online writing still seeks to control the terms of the reader’s interaction with the writer by controlling what aspects of the writer’s life and experience they have access to.
In a way this is an unsurprising thing to say. Despite the illusion of openness, all writing is fundamentally an exercise in controlling the terms of the reader’s access to the writer’s inner life. This is probably clearest in forms like the personal essay, but it’s equally true of fictional forms, in which the raw material of feeling and experience is encoded and transfigured by the process of creation: even at their most honest writers are always withholding, shaping, controlling. A good reader understands that, just as they understand that a writer often reveals as much or more about themselves through what they don’t say, through their tics and blind spots, as they do in the things they choose to tell us. But it’s also something we sometimes seem to forget in our rush to celebrate the openness and collaborativeness of the online environment. Because whatever else it is, online writing is still about inventing versions of the self, whether as pleasing personas, disguises or simply creations to be deconstructed and analysed, and as such needs to be understood within a critical framework capable of making sense of the complexities of that process. All of which makes pieces like Geordie’s, which is attempting to make connections between the ways we talk about more ostensibly “literary” forms such as the essay, and blogging (and indeed books like Karen’s, which seeks to place blogging in a wider context) all the more valuable.
Over at Hackpacker the irrepressible George Dunford has posted the text of a piece about the Australian litblogging scene. Originally published in The Big Issue a couple of weeks ago, it’s filled with sage and worldly pronouncements from such luminaries as Jessa Crispin and Yours Truly, but if that’s not enough to convince you to exercise your mousefinger, George’s description of Perry Middlemiss as the white-bearded Wizard of Oz litblogs definitely should.
The current issue of The New York Review of Books includes an excellent piece by Michael Massing about the future of news. In contrast to the angst and aggro that often surrounds the subject, Massing’s piece is laudably clear and uncoloured by either Wired-style techno-utopianism or stupidly reactive declaratons about the enduring importance of newspapers and the frivolousness and pointlessness of new media forms such as blogging.
To his credit Massing seeks to tease out the increasingly symbiotic relationship between bloggers and conventional journalists, and to emphasize the increasing role bloggers are playing in breaking news, both as part of the daily news cycle and in a more sophisticated, investigative mode. And, interestingly, he suggests the real danger in the shift to decentralized modes of news gathering and dissemination is less about the loss of the resources of the major media companies, and more about the sort of echo-chamber effect that too often predominates on the net, in which people balkanize into self-reinforcing conclaves of shared opinion.
In a way, of course, Massing’s article is a counterpiece to Clay Shirky’s now-famous article, ‘Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable’, which argued that the current convulsions in our media landscape are analogous to the convulsions which reshaped European society in the years following the invention of the printing press. Indeed Massing pushes Shirky’s argument one step further, suggesting a further analogy between the printing press’ role in loosening the grip of the Catholic Church on medieval society and the manner in which blogging and new media are undermining corporate and government control of the flow of ideas in contemporary society.
I don’t think either Massing or Shirky would argue they know what the future of media looks like. But as both make clear, we’re beginning to see some of its outlines. Fewer large media companies and fewer newspapers. More rapid dissemination of opinion and ideas. A shift away from professionalized news-gathering and opinion towards news-gathering and dissemination by amateur or non-traditional sources. The increasing predominance of news services defined by their ideological positions.
All of these make many of those familiar with old media such as newspapers deeply uncomfortable, just as the rise of television news has traditionally unsettled those who give primacy to the sorts of values that are supposed to prevail in print journalism. Yet for my part I’m broadly optimistic about the future. Partly this is about my feeling that newspapers have never been the paragons of liberty their defenders claim them to be. But it’s also about recognizing that what’s happening is, in some sense, inevitable and evolutionary. As the technological underpinnings of our society change, so will our society, and there’s a level at which it’s better to see that as a positive, rather than fighting a rearguard action you’re destined to lose. What’s happening is painful, but it’s also exciting, and creates new possibilities on every side.
None of which is to say I don’t have concerns about how we manage the process, not the least of which is the question of how we manage to finance new media organizations capable of breaking news and carrying out investigative journalism in smaller countries such as Australia. Massing goes to some lengths to point out that rather than being parasitic, as they are often accused of being, increasing numbers of American political bloggers are now generating sufficient revenue to take on larger and more complex stories, involving considerable research and travel.
This revenue seems to be being drawn from a range of sources, but the bulk of it still seems to be coming from donations. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but I do wonder whether it’s a model we’re capable of replicating in Australia, a country with a significantly smaller population than the USA, and a far less established philanthropic tradition.
This isn’t to say there aren’t already groups in Australia seeking to develop models to enable such projects. I mentioned Swinburne University’s new fund to support public interest journalism a while back, and there are certainly other such projects in development.
But I think there’s little question the difficulties associated with setting up and financing new media outfits in Australia are exponentially greater than in the US. While it’s partly a legacy of its history, it seems telling that the one really successful Australian non-traditional news organization, Crikey!, runs on a subscription model, rather than by allowing free access to all its content and financing that through advertising or other sources.
Some have suggested the solution is some form of state funding, whether via direct subsidy of the sort the French Government has offered the French newspapers, grant-based funding of the sort employed in the cultural sector, or some sort of public trust model. For myself, I’d be very surprised if any of these models were either politically palatable or even particularly workable, though I’d be lying if I said I knew what the alternatives were. But it does seem to me the question of how we finance new media news services in a small country such as Australia is a real issue, and one the American or even the British experience is unlikely to offer answers to.
For anyone who’s interested, William Gibson has started posting excerpts from his new novel on his blog at www.williamgibsonbooks.com. The first was posted on New Year’s Day, and there have been several more substantial pieces over the past couple of weeks.
The excerpts suggest the new book picks up somewhere after Gibson’s last novel, Spook Country leaves off, and that it will draw the brilliant Pattern Recognition and Spook Country together into a trilogy, mirroring the pattern of the Sprawl and Bridge sequences.
Gibson experimented with the same practice during the writing of Spook Country, and though a lot of his fans were excited by it, I felt it was better to stay away and wait for the real thing. Perhaps I’m just too busy, perhaps it’s a more deepseated, novelist’s prejudice against the idea of wiki-ing a book (though I’d be interested to know how many of the responses the excerpts receive Gibson will take on board).
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For those wanting more Gibson paraphernalia, here is the very stylish video Gibson’s publishers released to coincide with the publication of Spook Country in 2007.
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And here is a short review of Pattern Recognition I wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald in 2003. It’s still available online, but for some reason the quotes in the version on the SMH website have dropped out, rather changing the sense of the piece. That being the case I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing my original review below with the missing quotes reinstated (I hope the SMH won’t mind).
Somewhere in the middle of Pattern Recognition, William Gibson’s seventh novel, the central character, Cayce Pollard, describes her memories of that day in New York, of the impact of the second plane. The experience, related in a fragmented, dream-like language, seems to collapse time, collapse meaning. It is “like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture.”
What Gibson’s language strains to reveal in that event, or more properly, in our experience of it, is the sense of vertigo it induced, of the collapsing of boundaries: political, geographical, personal, ethical, its singularity lying not in its death toll, or in its nature but in our experience of it, the way it unmade the certainties that not just our present but our future were grounded in.
Whether it was begun before or after September 11, this sense of our experience of reality exceeding itself is wound deeply into Pattern Recognition. Not only is it the first of Gibson’s novels to take place in the immediate present, it also seems to represent the closure of some kind of circle in his writing, not least in the allusive play between the names of its protagonist, Cayce and the anti-hero of his groundbreaking first novel, Neuromancer, Case.
Of course to call Gibson a writer of science fiction has always been to misunderstand him. Gibson’s antecedents lie more in Burroughs and Pynchon than Arthur C. Clarke, their strange, essentially poetic assemblages of image and echo designed to explore the inner textures of a culture which exists increasingly outside of time and space. The effect is probably nearest to that of an intellectually rigorous brand of video-art: suggestive, unsettling, and unresolved, its meanings arising out of the interplay between the elements rather than residing within them.
And so, despite its contemporary setting Pattern Recognition is classic Gibson. Moving between London, Tokyo and Moscow, it turns upon a series of film fragments which have been appearing anonymously upon the internet. These fragments, in an echo of the Joseph Cornell-like assemblages of Count Zero’s artificial intelligence, are possessed of a mute, almost inexplicable power, a power attested to by the global underground following they have attracted. Carefully denuded of any identifiable signs of context or origin, the fragments may or may not be part of some larger work, yet regardless their power stems from their sense of compression, the way they seem to signify the possibility of a meaning which they simultaneously deny.
Cayce, a follower of the footage herself, is commissioned by her sometime boss, the wonderfully-named Belgian market-guru, Hubertus Bigend (who “seems to have no sense at all that his name might be ridiculous to anyone, ever”) to establish the identity of the footage’s creator. Bigend’s motives for doing so are ambiguous to say the least, but Cayce accepts nonetheless, a decision which drops her deep into a world of obsessed footage-heads, industrial espionage, Russian mafia and cryptography, only to fetch up, finally, in the painful truth of the footage’s origins.
Woven through this are a collection of images which play off each other with ever-increasing subtlety and power. The pictures of the missing pinned to windows and walls and doors in New York. An amateur archaeological dig near Stalingrad, where guns and badges, uniforms and eventually an entire Stuka, its pilot still in its cockpit are being drawn from the suffocating, erasing mud by Russian skinheads. Diagrams of the arming mechanism of antiquated American explosives are uncovered coded deep inside the footage. Mechanical calculators designed in Buchenwald are traded to collectors from car boots, resembling nothing so much as grenades. And everywhere, out of the fragments of the past, the present and the future, meaning suggests itself, elusive, partial yet possessed of a strange and ultimately deeply moving poetry.
Like Gibson’s futuristic novels, which refract the present hauntingly through the lens of their possible futures, there is something at once utterly immediate and strangely timeless about Pattern Recognition. It captures the fluidity of meaning and the sense of shifting certainties which infect our historical moment, strung between the unrecoverable past and the nascent future. ‘“The future is there . . . looking back at us,” as Cayce herself says. “Trying to make sense of the fiction we have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”
There’s a fascinating conversation going on over at Matilda about the ethics of reviewing, and in particular the question of whether accepting free books from publishers compromises bloggers. My feeling is that the latter question is a bit of a furphy, since reviewers for the mainstream press accept free books all the time, and it doesn’t compromise our integrity (or what we laughingly call our integrity). But I also think the discussion at Matilda is circling around another larger and more interesting question about the future of the book review itself.
The book review, in its current incarnation, is largely a creature of the print media, and in particular the newspaper. But over recent years the commitment of newspapers to their book review sections has been wavering. In his excellent Overlandlecture Malcolm Knox disputes the economics of this failing commitment, but whether it’s sound business thinking or not, the review sections of newspapers are in trouble. In recent weeks The Washington Post has folded its august Book World section back into the main paper (although it will continue to live on, ghost-like, online) and it seems likely other papers around the world will follow suit in the next few years. Given the convulsions (death throes?) afflicting the print media more generally as the GFC collides with their already shaky business models it might be interesting to see whether newspapers themselves outlive their book review sections, but whatever happens it looks less and less likely the traditional mainstream media print review will be around in anything other than a niche capacity ten years from now.
That of course raises the question of what happens then. Assuming there will continue to be interest in books (and while I think interest in books will continue to contract I’m confident both that there will continue to be a community of readers eager to discuss and debate books, and that the net will drive deeper and broader collaborations between such individuals) there will continue to be a demand for reviews of new publications, and I think we can safely assume the publishing business (whatever it looks like in a decade’s time) will continue to seek out forums prepared to give space to its product.
But what will those forums, and those reviews look like? The book review as it is traditionally understood is an awkward beast in cyberspace. The very qualities that give it shape in the print media – its authoritative air, the craft involved in shaping a piece to fit the space allotted, its ongoing process of attempting to balance the subjective response of the reviewer with a more objective view make it seem overly formal and hopelessly enclosed in the more collaborative environment of the blogosphere. Blogposts, and blogging, as they have evolved to date, are a much more personal, subjective form of writing, and offer quite different pleasures to the traditional review.
Yet the traditional review looks the way it does for a reason. Unlike bloggers, reviewers operate within a complex web of competing responsibilities to author, reader, book and editor (Kerryn Goldsworthy has written about this elsewhere but I can’t find the link, dammit) as well as restrictions relating to length and similar questions.
So will the end of the print media’s commitment to book reviewing mean the end of book reviewing, or at least of book reviews as we know them? Or will the ways bloggers write about books begin to become more formalized and codified as they become more enmeshed in the cycle of book promotion and discussion? Something of this sort is already happening with Amazon’s system of ranking for its reviewers, which despite being driven from the bottom-up, still push the reader reviews towards the more formal and balanced mode expected in the print media. Will new forums spring up to replace the broadsheet review sections, either aggregating reviews on blogs or actually commissioning them? And if it’s the latter how will it work economically? And perhaps most importantly, how will the blogging community, which has traditionally been opposed to absorption into the corporate machine, handle the process of being professionalized by inevitably closer relations with publishers and publicists? What will it mean for their independence and freedom of expression?
I don’t pretend I know the answers to these questions, but they’re real, and I suspect they’re dilemmas the blogging community is going to have to face up to, possibly sooner rather than later.
I mentioned Alex Ross’ wonderful study of 20th century music, The Rest is Noise, in my post the other day about Philip Glass. I’ve now discovered Ross – who is also music critic for The New Yorker – has a website, The Rest is Noise,which incorporates a blog, articles and information about the book. If you’re interested in classical and contemporary classical music it’s well worth checking out.
’The Changeling'
Appears in Jonathan Strahan's Fearsome Magics. Compare prices for the UK print edition and US print edition; also available for Kindle (US and UK) and most other ebook formats.
I’ve got a review of Sam Lipsyte’s scabrously funny new novel, The Ask, in this morning’s Australian, and while I don’t necessarily advocate reading the review I absolutely recommend reading the book, which is hugely entertaining.
Over at Hackpacker the irrepressible George Dunford has posted the text of a piece about the
The current issue of The New York Review of Books includes an 
leaves off, and that it will draw the brilliant 
and 
Pattern Recognition
city of tongues 