Immortality
Posted: January 1st, 2005, 12:22 pm
When I was a naive college student, I imagined a time, probably after I was dead, when whole teams of graduate students would be pouring over my manuscripts and dissecting my poetry line by line. I have stacks of tattered spiral notebooks that I was saving in anticipation of my immortality.
We only know about Bach because Mendelssohn popularized his music nearly two centuries after he died. The reason that we all recognize "Tiger, Tiger burning bright" is that Blake was a mad printer. Whitman sold his chapbooks off a vegetable cart.
Which brings me to the subject of the blogosphere. Blake or Whitman or Homer himself would have given their eye teeth to have the instantaneous and large audience of readers that many bloggers enjoy on the internet today. I can write a poem and within an hour after I publish it on the internet, several hundred people have read it. This is a literary miracle from the writer's point of view.
Then there are the questions of ubiquity and durability. Anybody can write a blog. All it takes is a $400 computer, modest typing ability and an internet connection. Blogs are everywhere. There are millions of them.
My friend Mike Nelson and I were talking one night several years ago in Club DaDa in Dallas. Our respective bands were performing there that night. We have both been musicians since we were in high school together. He said to me, " You know, when we were growing up, it was really something special to be a musician. Now, every kid on the block is in a garage band."
Blogs are like assholes, everybody has one. So how do you know which ones contain valid and penetrating thought and which ones are just some teenager's overflowing angst? I guess we'll have to leave that question to the teams of graduate students.
And will these documents last? In the 1980's, when I first embarked into the digital world, I only trusted hard copy. I wanted everything printed. But as time has gone by, I have become lax in my prejudice for print. I have volumes of work that exist in no other form but zeros and ones. I have also seen my work disappear from the internet. Servers crash. There are network accidents. Viruses can attack. Hard drives can die. I used to archive my work by emailing it to a yahoo account. The account disappeared when I neglected to visit it for four months. Poof! A year's worth of archives gone. Luckily they were just back-ups.
Suppose the internet went away. Would literary historians in the future be devising ways to resurrect hard drives from some dead server, like the lost soul of our wired civilization? What experts will decipher our digital cuniform or restore our sad papyrus of pixels?
We only know about Bach because Mendelssohn popularized his music nearly two centuries after he died. The reason that we all recognize "Tiger, Tiger burning bright" is that Blake was a mad printer. Whitman sold his chapbooks off a vegetable cart.
Which brings me to the subject of the blogosphere. Blake or Whitman or Homer himself would have given their eye teeth to have the instantaneous and large audience of readers that many bloggers enjoy on the internet today. I can write a poem and within an hour after I publish it on the internet, several hundred people have read it. This is a literary miracle from the writer's point of view.
Then there are the questions of ubiquity and durability. Anybody can write a blog. All it takes is a $400 computer, modest typing ability and an internet connection. Blogs are everywhere. There are millions of them.
My friend Mike Nelson and I were talking one night several years ago in Club DaDa in Dallas. Our respective bands were performing there that night. We have both been musicians since we were in high school together. He said to me, " You know, when we were growing up, it was really something special to be a musician. Now, every kid on the block is in a garage band."
Blogs are like assholes, everybody has one. So how do you know which ones contain valid and penetrating thought and which ones are just some teenager's overflowing angst? I guess we'll have to leave that question to the teams of graduate students.
And will these documents last? In the 1980's, when I first embarked into the digital world, I only trusted hard copy. I wanted everything printed. But as time has gone by, I have become lax in my prejudice for print. I have volumes of work that exist in no other form but zeros and ones. I have also seen my work disappear from the internet. Servers crash. There are network accidents. Viruses can attack. Hard drives can die. I used to archive my work by emailing it to a yahoo account. The account disappeared when I neglected to visit it for four months. Poof! A year's worth of archives gone. Luckily they were just back-ups.
Suppose the internet went away. Would literary historians in the future be devising ways to resurrect hard drives from some dead server, like the lost soul of our wired civilization? What experts will decipher our digital cuniform or restore our sad papyrus of pixels?