Sean Manning writes:

People behave differently on the post-2008 Internet than before because most of them are on smartphones or pads not laptops or desktops. For example, its hard to copy and paste blocks of text on a touchscreen, but usually easy to make screenshots, so people move things from one site to another as screenshots. Its hard to jump precisely around a text and type punctuation marks, so its hard to enter bbcode. Its easy to scroll, so sites designed for smartphones often have an infinite scroll. Its easy to pull out a smartphone in breaks from other activities, so people visiting the Internet on a smartphone are often in a hurry. People do more of what their tools encourage (affordances) and less of what their tools discourage.

Good point! I hadn’t thought if it that way, partly I guess because I don’t have a mobile phone or pad, so I do very little interaction with touchscreens.

A few years ago someone contacted me with a proposal to fix up the blog and make it more friendly to mobile devices, but it wasn’t clear to me that these changes would actually work. Or, to put it another way, it seemed that any changes would either be too minor to make a difference, or so major that they wouldn’t work with the sort of content we have here. What I hadn’t thought about was Manning’s point, that the way we write and interact on this blog is in some ways a function of how we interact with it on the computer.

There probably are some ways of making the blog more mobile-friendly, but I guess the real point is that the style of communication we’ve developed here works for this format. Kinda like how some stories work better as movies, some as TV shows, and some as plays. You can transfer from one medium to another but they’re different.

Tom Bissell writes:

Recently, in The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer [wrote that] Not once in the twentieth century . . . has a single politician, actor, athlete, or surgeon emerged as a first-rate novelist, despite the dismayingly huge breadth of experience each profession affords. For better or worse, and I am prepared to admit worse, writers are writers are writers. This explains why so many mediocre fiction writers sound the same, why there exist so many books about writers, and why many talented fiction writers seem to think that their best option to distinguish themselves is to flee the quotidian to explore more fanciful subject matter.

That’s an interesting point. Here in the twenty-first century, novel writing is a niche art and a niche business. In the previous century, though, the novel was a major popular art form, and lots of people were motivated to write them, both for artistic and financial reasons. Great novels were written in the twentieth century by people with all sorts of social backgrounds, high, low, and various steps in between—George Orwell was a police officer!—, but I think Mailer was right, that none of these great novels were written by politicians, actors, athletes, or surgeons. Perhaps the closest candidate is Michael Crichton (not a surgeon but he was trained as a doctor; no great novels but he did write Jurassic Park, which was solid genre fiction). Had his novels not been successful, it seems likely he would’ve just become a doctor, which indicates a bit of selection bias in Mailer’s statement. Jim Bouton authored the literary classic Ball Four, but it’s not a novel and presumably the writing was mostly done by his coauthor, who was a professional writer. OK, I guess my best shots on this are George V. Higgins (author of some arguably-great novels (see also here) and also a practicing lawyer) and Scott Turow (also a practicing lawyer as well as an author of several excellent legal thrillers which, ok, they’re not great novels but they have a lot of strengths, I guess I’d say they’re better than Michael Crichton’s even if they don’t have the originality of someone like Jim Thompson). But “lawyer” is not quite the same category as “politician, actor, athlete, or surgeon”—indeed, a lawyer is already a sort of professional fiction writer.

I dunno, it’s an interesting question. I assume there were a fair number of twentieth-century politicians, actors, athletes, and surgeons who had the capacity to write a great novel, or at least make a fair attempt, but it doesn’t seem to have happened. Maybe it would just have taken too much effort, to the extent that, had they gone all-in to write a great novel or a reasonable attempt, they would’ve just become full-time writers and that what’s we’d remember them as. I’m not sure.

Gore Vidal was a politician (kind of) and wrote some excellent novels, maybe they don’t count as “great” but maybe they do. He’s the closest match I can think of—but maybe not, because he was a writer before going into politics, so he doesn’t really count as a politician emerging as a novelist.

P.S. Bissell’s article also discusses the idea of writers being outsiders, which motivates me to point to these two posts:

There often seems to be an assumption that being in the elite and being an outsider are mutually exclusive qualities, but they’re not.

The insider-outsider perspective

As I wrote in the comments to one of those posts:

Saying someone is an outsider doesn’t convey much information, given that just about anyone can grab that label. However, as an observer of politics (and science), I notice that people sometimes highlight their outsider status, and as a political scientist I find that interesting. For example, what’s interesting about Steven Levitt in Freakonomics is not so much that he thinks of himself as a “rogue” but that he decided to label himself that way. Rather than presenting himself as an informant from the inside, he presented himself as an outsider. He had the choice of taking either tack, and he decided on the outsider label. That’s interesting.

Why would people want economics advice from a “rogue” outsider who thinks that drunk walking is more dangerous than drunk driving, thinks we are assured of 30 years of global cooling, and believes that beautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girls? Wouldn’t you prefer economics advice from an insider, someone with a Harvard and MIT education who’s now the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago? That’s what baffles me.

The outsider-novelist thing is more clear, in that different authors offer different perspectives. We read Jack London for one thing and Jane Austen for another.

Marshall McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.

Normal Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of literary criticism.  See, for example,

“End of novel. Beginning of job.”: That point at which you make the decision to stop thinking and start finishing

Contingency and alternative history (followup here)

Kazin to Birstein to a more general question of how we evaluate people’s character based on traits that might, at least at first glance, appear to be independent of character (followup here)

“Readability” as freedom from the actual sensation of reading

Things that I like that almost nobody else is interested in

Anthony West’s literary essays

I recently came across a book called “Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles,” by literary journalist Jeet Heer. The “Lechery” in the title is a bit misleading, but, yes, Heer is open about sexual politics. In any case, like the best literary critics, he engages with the literary works and the authors in the context of politics and society. He has some of the overconfidence of youth—the book came out ten years ago, and some of its essays are from ten or more years before that—, and there’s a bunch of obscure Canadian stuff that doesn’t interest me, but overall I found the writing fun and the topics interesting.

One good thing about the book was its breadth of cultural concerns, including genre and non-genre literature, political writing, and comic books, with the latter taken as of interest in themselves, not merely as some sort of cultural symbol.

I also appreciated that he didn’t talk about movies or pop music. I love movies and pop music, but they’re also such quintessential topics for Boomer critics who want to show their common touch. There are enough other places where I can read about how Stevie Wonder and Brian Wilson are geniuses, that Alex Chilton is over- or under-rated, appreciation of obscure records and gritty films from the 1970s, etc.

My comparison point here is Louis Menand’s book on U.S. cold war culture from 1945-1965, which made me wonder how he decided what to leave in and what to leave out. I’m a big fan of Menand—as far as I’m concerned, he can write about whatever he wants to write about—; it was just interesting to consider all the major cultural figures he left out, even while considering the range of characters he included in that book. Heer writes about Philip Roth but also about John Maynard Keynes; he’s not ashamed to write about, and take seriously, high-middlebrow authors such as John Updike and Alice Munro, while also finding time to write thoughtfully about Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. I was less thrilled with his writing about comics, not because of anything he said that struck me as wrong, exactly, but rather because he edged into a boosterish tone, promotion as much as criticism.

Another comparison from the New Yorker stable of writers is Thomas Mallon, who notoriously wrote this:

Thus displaying his [Mallon’s] ignorance of Barry Malzberg, who has similarities with Mailer both in style and subject matter. I guess that Malzberg was influenced by Mailer.

And, speaking of Mailer, who’s written some good things but I think was way way overrated by literary critics during his lifetime—I’m not talking about sexism here, I just think there were lots of other writers of his time who had just as much to say and could say it better, with more lively characters, better stories, more memorable turns of phrase, etc.—; anyway, even though I’m not the world’s biggest Mailer fan, I did appreciate the following anecdote which appeared, appropriately enough, in an essay by Heer about Canadian icon Marshall McLuhan:

Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer. . . .

McLuhan: We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.

Mailer: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.

McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed.

Mailer: Marshall, I think you’re begging a few tremendously serious questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-made environment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.

McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.

Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.

McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere at once, under a single dateline.

Mailer: But that’s not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating nature, or superseding nature. It’s far from that. Nature still does exist as a protagonist on this planet.

McLuhan: Oh, yes, but it’s like our Victorian mechanical environment. It’s a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

That’s great! I love how McLuhan keeps saying these extreme but reasonable-sounding things and then, each time, Mailer brings him down to Earth. Norman Mailer, who built much of a career on bloviating philosophizing, is the voice of reason here. The snippet that I put at the top of this post is my favorite: McLuhan as glib Bitcoin bro, Mailer as the grizzly dad who has to pay the bills and fix the roof after the next climate-induced hurricane.

Heer gets it too, writing:

It’s a measure of McLuhan’s ability to recalibrate the intellectual universe that in this debate, Mailer—a Charlie Sheen–style roughneck with a history of substance abuse, domestic violence, and public mental breakdowns—comes across as the voice of sobriety and sweet reason.

Also, Heer’s a fan of Uncle Woody!