Writing and the internet

There is something happening at the margins today, something happening just outside my field of vision, and when I turn in its direction, it moves just out of sight again. And in the meantime, I am fitting together other thoughts.

Item 1. Ben Kunkel's "Lingering" essay, which has many interesting things to say about the internet and such as, including "If you want to make a culture your own, you have to make your own culture, and not just repurpose the productions of people with more capital (or contribute marginalia to news stories)." And also, "Bloggers on the whole write carelessly, their ideas are commonplace, they curry favor with readers and one another, and their popularity is no index of their worthiness."

Item 2. Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I find Didion to be a touchstone for me, nevermind the perception of middlebrowness that she has accumulated over time. And I spent a couple hours this afternoon reading parts of that essay collection, and felt this passage from the preface to be especially apt:

What else is there to tell? I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations where I have to talk to anyone's press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is the last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.