Three reasons the online literary community makes me nervous sometimes:
Writers write in order to be read. This is obvious. But the speed with which words, once written, are now being read — a speed shaped by technological innovations long before the Internet turned the quick turnaround into the virtually instantaneous turnaround — has set me to thinking about the extent to which writing, for the writer, ought to have a freestanding value, a value apart from the reader. There is too much talk about the literary marketplace, the cultural marketplace, and the marketplace of ideas. We need to remember that a book — or a painting or a piece of music — begins as the product of an individual imagination, and can retain its power even when largely or even entirely ignored.
~ Jed Perl
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As brilliant an auctioneer and entertainer as Simon de Pury can be, he needs to reconsider his snappy comment that “in a split second I can tell whether a work of art is great or not.” All I have to say to him is: Louise Bourgeois.
The artist, who died last week, was the antithesis of the sound bite, and didn’t “make it” until she was well into her 60s because no one saw the importance of her work until the next generation of (women) artists began to cite it as an important influence. De Pury should remember that some things happen slowly, and not all artists — or their work — can be recognized as “great” or “genius” in a split second. Art is about slowing down time, and thinking — neither of which television does very well.
~ Ross Bleckner
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[Flann O’Brien’s newspaper] column gave pleasure to a great many people and occasionally perhaps authentic delight to a few, but it must have been a terrible burden, and as ruinous in the long run as the drink. The penalty of journalism, and kindred activities, is that it gives its author a certain amount of warranted creative satisfaction. Having done a nice, neat, expert job with a good joke or two in it, you are inclined to turn on your heel and walk away feeling pleased with yourself, and of course entitled to leave it at that for the rest of the day. I am not speaking contemptuously of journalism now; indeed a writer who has practised it hardly ever does. He enjoys it in fact perhaps too much, and he can hardly ever bring himself to do a sloppy job, knowing too well that those who inure themselves to doing sloppy jobs sooner or later become incapable of doing anything else, in any medium.
~ Anthony Cronin
Maybe we should ignore each other more often?