Sadly, nobody ever figured out how to do IP Multicast on the internet in a way that wouldn’t instantly be abused.
I’ve never understood the fascination with him, either. His work just seems so smug and plodding. I read the excerpt from The Circle in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (perfect publication to hit a demographic of neurotic technophobes?) a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn’t even get through it. Talk about ham-handed and overwrought.
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I think you miss the point of art if it has to really “get” a particular technology to be taken seriously, within reason of course. Is it not the role of artists to stand outside the mainstream? One could argue that important social commentary actually requires it. Often that commentary appears naive or contrived at the time; that is probably why many ‘great’ works of art go unrecognized in their era. I am not saying this novel will be one of those; I am just saying that debates over particular technology he gets “wrong” may be missing the point. Since this novel is critical of social media, it stands to reason that it will be derided by many in social-media circles, even by people who haven’t read it. We humans have a long history of getting defensive when we are criticized, particularly when that criticism is leveled at the masses. Thus the more negative the chatter on the internet, the more likely it is that Eggers has hit a nerve. I would also hope that people don’t read novels based on the “hipness” of the writer, but perhaps I am old fashioned.
Eggers wrote a story for a surf mag I read now and again, and that was the first and last Eggers story I’ll ever read. Contrived and cutesy was my reading of his stuff. His work felt like hipster-ism squished down into textual form.
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Mostly the review is about how bad the book is as a novel in the way novels are usually critiqued, the characters are shallowly written, the conflicts are cliche and not fully developed. His arguments about the quality of Eggers understanding of social media fit in with this critique by showing he doesn’t look at the whole thing and cherry picks very silly examples of why SM is bad, examples that were popular among the non-cognoscenti even a few years ago already, like tweets about what someone had for lunch. It is like he doesn’t know about the Arab “Spring” and the roll that Twitter played.
When someone brings up these issues with me I think it is just that they have a boring group of friends or would prefer to be read but not responded to.
You can’t make relevant and pointed commentary if you don’t know what you are talking about.
And I certainly was not recommending him on the basis of he himself believing he is hip. Which, BTW, is different from “Hipster.” “Hip” means you know what you are talking about. His reputation is one of a bleeding edge pomo author who explores the outer edges of what is acceptable in a contemporary authors body of work. He wrote the book called “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” I think he considers himself to be self-aware, even capable of laughing at himself, but if you are going to play that edge you had better deliver. People I trust say he doesn’t. That is enough warning for me.
Look at us discussing a book we both haven’t read! I have admired much of Eggers past work, not just ‘Heartbreaking’, but McSweeney’s etc. I read a synopsis of his new book and perhaps hoped it was the great 21st century novel. He certainly has the credentials (hipness if you prefer). I still think it would be a shame to dismiss it based on a couple bad reviews, especially from the tech. crowd so I am going to read it and make up my own mind. It may be rubbish. For sake of arguement, using the Arab Spring/twiitter example to defend SM is pretty played out by now too. I for one think the overall social cost/benefit analysis of SM is still prime fodder for art and criticism. Does that make me a technophobe?
Nope.
And we are discussing a review of a book we haven’t read.
I don’t have time to read everything. I have to be selective and prefer things that add to my understanding of myself or my fields of interest. Frankly don’t have time or patience for fiction these days. (Though I will read the story in the latest New Yorker if I am not too depressed already.) I feel a need to keep other voices out of my head when attempting to be creative.
I didn’t realize you were a fan (why not? I should have.) That changes everything. I could have been asking you how he might use the shallow take in some interesting way. A possibility I was trying to avoid since it makes the conversation too complicated and could lead to misunderstandings. I will allow it could be satirical or that the universe he sets his writing in is particularly flat and full of vain people. That would fit with that other title.
Come to think of it, I did buy and read most of his McSweeney issue and found it interesting enough, liked the form it took, fake newspaper. I remember being irritated by some of the politics expressed, but can’t remember now why or how.
I do believe the roll Twitter played in the middle east is somewhat more impressive than what my buddy had for lunch. (which he still does tweet.) Such a story may get old but should age more gracefully than nincompoops negative and ignorant putdown of Twitter because of what the boring 90% does with it.
Thanks for the calm and unhurried discussion.
Homer got war, perfectly, from the mechanics to the ethics to the aesthetics. Moby Dick is terrific on the technologies used in whaling. Pynchon is aces on engineering and communications. There are many more examples. What would be good about misunderstanding a technology, either in technical aspects or in broader ways, that’s the focus of a work, especially in a work that aspires to be somewhat important or even definitive in its commentary?
On the topic of live streams, I think it is absurd that no audience exists. For example, Felix Baumgartner jumping from “space.” Whether they were at home or work, my Facebook feed was filled w/ people on the edge of their chair. I hope the novel’s good, I’ll give it a try. I don’t always like his books, but when he’s on, he’s really on.
Madrigal is concern trolling for dollars. I’m reading The Circle right now, and I’m laughing my ass off at this sendup of Valley culture. Maybe it’s because I work in the shadow of the Googleplex and live in San Francisco, so I recognize a good sendup of The Scene and its Hangers On. The whole point of Eggers’ critique is the circular referentiality of social media and the people who take it seriously because they are paid and pampered to do so, taking it beyond the point of absurdity.
Madrigal is a writer of some kind, so he should get off his ass and write the book he criticizes Eggers for not writing. But he’s just zinging the web for easy hits and ad impressions, and so is Beschizza for that matter. Much easier than writing a novel innit?
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Like you, I read very little fiction, but might make an exception for Eggers. Plus I enjoy dystopias. Does that make me a misanthrope? (don’t answer that)
Exactly. The cliched critique of SM you bring up is nevertheless alive and well as you observe. We all know people who use SM in myriad self-absorbed ways. If I were writing a Dickensian novel set in the present day (and I assure you, I’m not!), a large majority of the characters would be doing just that. Would that necessarily make my understanding of SM hackneyed?
I think it is important not to confuse a critique of society for how it uses technology with a critique of the technology itself. Don’t forget that television was full of potential too. The history books will point to that time Morley Safer filmed marines burning that village in Vietnam, or that time Ed Murrow stood up to McCarthy, but in terms of comprehending the overall social implications of T.V., aren’t those the exceptions we cling to?
If one is in the business of literary social commentary/criticism, the real story is what the majority is doing with the medium. After all, they are the ones driving the bus whether we like it or not. I’m pretty sure that Eggers gets that Twiitter could be used to make the world a better place. The question then is why is the so-called Arab Spring the best example we’ve got?
Yes, The arab spring is still unfolding. It is an easy thing to point to though, and the diffuse good is harder to see.
I read the whole review while writing that last post and started to get a feeling that he was out of his depth. After posting I went and read Eggers Wiki page and saw that he is a lot more respected than I thought and started down the slippery slope toward total reversal. Then I came and read the readers review above and realized I had fallen for something I have been reading about lately. Namely the fallacy called “What You See Is All There Is” wherein one forgets to consider information not presented.
I am happy to say I am old enough not to be too embarrassed at recognizing myself in a fault. I kind of enjoy it.
Have a good evening or morning, depending.
That’s hardly new.
Around 1999, I worked for ZDTV, which became TechTV shortly before I left. When I started there, the lead from on-high was that we were going to be all about webcams and amateur video; there was some assumption of a direct connection between the two. However, nobody could quite figure out what to do with webcams. Most of the advertising tended to focus, then as now, on adorable children sending videomail to grandma, though that application had few takers at the time.
One of the few things that did catch on were simple 24/7 webcam sites. At the time, these usually weren’t streaming – a typical set up was to generate a JPEG once every ten seconds to a minute, and the cameras were set up on someone’s desk, near the monitor. There were a few sites that charged subscription fees to watch the web cams of young women, promising soft porn, basically. (From what I was told, most of these never actually showed anything, and when they did, it was blurry and not particularly interesting.)
One of our shows had a story on its companion Web site for months, titled, “Sexiest web cams on the Internet”, which was a misleading title, and rather irritating. The story itself had links to a number of personal web cam sites that were run by women. Most of them were not “sexy”, particularly – you’d just occasionally see a woman, sitting at her desk, looking at her monitor.
What struck me as interesting at the time was that the ones that persisted for long and developed an audience featured the proprietors of the sites writing online journals, and discussing their lives with their regular visitors who posted comments. The web cams were all but forgotten. In retrospect, this was clearly the antecedent of bloggling, at least in the style of LiveJournal.
The trouble is that there are (at least) two ways of ‘not getting it’ that put you outside the mainstream:
One of them makes you an incisive commentator who, by ignoring or rejecting the trivial and common ‘understanding’ of what a thing does, shows us what the thing actually does or could easily be capable of doing.
The other one just makes you a cranky old man, waving his cane at some strawmen he thinks are getting on his lawn.
You can go the route of ignoring a technology entirely, and shoot for ‘timeless’ or ‘period piece’ or ‘dated; but a fantastic specimen of the X-century whatever-kind-of-art’ or some similar thing; but you can’t write about a technology, while failing to understand it, and not look ridiculous.
Point taken. I did say “within reason”. I am going to have to take your word on Homer and Pynchon since I am neither an expert on the Mycenaeans nor an engineer, but I can see 19th century nautical types being dismissive/jealous of Melville in his day, after all he only spent a few years at sea. I believe Moby-Dick was panned by reviewers and certainly did not achieve any serious literary notice until after the author’s death.
Isn’t that a great place to be! Who knows whether or not the novel has any import. Only time will tell, but probably unlikely. I am all the more interested in reading it now though. Cheers.
I’m not an expert on the Mycenaeans either, which is irrelevant, as Homer was neither Mycenaean nor an author that can only be profitably talked about by experts or scholars. Ditto Pynchon. Scholars of each author have testified to their various expertises, and a lot of this is readable by generalists; a lot of it is discernible by the generalist as well, as it lives and breathes on every page of their works.
Melville’s readers weren’t nineteenth-century “nautical types,” as nautical-types had nautical-type stuff to do instead of reading Melville. Part of what sank Moby Dick was its plethora of nautical data and the loving detail Melville imparted to his depictions of the Pequod, its whaling activities, etc. Many reviewers hated it, but even those who reviewed it positively were often compelled to acknowledge what a strange lumpy mixture the book is of fact, fiction, and fancy:
This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition.
This sea novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad. So far as the nautical parts are appropriate and unmixed, the portraiture is truthful and interesting.
The book is not a romance, nor a treatise on Cetology. It is something of both: a strange, wild work with the tangled overgrowth and luxuriant vegetation of American forests, not the trim orderliness of an English park. Criticism may pick many holes in this work; but no criticism will thwart its facscination.
Here, however -- in The Whale -- comes Herman Melville, in all his pristine powers -- in all his abounding vigour -- in the full swing of his mental energy, with his imagination invoking as strange and wild and original themes as ever, with his fancy arraying them in the old bright and vivid hues, with that store of quaint and out-of-the-way information -- we would rather call it reading than learning -- which he ever and anon scatters around, in frequently unreasonable profusion, with the old mingled opulence and happiness of phrase, and alas! too, with the old extravagance, running a perfect muck throughout the three volumes, raving and rhapsodising in chapter after chapter -- unchecked, as it would appear, by the very slightest remembrance of judgment or common sense, and occasionally soaring into such absolute clouds of phantasmal unreason, that we seriously and sorrowfully ask whether this can be anything other than sheer moonstruck lunacy....
The author has read up laboriously to make a show of cetalogical learning.... Herman Melville is wise in this sort of wisdom. He uses it as stuffing to fill out his skeleton story. Bad stuffing it makes, serving only to try the patience of his readers, and to tempt them to wish both him and his whales at the bottom of an unfathomable sea....
But what was never in doubt was that Melville knew what he was writing about. How Moby Dick would be improved by the novelistic equivalent of Melville humming “whaling stuff, whaling stuff, whaling stuff” instead of doing his homework is still a question I would put to you.
That kind of gibes with what I originally wrote. I would not have expected 19th century whalers to pay much attention to literary reviews, any more than I would expect tech. insiders to do so today, with the exception of course for a book this close to home. The intent of my original comment was to point out the likelihood of a bias against Egger’s new novel within tech. circles, and a hope that people would make up their own mind, as opposed to decide not to read it, based on one or two negative reviews on the internet.
Look, the book might very well be crap, but if it is, it won’t be because the author’s understanding of a technology so new that no one can really claim to completely grok was slightly flawed. Since the novel is set in the future, doesn’t that grant Eggers a fair bit of leeway anyway?
One thing is certain; all the authors you cite were not insiders in the fields you mention, rather they were outsiders with a healthy distance from their subject matter. This book might not be it, but the definitive account of where this is all is leading us will not be written by someone close to the industry and probably won’t be welcomed by it either.
What got me was that it took and entire goddamn chapter for him to walk up the beach and buy himself a drink.
Ah, I’d thought you were positing just that, a bunch of whalers who read the book and dismissed it. Ha.
I continue to disagree with you concerning the rest: Pynchon was a professional, for example, employed as a technical writer by Boeing from 1960 to 1962; and Melville knew enough of boats and the sea to qualify as a kind of expert certainly: perhaps not the expertise of a lifetime, but certainly more than that of a well-read lubber who’d never been to sea. Homer it would be impossible to say given the issues surrounding Homer’s identity: but Aeschylus fought directly against the Persians some hundreds of years after the Homeric epics, so it’s possible–there certainly wasn’t the clear divide between a military-civilian identity in that culture (as there would be today). Shakespeare’s deft shipwreck scene in The Tempest almost certainly derives from firsthand knowledge, as there were no sea manuals at the time to supply him with the technical details he uses, effortlessly and expertly, in 1.1. Etc.
The definitive account of tech may or may not be written by an industry professional: what’s clear is that it will not, cannot, be written by someone lacking some expertise in the subject matter, coupled with the writing skill and imagination to fill in the gaps, and an ability to amalgamate the two. The numerous examples above rather prove this point: again, please adduce an example written in the realistic-mimetic tradition, in which the opposite obtains.
