Something’s been bothering me. It’s all this humorless chatter on the internet. Everybody’s a commentator, everybody’s a journalist. Yes, I know it’s modern to think that’s a good thing, and when I want to know whether a restaurant or an iPod accessory is any good I certainly do.
But there’s a fine line, buddy.
A couple of weeks ago, Garrison Keillor wrote a lovely, ironic column for Salon.com extolling the old — and to laptop-chained digivores even erstwhile — art of reading newspapers in cafes.
“You open [the newspaper] with a flourish and a ripple of newsprint, your buoyant self-confidence evident in the way you turn the pages with a snap of the wrist, taking in the gray matter swiftly, your eyes dancing over the world's sorrows and moving on, crinkling the page, snapping it, rolling it, folding the paper in halves and quarters, tucking it under the arm or tapping it against the palm.”
In response, more than 80 readers posted what Salon calls, with retro flourish, ‘letters’ — otherwise known as comments — most of them anonymous, some almost as long as the original article, many as bullish and indignant as the orange vapors that exude from the nostrils of Fox News talking heads. Here’s one.
“Mr. Keillor mentions that “it is so lumpen” that laptop users don’t know how to “use” a newspaper. I counter that there are lumpen newspaper readers, not lumpen laptop users.”
Here’s another.
“What a pointless article.
“That Dude is running out of ideas. And YouTube is much funnier that this tepid christian attempt at humour.
“On Youtube you can watch chimps boning. As and when GK comes up with anything as interesting as that, someone fax me an email.”
And another.
“One Rule for Reading GK: 1. Don’t bother
“— Next issue, please”
And there, in a nutshell, you have it. Where once there were ideas, now there are only issues. Where once good periodical writing could afford to speak for itself and bad writing could be discarded with a yawn and the quick, satisfying flip of a page, now almost all such writing, regardless of its merits, is subject to the same frantic monkey-typing.
It’s a funny business if you think about it. Funny funny, I mean, not odd funny (after reading a few of Salon’s letters I’m inclined to be as literal as possible). It’s also desperately un-funny, even kind of depressing. Now that we’re all pundits all the time, and citizen journalists, too, who never go off duty, is there to be no more joy in reading?
Ahem, Garrison Keillor is a humorist?
For that matter, so are most of the people involved in publishing newspapers. There’s no air more imbued with winks and sarcasm and childish giggles than that around a newspaper copy desk. They’re having a laugh. They have to. How else could you face the murders, the wars, the missing children that make up the news day after day?
And so it goes, and so it goes. Then yesterday I came across a Daily Telegraph review of the book Common Ground, which includes an essay that I wrote. The reviewer liked the book in general, but had this criticism:
“Most of the essays are the work of aspiring writers… The majority… work in advertising, a world not known for its humility, as the pieces on Julian Barnes, Keith Waterhouse and T S Eliot prove.”
Ouch. I wrote the piece on TS Eliot.
If the Telegraph’s website allowed insta-comments, I might foolishly have punched out a rebuttal, mocking the reviewer for assuming that I work in advertising; wanting to know the meaning of ‘aspiring author’ (“The only writers I can think of who aren’t ‘aspiring authors’ are Harper Lee and JD Salinger, and why not?”); addressing the mountains of self-doubt that I had to tunnel through just to reach an essay about the great and intimidating TS Eliot that I felt was halfway publishable; and finally maybe even tit-for-tat questioning the humility of anyone who (in the very next paragraph) inserts himself into what is after all only a short book review.
Sigh. Thank God I couldn’t do it.
If I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that every public letter is a cry from a wounded heart, even the hand picked, witty letters that grace the pages of British publications, their humor so reliant on obscure rules of grammar, their cleverness so honed by lonely hands to tickle the letters editors’ jaded hearts. By contrast (and yet so similarly) how many of the open comments on websites are written with the dreadful expectation that no one will ever read them?
As a citizen journalist with a duty to be fair and balanced I’m obliged to note that a TLS reviewer thought I wrote “convincingly on The Waste Land ‘as an indictment of London’s dark financial heart’”, even as he hit some of my co-contributors with the same stylized punches that the Telegraph reviewer used to meet his own word count.
And now, in nearly every possible way, I’ve done the thing I was so bothered about. But I’m not proud of it. (Discuss.)
