Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Finding a space

How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?
I don't have an answer, I just wonder how many more people happened to read Doris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech because of the internet? Of course, reading online is different from reading a book, even Felicity Finds Love; the hope if offers, for example, of a possible unity as abstract as its binding is real. But reading Lessing's speech and then The Literary Saloon's report on the NBCC's survey results, I wondered about the impact blogging has - not on reading - but on writing. So many more people are writing for a large audience. What an extraordinary change! What impact might this have?
Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?"
Yes, many more are finding a space: however the word is disguised, a whole day may indeed pass in writing ... etc.

2 comments:

  1. Reminds me of some sentences I read a few days ago in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I wish I could remember them exactly, but, in a shoddy paraphrase, a character is comparing free, literary Paris with Communist Prague with its censorship and suppression, and comes to the conclusion that all the writing in Paris can be worth less than that one book that's been banned in Prague.

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  2. Seems to me DL's pulling the old trick of predefining something as 'bad', then stopping everybody to come and look see how bad the 'bad' thing is - a whole day has passed: isn't that what we all want? That absorption in something, that going with the flow?

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