Inter Alia #6: DeWitt Goes Digital

Piqued by Leon Wieseltier’s huffy take on James Wood’s exodus to The New Yorker, many commentators seemed to overlook the paper of record’s tacit endorsement of the proposition that Wood is “brutal,” blasting away at our frail eminences. Isn’t he that vicious British critic? an English professor recently asked me. In fact, Wood is anything but.In September, The Quarterly Conversation will be publishing a long essay in which I try to illuminate Wood’s shortcomings as a critic of contemporary American fiction, but it feels important to me now to note that these shortcomings arise from Wood’s fundamental virtues as a critic, namely his passion for, and faith in, literature… just as Faulkner’s excesses are inseparable from his gifts. Wood himself may not assent to E.L. Doctorow’s axiom that “excess in literature is its own justification,” but he is its exemplar.Wood incites passionate disagreement – making him a rare nut in the tepid oatmeal of our media culture – and is hard on writers who leave him wanting. Quite often, he is wrong about them. But Wood does not hate books, or even novelty. He presents a pretty persuasive platform for his criticism in his 2005 essay “A Reply to the Editors,” directed at N+1. It is, along with his conflicted review of DeLillo’s Falling Man, one of the best things he’s published recently. For as long as he’s at The New Yorker, I’ll enjoy reading James Wood, and rising (I hope) to his provocations.Isn’t this what citizenship in the republic of letters is supposed to mean? [Click to read Inter Alia #1 and #2.]

Among its many peculiar achievements, the Internet seems to have pushed the old “observer effect” – wherein by paying attention to a process we alter its outcome – into the realm of magical thinking. Back during election season, I remember, I had assembled a little rosary of blogs I’d cycle through every day – or, let’s be honest, every hour: Nate Silver, TPM, Politico, RealClearPolitics…as though the existence of the daily cavalcade of kerfuffles depended on me being around to bear witness.Eventually, the endless news cycle would be revealed as the engine of ephemera I already suspected it was. Mr. Silver’s uncannily good number-crunching had Obama on a cruise course to victory from mid-September onward. I could have done something worthwhile with my time; I could have…I don’t know…read a book. Instead, what did I do? Nate Silver, TPM, Politico…Since the election, however, I’ve found that most of these sites give me a headache. The expanded version of Politico, in particular, seems to have diced the news cycle to such a fine consistency that, by the time I get to them in the afternoon, the morning’s chunky controversies are so much dust in the wind.So which of the political blogs do I still read? To my surprise, it’s The Atlantic’s. I’ve singled these guys out before, but I’d like to cast my interpretive net a little wider. That theatlantic.com feels as worthwhile now as it did back in July (a veritable eternity, in the blogosphere) seems to me to point to some of the overlooked ingredients of good online writing.First, I like that The Atlantic focuses on a certain subject – in this case, politics – but not too narrowly. Digressions are encouraged, in a way that keeps the conversation tethered to the wider culture, and accessible to newcomers. This turns out to be a tricky middle ground to occupy; it’s something we’re still working on at The Millions. Still, it seems possible to write about a given passion while still addressing a general-interest audience. (The New York Review of Books has been doing it for almost half a century.)Another thing I admire about The Atlantic’s blog offerings is the plurality – not to say preponderance – of voices. Jeffrey Goldberg, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ross Douthat, Andrew Sullivan et al offer a broad range of insights and provocations. Still, unlike the tentacular Huffington Post, this eighteen-armed blog monster feels refreshingly vincible. A mere half hour of my attention exhausts it. And in the everything-all-the-time world of the web, such limitation may prove to be a precious commodity.This is, of course, a somewhat self-serving post: We at The Millions have a vested interest in figuring out how the successful websites became so. (And my lifelong love affair with print continues; you will have to pry my weekly New Yorker from my cold, proverbial fingers.) Still, trying to figure out why we like what we like may help preempt the “slow decline and emerging blind spots” Max, among others, has warned us about. Now if someone could just figure out how to make online journalism profitable…

A prize-winning journalist once told me this story: Early in his career, writing on spec for The Village Voice or some such organ of the alternative press, he had ventured to the set of Blazing Saddles to interview Mel Brooks. Flush with the wine of self-importance, he flourished his press pass for the security guard outside the soundstage. Inside, however, he found himself merely the youngest and least consequential member of a flock (pod? pride? murder?) of reporters. While waiting for Mr. Brooks to appear, he tried to make small talk with Kenneth Tynan of The New Yorker. “So you guys are doing a profile? Must be a tall order to crank 5,000 words out in time for the movie premiere.” I have no idea whether Tynan wore small half-glasses at that or any other point, but I picture him gazing coolly over the top of the lenses to deliver the following riposte: “We are The New Yorker. We don’t do timely.”This anecdote, in its 2005 version, was meant in part to tweak Tynan for his Olympian condescension, but there was envy in it, too: O, to write without the oppression of deadlines and “news hooks!” I thought of Kenneth Tynan and Blazing Saddles again last week, as I perused the contents of the second issue of N+1‘s new book review supplement, N1BR. Here were: Nikil Saval assessing Alex Ross‘ The Rest is Noise, a year and a half after its publication.Giles Harvey arriving six months late to the 2666 party, with a thoughtful dissent, no less.Nathan Heller offering trenchant insights on a John Updike novel from 1968.Rachel Aviv ranging over the decades-long career of Anne Rice.We are N1BR, I thought. We don’t do timely.Which is all to the good. It goes almost without saying that the current book-marketing dispensation, in which reviewers are given a brief window to render a collective judgment on, say, Tree of Smoke, has seemed more and more ludicrous the smaller that window has become – particularly as books, unlike their authors, live for hundreds of years. One of the knocks on online discourse has been that it pushes timeliness to the point of ephemerality. But as Open Letters Monthly‘s “Second Glance” column, Dan Green’s emerging side project, the brand new Second Pass site, and our Year in Reading series, not to mention our own Lydia Kiesling‘s Modern Library Revue, suggest, the departure from the economic vicissitudes of print may in fact help free us from the tyranny of the now.To be sure, one of the purposes of literary journalism is to alert readers to the new. Still, the scarcity of advertising dollars, and the attendant lack of a profit motive, do seem to open up the possibility of writing about books because they are worth writing about, rather than because they came out last week. At which point the challenge becomes to write well. Here’s hoping the folks at N1BR, and others like them, will make arriving late to the party fashionable again.