Camille Paglia (visit the Salon cookie trick page first):
The blogs, for example, are becoming so self-referential. If people want to be better writers, they can’t just read the blogs! You’ve got to look at something that’s outside this rushing world of evanescent words. Nowhere in blog pages does anyone pay attention to the individual word – things are moving too fast. Someone like Emily Dickinson was working with the dictionary and looking at the etymology of the word, so that you have all this tremendous stuff going on within a single word!
Her claim fails to explain the many linguistics Weblogs in use, or the fact that actual writers maintain Weblogs. Some of us even cover books and, indeed, lexicography.
My partner of 12 years, Alison Maddex, gave birth to a baby boy in November 2002 – Lucien Harry Maddex. I am Lucien’s adoptive parent – but certainly not his mother! […] I kept Lucien’s birth completely out of the public eye….
Except, of course, for telling C-SPAN about Lucien’s birth in 2003, which I reported.
Then when Matt Drudge put the picture up on the Drudge Report, I thought, “Hooray! This is Roethke’s first appearance on a major news Web site!”
Could it be that Camille secretly enjoys “look[ing] at something that’s outside this rushing world of evanescent words”?
Anyway, is it not true that “cultural energy at the end of the century has abandoned the traditional arts and shifted to the Internet – which is why you and I are having this conversation”?
I just love that idea of lineage and transmission from generation to generation.
We’re doing what we can. Some of us write for longevity. We are trying to ensure that electronic documents will actually still be around and functioning for future generations to learn from.
And some of us – some of those selfsame people – continue to write in, and for, print. We have mixed allegiances. We want the print medium and the electronic medium to be as respectively good as each can be. We love the physical codex of the book, and its seeming opposite, the bodyless codex of the display.