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Uncreative Writing - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Today technology has exacerbated these mechanistic tendencies in writing (there are, for instance, several Web-based versions of Raymond Queneau's 1961 laboriously hand-constructedHundred Thousand Billion Poems), inciting younger writers to take their cues from the workings of technology and the Web as ways of constructing literature. As a result, writers are exploring ways of writing that have been thought, traditionally, to be outside the scope of literary practice: word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few.
As much as I admire Mr. Goldsmith for many of his activities like Ubuweb, here he's mostly trying to justify what he wants to do, and he's on shaky ground.
ReplyDeleteA few of the comments are quite pithy, because they point out the false premises that arguments like this are based on.
A fascinating read, nonetheless, even though only half-convincing.