Here's an article from the New York Times Magazine section from 9/7 about facebook and twitter and about how these developed and how they have transformed or are transforming the way we communicate.
I was recently reading "A Painful case" from James Joyce's Dubliners, " and found a sentence that reminded me of this article. "A Painful Case" is a story about Mr Duffy, a writer manque, who is engaged in an illicit affair that he rationalizes by seeing it as part of the artist's life he craves. That the woman is married only adds to the charm while also making the affair "safe." Duffy is a portrait of an artist of a different kind. Mr Duffy is forever translating Gerhart Hauptmann's Michael Kramer and he keeps rotten apples in his desk drawer, so that when he is in need of inspiration he breathes in the apple fumes. The latter is a trick that he learned from Schiller, and it is as much this fact as it as any enlivening properties of decaying apple that serves his purpose and his self image. The woman he is seeing, Mrs Sinico seems like she has been written just for him, though her Bovary-like end is more of an inconvenience for him than anything.
But it was the following sentence that reminded me of this article, especially its discussion of twitter and the news feeds on facebook:
I was recently reading "A Painful case" from James Joyce's Dubliners, " and found a sentence that reminded me of this article. "A Painful Case" is a story about Mr Duffy, a writer manque, who is engaged in an illicit affair that he rationalizes by seeing it as part of the artist's life he craves. That the woman is married only adds to the charm while also making the affair "safe." Duffy is a portrait of an artist of a different kind. Mr Duffy is forever translating Gerhart Hauptmann's Michael Kramer and he keeps rotten apples in his desk drawer, so that when he is in need of inspiration he breathes in the apple fumes. The latter is a trick that he learned from Schiller, and it is as much this fact as it as any enlivening properties of decaying apple that serves his purpose and his self image. The woman he is seeing, Mrs Sinico seems like she has been written just for him, though her Bovary-like end is more of an inconvenience for him than anything.
But it was the following sentence that reminded me of this article, especially its discussion of twitter and the news feeds on facebook:
He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.Now twitter and facebook feeds aren't generally written in the third person and the predicates are conventionally in the progressive not in the past tense, but the impulse is the same, to narrate our lives briefly, moment by moment, to capture and encapsulate the on-goingness of life, to telegraph experience, to translate our daily movements into traces of information, to an audience that is out there. And in doing so to see ourselves as writing our lives, as artists do, if only artists of the Mr. Duffy kind.
No comments:
Post a Comment