The Thirteenth-Century Attention Economy
Michael’s right that I find the scandale de Silliman completely pointless, but one small comet to achieve escape velocity from the orbit of inanity is something Robert Archambeau posted today. Seems to me Bob is concerned not so much about Silliman’s comment policy as he is with why people care. He suggests that unknowns want these forums as a place to make themselves known and says “we might lay the blame for the current state of affairs…on the attention-economy of poetry, in which people want to be noticed any way they can”:
I think this attention-seeking condition is endemic to the whole American poetry culture now, and at root the issue is the surplus of supply (of poems, of opinions) compared to the demand. It is with poets as it is with aspiring Hollywood starlets: there are a multitude of them on the scene, hoping to be noticed, and few stunts are too low for someone to stoop down to them. I haven’t seen any poets doing the “exposing underwear while getting out of a limo” trick, but I’m sure it can’t be too far off — I just pray it isn’t Silliman who goes there.
Which is a more-than-plausible, if not particularly novel, explanation for much of what gets oxygen in poetryland. Bob pins the change on the internet:
When the dissemination of poems and commentary was limited by the technology of print, relatively few people were able to disseminate their work, and they could imagine that the audience for what they had to say was larger than the number of other publishing writers. Now everyone with a laptop can get their work out there, but getting it noticed amid the crowd is an issue…. Everyone is famous, now, to fifteen people.
Here I’m less convinced. Remember that in 1991, which has to count as pre-internet by any meaningful measure, Dana Gioia could write:
What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet…. A ‘famous’ poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful.
Even this latter isn’t a debate that I have the time or inclination to get into now, but I couldn’t help but think—because these days I’m only allowed to think—about Dante, and his own story of making a name for himself among the young aesthetes of 13th-century Florence.
Near the start of the Vita Nuova, which is as much a record of his own poetic self-fashioning as it is the tale of his love for Beatrice, Dante tells us that he had a dream “in which a wondrous vision appeared to me”: a cloud the color of fire reveals a fearsome figure, who soon discloses his identity as the god Love. Love declares “I am your Lord,” and shows the dreamer a woman naked but for a blood-red drape whom Dante recognizes as Beatrice. In one of his hands Love holds something burning and he explains to Dante, “This is your heart.” In what is possibly the creepiest moment of the whole of Dante’s oeuvre Love then wakes Beatrice to force-feed her the burning organ.
After he woke up, Dante tells us, he was confused by the dream, and so he addressed a sonnet to “the famous troubadours of that time,” asking them to interpret it. (Later he would say that “the true interpretation of that dream was not seen by anyone then, but now is obvious even to the most simple,” though critics still argue its meaning.) Here is Dante’s poem:
To every loving, gentle-hearted friend,
to whom the present rhyme is soon to go
so that I may their written answer know,
greetings in Love’s own name, their lord, I send.The third hour of the time was near at end
when every star in heaven is aglow:
‘twas then Love came before me, dreadful so
that my remembrance is with horror rent.Joyous appeared he in his hand to keep
my very heart, and, lying on his breast,
my lady, veil-enwrapped and full asleep.But he awakened her, and of my heart,
aflame, he humbly made her, fearful, taste:
I saw him, finally, in tears depart. (trans. Di Scipio)
In response to his poem, Dante says, he received many and diverse opinions. Among them was one from Guido Cavalcanti, who, thanks to this first call-and-response, would soon become Dante’s best friend. Here is Guido’s response:
Thou sawest, it seems to me, all things availing,
And every joy that ever good man feeleth.
Thou wast in proof of that lord valorous
Who through sheer honour lords it o’er the world.Thou livest in a place where baseness dieth,
And holdest reason in the piteous mind;
So gently move the people in this sleep
That the heart bears it ‘thout the feel of grief.Love bore away the heart, because in his sight
Was Death grown clamorous for one thou lovest,
Love fed her with thy heart in dread of this,Then, when it seemed to thee he left in sadness,
A dear dream was it which was there completed
Seeing it contrary came conquering. (trans. Pound)
Courteous enough, no? Cavalcanti’s melancholy meditations on “death grown clamourous” seem a good double of the kind of civil banter Ange reads in the Augustans. What Dante doesn’t tell us in the Vita Nuova, though, is that one of his respondents, Dante da Maiano, sent back a poem with enough snark to make a Gawkerite blink. Herewith, my candidate for the Ur-text of comment-field cutting:
To what you’ve asked,
reflecting, I respond briefly,
my friend of little knowledge,
giving you true advice.I speak of your need—
if you are healthy and of sound mind—
Wash your balls in cold water,
so the vapor—which makes you fantasize—passes and extinguishes itself;
and if you’re infirm,
I imagine you’re only delirious—may you know—As such I send my poetic view on this matter;
I won’t change my judgment,
until a doctor looks at your urine. (trans. Cirigliano)
Dante da Maiano was older than Dante Alighieri, so perhaps the parallel to today’s attention economy isn’t exact. But it’s worth noting that the elder Dante had earlier tried the same trick himself, asking the poets of Florence to explain a dream in which donning his lady’s dress freed him to make out with her beside his dead mother. Among his respondents was the young Alighieri, and the poem he wrote remains the earliest example of his verse we possess.
See also:
http://www.digitalemunction.com/2010/05/03/digital-emunction-is-obsolete/
?
Dante (Alighieri) sort of asked for it… a low-blow reply to his high-toned right hook. Can’t tell if Maiano is being mean, or if he just wanted Alighieri to have a good laugh (which I hope he did). Maybe both.
Marco Polo got copied on this email in Peking, no? Which compelled the All-Wise Emperor to install comment-blocking? “To protect the tender ears of our Youth Poets.”
The argument “twas ever thus” has some real validity, for sure — and I like the Dante angle. After all, didn’t he also write something about what a pain in the ass it was dealing with all the correspondence he got? A kind of renaissance comments-stream-moderation thing, I suppose.
While the desire for recognition can be found in many (most?) (all??) socio-cultural situations, things do, of course, change in relation to their contexts — let’s say the internet makes certain kinds of attention ploys more plausible, and more frequent. I actually think these are good problems to have, in that they are symptoms of a movement (flawed, partial, weird, unplanned) to democratize access to the means of cultural production. I’m okay with that, by and large.
Bob
Well, how good and/or democratizing is it, really, to have discussion space monopolized by CFBs [comment field bullies]. Unless you’d argue that CFBs are really representative of the many.
I’d say that the CFB is one of the essential actors in a democracy, as is the (non-government) blogger who decides to ban him. That doesn’t mean CFBs are a Good Thing for Poetry (GTP (TM))—probably the contrary. But it does suggest that the more we democratize access to the means of production, the more we’re going to see a retreat into non-democratic networks of artistic support (e.g., e.g., e.g., e.g.)
I suppose what I mean is this: the very real problem of CFBs is the product of a larger condition that I think is, overall, a big gain over how things used to be. That is: I wouldn’t want to go back to the pre-blog days, even if we could.
In other news, turns out I don’t know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t Dante who complained about all the half-witted and narcissistic correspondence he had to deal with, it was Petrarch, in one of the letters from 1352. Check it out in Robinson and Rolfe, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, or on pages 120-123 of The Portable Renaissance Reader.
Bob
I’m inclined to be agree with you guys. But: if you apply this liberality, for lack of a better word, to Am. politics, you will then be able to predict how talk shows, blogs, and hype are strongly going to inflect coming elections. And you many not be so sanguine about the result, when it comes.
Whaddya mean, going to inflect?
Absolutely, Don. But (unlike Bob, maybe) I wouldn’t say I’m sanguine. I just think that’s the way things are, and that no poet older than 25 has any excuse for thinking it will ever be otherwise.
As I was trying to suggest, I don’t think democratic situations are, in general, the best matrix for the making of art, especially not at the start of a career. As far as I’m concerned, a young poet would do much better to embed herself in a closed coterie of ten like-minded souls than to cast her half-baked bread on the democratic waters of the internet.
Ten is five or six too many.
Coterie Math
1 leader of real talent and winning personality
+ 1 girlfriend/boyfriend of leader (talent optional, attractiveness not)
+ 2 people of medium talent whom the leader can measure and reassure himself/herself (but who are we kidding: himself) against
+ 1 preferably balding theorist who is deathly shy in person and ruthless in print and who sees the leader as confirmation of everything he (the theorist) believes poetry should be–and also, possibly, someone he’d secretly like to sleep with
+ 1 publicist of loud voice, minimum self-consciousness, and uncritical mind
+ 1 ambivalent outsider who will, though s/he doesn’t know it yet, help the leader break out/cross over when the time is right
+ 3 sycophants who count it the apex of cool to be allowed to post fliers/serve beer/fill seats at the coterie’s events
—————
10 people
you just described the Baader-Meinhof gang!
If you say so.
Since we apparently live in age in which adults say “show your work” to other adults without fear, here’s how I count it: Three or four poets whose work you envy and whose responses to your work are variable enough to suggest they actually read it.
What you suggest is absolutely what I’d tell a young poet to seek out. What I suggest are the job openings I’d guess he or she would find.
> are variable
vary would be better
> the job openings
Now There’s a First Book Title TM
I want to be the ambivalent outsider here.
I’m an expert keg-tapper.
I’d rather be the boyfriend.
I’m inclined to agree with Bobby, altho I’d widen the scope of what democratic situations aren’t the best matrix for the making of.
A leader? I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I mean, Michael Farrell’s got an interesting study out there about the composition of creative groups and coteries. He makes a pretty powerful argument that the presence of a leader (or one figure with a bigger aura than the rest) can be an impediment in all kinds of ways.
It would be interesting to think through the relative fates of American langpo and the poetry we associate with Cambridge in the UK. No single figure bestrides langpo like a colossus (the Grand Piano project seems relevant here). Prynne towers over Cambridge in terms of prestige and in terms of reception. I haven’t thought it through in Farrell’s terms at all, but it’d be worth doing sometime. (And it could make sense with other personality-dominated scenes — think of the Wintersians). Here’s a link to the book, some of which you can read for free:
http://www.amazon.com/Collaborative-Circles-Friendship-Dynamics-Creative/dp/0226238679/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1280871809&sr=1-2
I’m now waiting for Keston Sutherland to throw a milkshake at me or something, which seems to happen whenever I write the words “Cambridge” and “poetry” in the same sentence.
B.
The Grand Piano is relevant because it happened at the time Langpo’s Prynne was off publishing with FSG.
> Prynne .. FSG
Devoutly to be wished.
I take Bobby’s point about Dante and so on. And we gain a great deal in recognizing the ways that many contemporary anxieties and problems do not belong solely to the moment. (Many of the complaints about the Internet have their echoes in complaints about print. Take a look at some of the pamphlet debates in the early eighteenth century in Massachusetts, for instance.) But don’t we also risk losing historical sense and precision here? That is to say, insisting upon the ways that many contemporary anxieties, etc. of poets have nothing whatsoever in common with the anxieties of poets in the thirteenth century or, for that matter, the eighteenth century doesn’t just betray a narrow focus on the moment, a lack of historical breadth, either. We might end up being wrong in our assessment, but fending off anachronism is surely not an ignoble aim.
The trick, I suppose, lies in seeing both the continuities between historical moments and the particularities of individual moments. Generally, I’m a believer in continuities: most of the time I think of us as still operating within Romantic paradigms, and with many of the social conditions of that era. Some days, I see the line of continuity as very strong all the way back to the 1640s. Then I have a drink.
B.
fending off anachronism is surely not an ignoble aim
Sure, and if you slice anything finely enough you can find differences. But what do you think is lost by saying that this looks like that? It’s not anachronistic to say Dante was obsessed with the ways and means of fame. That fame meant something qualitatively and quantitatively different then than it does now doesn’t change the fact that some of his attitudes look awfully familiar.
But what do you think is lost by saying that this looks like that?
Well, maybe nothing: that’s why it’s a risk. Or maybe all kinds of things, like a rigorous awareness of historical conditions and significant historical change, say, the effects of the Renaissance, the English Revolution, the Enlightenment, and, oh, I don’t know, capitalism, to name just a few (and here we still haven’t arrived at the twentieth century). I didn’t mean to suggest that we risk being anachronistic when we say Dante was obsessed with the ways and means of fame. I meant to suggest that we risk being anachronistic when we assume our analysis of Dante’s obsessions is interchangeable with an adequate analysis of the obsessions etc. of contemporary poets. I could make a similar argument about Edward Taylor, too (despite the fact his poetry wasn’t published). But unless you think that those obsessions emerge (or are even legible) outside of historically embedded conditions, surely there are profound limits to any argument that looks at Dante’s obsessions and anxieties in order to explain our own.
Again, sure, I would never say we should ignore that risk. But in nearly 10 years of graduate school (dear god) I’ve discovered that people are much more keen to insist on the danger than they are willing or able to show how it shakes out in specific cases.
My pet theory: history is like white light. It is the product of many causes that vibrate at different frequencies. Some of them are long, some are short, and most of them have nothing whatsoever to do with capitalism. I’d say the sociology of art that Dante lived marked the start, in some ways, of a wave we’re still riding.
(If you really wanted to get Marxist about it, you could note that Dante coincided in time and space with the first stirrings of capitalism, but I’m honestly not convinced that explains it.)
Fair enough. But one of the things my nine years in graduate school (let’s hear another dear god) has taught me is that everyone thinks their period of specialization is the wave we’re still riding. I could perhaps be persuaded that the sociology of art of Dante’s time marks, in significant ways, the beginning of conditions we are still dealing with. But that argument merely displaces without eradicating the question of historical change. What do you say to someone who thinks the real turning point is fifth-century Greece? And so on. I tend to believe that there really were unprecedented shifts in the past few hundred years (and, on a much smaller scale, the past few decades) that an analysis of Dante could account for in no way whatsoever. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn a lot about contemporary poets by looking at Dante. It just means the risks involved in that knowledge are far from trivial.
“most of the time I think of us as still operating within Romantic paradigms, and with many of the social conditions of that era. Some days, I see the line of continuity as very strong all the way back to the 1640s.”
“I’d say the sociology of art that Dante lived marked the start, in some ways, of a wave we’re still riding.”
All 3 of these sentences strike me as sound, which suggests that we’re accumulating tendencies and trends without necessarily shedding older tendencies.
While I personally don’t share Kent’s dismay at the disappearance of the comments at Silliman’s blog, I too was struck by their disappearance, am sympathetic to Kent’s concern, and wonder at people’s disdain of same. I have from time-to-time looked up old brouhahas at the Harriet blog, trying to recall what asinine thing I said about something-or-other, and would be dismayed to see those comments disappear.
Thanks, RPB, for your stimulating discussion of the answer-poem culture of 13th-century Italy.
I think it’s too bad Harriet & Ron Silliman felt compelled to close up their comment streams. I think it has less to do with either democracy or poetics than with the time & patience constraints of website managers. Hyde Park soapbox speeches by cranks & argumentative fanatics are (or were?) available because England is tolerant & likes eccentrics generally & the big old park is just there. If the website managers had the time & patience to moderate & weed out the really nasty & malicious postings, then we would still see the comment streams (I think).
The whole business about how poets develop, & openness vs. coteries etc. seems to me to be far too subject to chance & unpredictability to draw any general conclusions. The basic requirement for good poetry is a love and affinity for language itself, which is a gift that usually shows itself very early. How the individual gifted wordsmith handles & develops that gift varies greatly. But most good poets are innately good or good -in-embryo long before they reach the age of 18. As such they adapt in different ways tot he social & literary opportunities that present themselves.
> time & patience constraints
The idiocy ratio of comment streams can’t have helped. (I may have misspelled gender in that last sentence.)
Friendster killed listservs. MySpace killed Friendster. Blogs killed MySpace. Comment fields killed blogs. Facebook killed comment fields. C’mon, Tumblr and Twitter…
> killed blogs
Group blogs survived, though — multiple authors mean the structure is already part comment field.
“Hyde Park Kills Twitter in Massive English Sparrow Strike”
In any case, the only way any of this social writing survives is if you keep a printed copy of it or if enough people cut and paste it onto their own sites.
That’s why I did this :
http://books.google.com/books?id=xICJLgM2-9sC&dq=%22the+well+is+always+there%22+gould&hl=en&ei=9Vs7TJ-AFJSRnweDooC9Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA
- but I didn’t include the COMMENTS !
I want to click a thumb-up icon under Jordan’s “gender” joke.
as for BB & BN’s back/forth: it’s obviously true that social dynamics have changed in profound ways since [pick handy but defensible epochal shift]. what interests me more than arguing about whether or in what ways our artistic phenomenologies are continuous w/ Dante’s or whoever’s is the question of what exactly we’re trying to posit as the engine of those phenomenologies (or conflicts or subject positions or ideologies; we’ve all been in grad school long enough to pick our poisons).
Bob seems to be saying that the internet changed something. but I’d want to press on that point & argue that communication technologies don’t change things in that way, no matter what Benjamin or McLuhan or Kittler or Kenny G. say. rather, the technologies themselves & our responses to & within them are simultaneous reflections of broader productive historical forces.
that might strike everyone as banal, but I think it’s worth clarifying whether we’re claiming that technological change is in & of itself the catalyst of sociological & phenomenological change (the internet is changing the way the think!). & worth defending what I might call, without contradiction, a limited universalism of the human.
> simultaneous reflections
Name it! Go! Go! Go!
Well, of course technological changes come about in response to &/or as part of larger things. So sure. Separating causality from effect is never easy, and in the end there is usually some kind of dialectical relation of the two.
Anyway: I don’t suppose it’s terribly radical to say that communications conditions (for poets, and damn near everyone not mired in abject poverty, and maybe them, too) are different now than before the rise of the internet. I also agree that the internet and other technologies don’t drop down from space to become agents of change separate from other forces, including the forces (technological, social, economic, what have you) that created those technologies.
In the end, the old Hegelian dictum about the true being the whole has a truth to it: the only fully adequate explanation of reality is reality. Of course that doesn’t mean that more abstract and partial maps of the situation have no value, truth, or pertinence, as long as we are aware of their limitations (which is why its good you made your comment).
B.
History originates in the milky-white light of conscious (pre-)creation. The early morning Milk Train.
& it (history) consists of human beings trying to remember what that light was like, & Yahweh showing up to remind them. In person.
That’s my theory, anyway…
BB, have you read John G. Demaray on Dante? Or even better (if that’s possible) – A.C. Charity (Events & their Afterlife)?
Or, try Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen: “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!”
JL
Mickey was onto something. Hexaemeral.
Beneath a veil of milky white
Stands Isaac’s like a hoary dovecote,
The crozier irritates the grey silences,
The heart understands the airy rite.
The wandering specter of the centennial requiem,
The grand bearing of the shroud
And in a decrepit seine, the Gennesarian gloom
Of the Lenten Week.
The Old Testament smoke on warm altars,
And the final, orphaned cry of the priest,
A regal, humble man: clean snow on his shoulders,
And the savage purple mantles.
The eternal cathedrals of Sofia and Peter,
Storehouses of air and light, the possessions
Of the universal granary
And the threshing barn of the New Testament.
The spirit is not drawn to you in sorely troubled times,
Here drags the wolf’s track of unhappiness
Along the cloudy steps;
We will never betray it:
For the slave is free, has overcome fear,
And preserved beyond measure
In the cool granaries, in deep combines,
Is the kernel of deep, full faith.
- O. Mandelstam
Insulting the stars is old hat; nothing to do with the internet. See: Marinetti’s call to burn the museums, faintly and weakly and unconsciously-ironically repeated by Pierre Boulez’s call to destroy all art of the past. I see the internet as a further elaboration and acceleration of the truly revolutionary boom of mass media in the first quarter of the 20th century, with the movies and radio and records. I would not be surprised to wake up in 300 years and find that future generations have found the 20th century’s poetry in movies like “Casablanca,” much as Shakespeare’s contemporaries had no idea that his plays were anything other than cheap entertainment. (Most of Shakespeare’s plots are no better than “Casablanca”; often “cheaper” and more preposterous.)
> I would not be surprised to wake up in 300 years
You’re a better man than I, Gunga Duck
The known unknowns. Is that a band name yet? They’re about to retire it, actually.
I never know what Jordan is talking about, or referring to, but I’ll add a note here. For those few here who may (or may not) be interested in the upshot of Silliman’s comments box out-blotting, there’s a piece call’d “What’s Up with Silliman” post’d at my own Pacific Trash Vortx, here.
JL
Oh, man. After reading that piece, I’d like to publicly thank Ron Silliman for deleting his comments archive. But props to Kent for his winning emulation of the bombastic Latta house style.
…must be doin’ something right.
Well, since we’re airing our displeasures, here are mine.
Dear Robert, and all,
I think it’s funny — as in ha-ha very funny — that a complaint about missing comments on a blog is posted on a blog that doesn’t accept comments.
Call me out for hobglobin-ing here, but I think not.
Hmm. I hardly think trading commentary is ‘getting attention any way possible’. That it matters? I don’t think the point is ‘does it matter’ nor is it ‘does anyone care’. That just smacks of a type of one-up-manship as it, I am simply too important to care mentality (of the one voicing it).
On the other hand, I think it will be very interesting to watch the Nielsen ratings fall because out of those 2.5 million hits, I’d bet that upwards of 30% of those are either by double dippers and/or boxer war groupies. Perhaps even, typing in their boxers.