Dear Susan,
It’s our final morning at the breakfast table together, so I’ll take an extra rasher of bacon. My wife is off in New York for five weeks studying to be an even bigger religious zealot than she already is (she’s actually taking a serious Talmud course) so I’ve got to break the Kosher rules while I can. It’s been a real pleasure keeping cybercompany with you. This experience has also loosened some of my skepticism about the importance of the internet. I’m beginning to think that on-line writing really is a new and legitimate genre, halfway between traditional prose and speech. It seems that you’ve got to reverse your organizational method, putting the random stray points up top before easing in to your main argument. You’ve also got to change direction often to fool the reader into thinking he or she has clicked on to a new page, to ward off restlessness. The pace is more stop-and-go than fluid. I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago thinking maybe that I should write the book I’m working on in this format, to see if it works in print. Maybe this is the prose style of the future, a long way from Henry James.
But I don’t see how the internet is going to replace print. Slate has evolved quickly to the medium, but much on-line writing, like our little feature, is commentary on the print world. So far I don’t see how the short bursts of on-line writing could survive on their own. My wife’s the Talmud reader in the family, but as I understand it, they stick a passage of the Torah in the center of the page and then the Talmud consists of competing paragraphs of commentary by various rabbis arranged on page around it. Forgive the absurd comparison, but so far on-line seems to be the Talmud to print’s Torah.
The format does seem to weaken authority. Take our exchange. We’re writing in Slate but the editors have much less editorial presence in this section than editors do in any print magazine. I think I read in one of Kinsley’s Readme’s that some staffers post their own copy. On-line seems to reduce the power of editors and increase the power of writers. Which brings up my pet peeve with Slate. In the “Other Magazines” section they don’t list the authors of pieces, just the magazines. But if the Slateniks really believed articles are just the product of the collective magazine, why do they have bylines here? Why don’t they become like the Economist. Often enough, the author of a piece is more important than where it appeared. But if they listed authors, it would be harder to flatten articles to fit the stereotype assigned to each magazine, which is the column’s frequent conceit.
Everybody should go back and reread the paragraphs you had yesterday on Ken Starr’s thinking. They seem right on to me. The only question I have concerns how prosecutors think. When journalists and politicos get on a case, they get morally outraged if they think somebody is getting away with something awful. This is a good emotion but it leads to a Captain Ahab obsessiveness. The Dems say this is what has happened to Starr, but can a large prosecutorial team get so worked up? Isn’t it possible that their doggedness suggests they have something new and big we don’t know about? Are there high profile cases in which prosecutors have dropped a bombshell in their report? If not, you’re surely right. A few small indictments (I doubt V. Jordan gets one) and we all go back to debating social security privatization.
The one must-read piece in the paper’s today is Mark Helprin’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Helprin is a national treasure. A great novelist, he’s also the finest rhetorician writing for newspapers. I think his political judgments are sometimes wrong, and no doubt many think them crazy, but there is nobody who can phrase an essay as well, or develop such thundering momentum.
The essence of Helprin, I think, is that he is a classical man in a post-modern age. His notions of virtue and vice come from Pericles and Plutarch. The three words that ring though his writing are honor, land, and history. He reveres these things in a way that is rare today. In conversation he can be wry and witty, but his prose is usually classical. Here’s a sentence from today’s piece: “Nearly 400 years of America’s hard-earned accounts–the principles we established, the battles we fought, the morals we upheld for century after century, our very humility before God–now flow promiscuously through our hands, like blood onto sand, squandered and laid waste by a generation that imagines history to have been but a prelude for what it itself will accomplish.”
I’m as cynical as the next guy, but I must still be a conservative because I admire sentiments like that. And I’m not entirely sure how such essays can be expressed on-line.
all the best,
David
