Blogging Makes Joan Didion Uncomfortable

This is the second in installment of posts in which iconic writer of the sixties reveals misgivings toward the brave new world of writing in a technological age. In an interview—or. more accurately, a passing encounter —with Ross Kenneth Urken of the blog Guest of a Guest, Joan Didion says:

Well, I don't really understand blogging. It seems like writing, except quicker. I mean, I'm not actually looking for that instant feedback.

Just as it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Phillip Roth should have no interest in curling up in bed with a Kindle, it should shock no one that Joan Didion, whose sentences flash like knife blades honed as a keen as razors blades that somehow never go dull, should have little interest in the casual immediacy of blogging.

“It makes me uncomfortable,” Didion said. “It’s an entirely different impulse, I guess. It's like talking.”

And, of course, writing as talking is not what Didion does. Consider the opening of her essay “Marrying Absurd” from Slouching toward Bethlehem (1967):

To be married in Las Vegas, Clark County’s Nevada, a bride must swear that she is eighteen or has parental permission and a bridegroom that he is twenty-one or has parental permission. Someone must put up five dollars for the license. (Sundays and holidays, fifteen dollars.) The Clark County Courthouse issues marriage licenses at any time of the day or night except between noon and one in the afternoon, between eight and nine in the evening, and between four and five in the morning. Nothing else is required. The State of Nevada, alone among the United States, demands neither a premarital blood test nor a waiting period before or after the issuance of a marriage license.

In her dry recounting of the provisions of Clark County’s marriage ordinances regarding the issuance of marriage licenses, culminating in the listing of each of the three hours during which the courthouse is closed, Didion contrasts deadpan Nevada’s forward-looking, laissez faire marriage policy of the 1960s with its consequences, which are, at the same time, lucrative, touching, and pathetic.

Most discussions of the contrasts between literary writing and blogging generally come around to questions of impermanence and revision, the implication being that bloggers are writers whose medium requires them to forego artistry for speed. However, such a view necessary devalues the range of complex decisions and techniques acquired in hours of solitary crafting that are lost in the interest of haste. To say nothing of what is lost when permanence is lost. For example, twenty years from now the 2010s will be remembered as the infancy of what will likely be by then near-universally legal gay marriage across the country. Are there essays being written today, in Iowa and Vermont, the gay “Marrying Absurd”s of today, that will still be read two decades from now?

Philip Roth Hates Change

Reuters reporter Christine Kearney asks Philip Roth about e-readers, a device over which the author of the new novel Nemesis has likely lost little sleep. Of the larger question of technology in general, Roth says:

"The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people's reach anymore," he said.

Beginning with film in the 20th Century, then television, then computers, and more recently social media networks such as Facebook, the reader is now utterly distracted, he said.

"Now it is the multiple screens and there is no competing against it," Roth said. Roth does not plan to buy any kind of e-reading device such as Amazon's Kindle. "I don't see what the point is for me," he said. "I like to read in bed at night and I like to read with a book. I can't stand change anyway."

Kearney’s second topic struck me—if not Roth—as more interesting.

"Among the publishing chatter about a possible impending death of the popular, longer novel and the growth of novellas due to e-readers,” Kearney writes, "Nemesis—clocking in at about 56,000 words—is Roth's latest in a cycle of short novels."

While I’ve caught none of this chatter, Kearney suggests that Roth is on the cutting edge of the trend. “I am with the times,” Roth jokes.

Roth, author Goodbye, Columbus, says he asked Saul Bellow, author of The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, how to write a short novel.

I talked to him and said "How do you do it?" And he didn't know any more than anybody else. So we just laughed.