Random Notes

You're entering the world of personal publishing at a perilous time. While the tools for creating blogs are bountiful, cheap, and increasingly easy to use, there's nothing to stop you from making macramé on your site several times each day. You choose a template, pick a funny name for your blog, and then what? The desire to post often leads new bloggers to shovel loads of jokey memes, personality tests, and popular news links into their entries. While there's nothing wrong with recycling links—everyone does it—the real zest comes from sharing your perspective on what those link or memes mean to you. ... You can choose to use your voice any way you please, but the really talented bloggers are using theirs to share snapshots of their lives or to provide peeks into the things that obsess them. This attracts readers—often because they share those obsessions, but just as frequently because they happen to love the way those bloggers express themselves. ...

This is not to say that you should parse all your post ideas through endless filters. But I do encourage you to bring something unique about yourself to the conversation whenever you can. Even if you and your kitty are the only ones who read your blog, you'd do well to regard each entry as a chance to say something new, entertaining, unusual, or funny about yourself and the world around you. Don't post crap.

The trick, if there is one, is to zero in on the thing that really makes you want to share your stuff with the world, and then go with it."

We want -- nay, insist upon -- specialists, the more credentialed the better. Take the field of literature for example. Americans expect its novelists -- particularly the ones we've lavished numerous awards on -- to remain novelists at the expense of anything else. Our sense is that big award-winning novelists, rather than waste their literary efforts on mere trifles, should be at home writing the great American novel, and nothing else. ...John Updike's another writer who has suffered, I believe from this emphasis on specialization. Updike's built a well-recognized and well-rewarded career as a novelist, though I personally find his fiction unreadable to the point of being amazed that others not only read it, but *enjoy* it. And yet: Updike is one of the most gifted essayists and sensitive critics of his generation, and has moments when he is simply without peer as a formalist poet. But: this is not, for the most part, that American audiences want. Nice, uh, "verse," Mr. Updike, but would you mind going back to writing those novels of yours?

And we don't just do this to our own writers: we end up "Americanizing" British writers as well. Most Americans think of George Orwell only as the author of Animal Farm and 1984. But without a doubt what he'll be remembered for are his imminently re-readable essays and journalism. Yet try pointing that out to your average undergrad."Orwell? Didn't he write that farm book I read in high school?"

British literary culture, on the other hand, is much different. Not only do they not mind amateur forays into fields that Americans would only allow professionals into, they seem to possess a cultural insistence upon it. .....

We allow men of the Renaissance to be Renaissance men. It is accepted that Michelangelo wrote sonnets; that Leonardo da Vinci invented flying machines on-off days from painting virgins and last suppers; even that Henry VIII was a fair musician as well as an epoch-making monarch. But at some point between the 16th and 19th centuries, being a Renaissance figure stopped being something for a serious artist to crow about. The facts that Blake drew, etched and painted as well as wrote, that Saint-Saens was a gifted amateur mathematician, astronomer, poet and playwright, and that Borodin was a distinguished doctor, are considered signs of eccentricity and possibly waywardness (if they had concentrated more on the matter in hand, they might have made it to the top table).

You could say that modern civilisation is a history of intensifying specialisation; as knowledge increases, any single person's hope of grasping more than a tiny section of the ballooning sphere diminishes. That may be true of science, and is certainly true of factory labour, but I am not at all sure it applies to art, or indeed life lived artfully.

I remember feeling greatly cheered when I read that the English painter Stanley Spencer devoted up to one third of his waking hours to playing Bach on the organ. This makes no sense according to contemporary ideas of time management, and maybe his wife felt he should concentrate a bit more on work that would support the family, but Spencer stuck to his guns, or his preludes and fugues.

The point, I assume, was not that Spencer was a brilliant organist or musician, but that playing Bach was an essential part of what made him tick, as an artist and as a human being. Bach's theological polyphony, his chromaticism, his unerring architecture, in some mysterious way, fed into Spencer's ecstatically textured vision of Cookham, its men and women, animals, birds, trees and river.

Spencer might seem eccentric (anyone who can discern earthly paradise in a Berkshire village must have a special kind of sight), but I don't think his Bach-playing habits are really so unusual. Recently I discovered that Samuel Butler (a splendidly bitter, bracing author I have only just got round to investigating) co-wrote an oratorio called "Narcissus". Anthony Burgess is a more recent example of a writer who spent time composing music.

I believe that Renaissance man or woman is not a peculiarity of that era, but is much more complete and representative - and in a way more normal version - of humanity than modern-day "compartmentalised man". Joseph Beuys gets a lot of stick these days for saying "everyone is an artist". Not everyone is a great artist, to be sure; great artists are few in number; but every human being is born a singer, a dreamer, and at certain moments and in certain states a poet. Language was originally poetry. The Iliad and the Odyssey come before the Peloponnesian war and the dialogues of Plato; whole darkening aeons before Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management.

We should all encourage and develop as much breadth and multi-facetedness as we find within ourselves, and others. This may involve spending time on things that we are not especially good at, whether it be singing, poetry or painting, but which extend our range of thought and feeling and deeply enrich us.