Lewis Lapham on Web Writing

Lewis Lapham publishes a quarterly that perfectly overlaps "Things You Can't Google" (TYCG.)

A set of Lapham's Quarterlys is a good replacement for the now-defunct bookshelf encyclopedia in any family home. A contemporary family home, because the wonderfully snobby Lapham has done something akin to, more elevated than, *compromising* for the web. Most of the entries in each issue would fit into a blog post. And the entries span blogs from last year back to well before Gutenberg.

His editor's letter from the "Means of Communication" issue is too long for the web (which would likely frustrate and please him, it's the point he's exploring in this essay,) but here's an excerpt from his piece titled Word Order:

...Carr presumably knows whereof he speaks, and I’m content to regard the Internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue. It is one thing to browse the Internet; it is another thing to write for it. The author doesn’t speak to a fellow human being, whether a Spaniard, a Frenchman, or a German. He or she addresses an algorithm geared to accommodate keywords—insurance, Steve Jobs, Muammar Qaddafi, mortgage, Casey Anthony—but is neither willing nor able to wonder what the words might mean. It scans everything but hears nothing, as tone-deaf as the filtering devices maintained by a search engine or the Pentagon, processing words as lifeless objects, not as living subjects.

You're with him, you value words over photos over video. But you introduced the last snippet as "the point he's exploring" that's so reductive to him. And to real writers:

The strength of language doesn’t consist in its capacity to pin things down or sort things out. “Word work,” Toni Morrison said in Stockholm, “is sublime because it is generative,” its felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. “We die,” she said. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Shakespeare shaped the same thought as a sonnet, comparing his beloved to a summer’s day, offering his rhymes as surety on the bond of immortality—“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

Language at its best is *not* to pin things down or sort things out. (Or to insert bold emphasis into another author's words, as we've done to Lapham in this post.) Lapham is wonderfully snobby because he remains delightfully game - LQ debuted 10 years ago, a year following the iPhone. His site publishes tweet-able entries. His closer hints optimism:

Maybe our digital technology is still too new. Writing first appears on clay tablets around 3000 bc; it’s another 3,300 years before mankind invents the codex; from the codex to moveable type, 1,150 years; from moveable type to the Internet, 532 years. Forty years haven’t passed since the general introduction of the personal computer; the World Wide Web has only been in place for twenty. We’re still playing with toys. The Internet is blessed with undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Absent the force of the human imagination and its powers of expression, our machines cannot accelerate the hope of political and social change, which stems from language.

Essay from Lapham's Quarterly Communication issue, Vol V, Number 2.

Now if only I could track down his essays on why he had to leave his childhood home of San Francisco, and one my father told me he'd read about lineages in rock music. Lapham on Rock lives in the category of "Things You Can't Google" (TYCG.)