The Dress was divisive, in the purest sense, dividing (according to a BuzzFeed poll with nearly four million votes) the two thirds of people who saw white and gold from the third who saw blue and black. Facebook’s engineers had been perfecting its engagement metrics…[A]nd the Dress was universal—a form of media that didn’t even require literacy to land. It didn’t spread, like most memes, along a rising viral curve, passed hand to hand. It spread, instead, algorithmically, as Facebook showed the Dress to users whose friends had not yet shared it, confidently predicting that they would find it just as engaging. Within a couple of hours, our traffic rose to seven hundred thousand people simultaneously, seven times our usual peaks. That sent our engineers scrambling to add servers to BuzzFeed’s back end; it was a number not reached before or since by a BuzzFeed post on the web.
That does seem like a moment to remember: when a medium designed to transmit streams of text transcends itself, delivering something “universal—a form of media that didn’t even require literacy to land.”
The novelist Haruki Murakami, on how he demands regular productivity from himself when working on a new piece of long fiction:
That’s not how an artist should go about his art, some may say. It sounds more like working in a factory. And I concur—that’s not how artists work. But why must a novelist be an artist? Who made that rule? No one, right? So why not write in whatever way is most natural to you? Moreover, refusing to think of oneself as an artist removes a lot of pressure. More than being artists, novelists should think of themselves as “free”—“free” meaning that we are able to do what we like, when we like, in a way we like without worrying about how the world sees us. This is far better than wearing the stiff and formal robes of the artist.1
I find something satisfying about a novelist refusing to call himself an artist. And there is a long tradition of writers de-emphasizing their artistry, likely stretching back to before the novel was a major, reputable genre of writing.
Murakami suggests that artistic production might not be a good descriptor of his activity; perhaps many “artists” no longer see themselves in the image. Perhaps what it means to be an artist has become too specific, and it is easier to discard the label. A writer like Murakami could prefer to write under simpler–if less legible–terms. A lot of art today struggles under a romantic burden; to be an artist is to resist the functional and purpose-driven framework of ordinary life. Murakami’s self-definition–that a novelist is someone who is more free, who takes his or her freedom seriously, who makes use of it–also shares this resistance to a reductive functionalism, even as his artistry accepts a regularity more typical of the factory.
It is worth thinking more about why being an artist has lost some of its attraction–especially to those who devote their lives to making art.
From “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing A Novel.” In Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami, 2023
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The late spring dispersal of cottonwood seeds happened throughout last week–and into this one. I couldn’t find any ready information about variance in seed volume by year, but the amount of seeds in the air seemed greater this year.
A low-hanging catkin in a nearby park with closeups of seeds, mid-release:
Seedpiles could be found everywhere, piling up so high and thick they were like snow on the grass
In less cultivated environments, the eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides) is more of a niche species, occurring near rivers and water sources, where the seeds need constant moisture to germinate and grow. These seeds are notably short-lived (the US Department of Agriculture’s Woody Seed Manual reports they stop being viable in as little as two weeks). Unlike some seeds, which can remain dormant for a long time until conditions improve, the cottonwood appears to be a prolific producer of low-odds seeds that travel far. Most will waft off course and die off right away, but the hope is that a few float far enough to hit the right habitat–and take off.
The city of Chicago probably likes to plant them in cultivation because they are fast growers (some sources say one of the fastest, 6 or more feet a year), reaching a mature height in 10-15 years.
Because of a few favorable qualities, this tree with a picky survival strategy gets to live everywhere in the city.
Metra electric, on Chicago’s South Side, has been doing track work lately. I can’t be certain whether these will be added to the tracks or have just been removed, but they look weathered, like they have reached the end of their primary life. If so, they will likely be designated for use in landscaping projects. There is apparently a brisk secondary market for them; even the big-box home improvement stores sell them used, even though there has been some concern in the past that they are treated with creosote, a carbonaceous chemical that can cause cancer.
The railroad tie is one of those technologies that should inspire admiration for its simple persistence. Railroads have been going over 200 years, and this essential part remains mostly unchanged. Arguably it is not valued enough: in the U.S. rail travel and transport are an underutilized technology.
How much discarded technology also finds a second life? Most technological waste goes into landfills or is simply dumped, wherever, into the surroundings. A small part is concentrated in recycling facilities. Almost none of it becomes a simple tool, an ornament, that renaturalizes itself into an everyday object.
I have a standard answer when interviewers ask me about literary prizes—this question invariably comes up, whether in Japan or abroad. “The most important thing,” I tell them, “is good readers. Nothing means as much as the people who dip into their pockets to buy my books—not prizes, or medals, or critical praise.” I repeat this answer over and over ad nauseam, yet it doesn’t seem to sink in. Most often it’s completely ignored.
When I stop to think about it, though, interviewers may simply find my answer boring. There may be something about it that sounds packaged for public consumption. I sometimes get that feeling, too. It certainly isn’t the kind of comment that sparks a journalist’s interest. Nevertheless, since the answer reflects what I see as the honest truth, I can’t really change it, however boring it may be. That’s why I end up saying the same thing time and again. Readers have no ulterior motives when they shell out twenty or thirty dollars for one of my books. “Let’s check this out” is (probably) what they’re thinking, pure and simple. Or they may be full of anticipation. I am eternally grateful to such readers. Compared to them…no, let’s just drop the comparisons.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it is literary works that last, not literary prizes. I doubt many can tell you who won the Akutagawa Prize two years ago, or the Nobel Prize winner three years back. Can you? Truly great works that have stood the test of time, on the other hand, are lodged in our memory forever. Was Ernest Hemingway a Nobel Prize winner? (He was.) How about Jorge Luis Borges? (Was he? Who gives a damn?) A literary prize can turn the spotlight on a particular work, but it can’t breathe life into it. It’s that simple.
- Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation
I can see why some people might find this banal, but it stopped and moved me when I read it. Maybe this is one of those points that is more obvious to people who have never published (or attempted to publish) something for others. They are not as close to the danger.
One of the preconditions for writing is to become more involved with one’s subject than the audience. To write anything, you almost have to get in your head a little bit; concentration requires losing track of others. This is true for any writing that is original and difficult–especially literary writing. When a writer publishes, it is always a little surprising to finish and discover that one’s writing has been read: that there was another phase to this game, that it has an effect on someone.
Sometimes I think that the main reason graduate schools in the humanities (Masters and Ph.D.) remain as big as they are–still– is because they create a pool of “good readers” for the faculty. Given that graduate students are more numerous than professors, and the size of the average non-specialist audience for scholarship is zero, graduate students must be the single largest set of readers for academic writing.
Today the ratio of writers to readers may be closer to 1:1 than ever. I want to say–not without a healthy doubt for my own answer–that perhaps more people have discovered the pleasure of writing, for its own sake, than at any point ever. But this also makes readers more scarce than ever. There is simply more writing, chasing an only marginally expanded pool of readers. What makes Murakami’s tribute to the reader worth ruminating on is that it speaks to a condition of all writing– even the professionals at the very top of the recognition hierarchy.
To write is to risk not being read, to risk looking self-absorbed because you have taken care to craft an object that no one will ever use. This is why prizes for writing can look like an attempt to perform an audience into existence (aren’t prizes awarded on public stages? with an audience?). So often when a prize is awarded, the media coverage notes that the prize is “prestigious.” But prestige does not imply readers–only readers do.
It’s always nice to know the name of the flower that is blooming right now; another challenge is to look for the wildflowers that have faded back to greenery. From a plant cultivator’s standpoint, the action ramps up when the bloom fades. It is then that you have to watch for the seedpods. These can be tiny–dispersed within a day–or large, ostentatious and long-lived, as in many species of milkweed.
Milkweed pods left on the stalk during winter
I’d say we’re past early spring by now. The first round of squill that appeared all over the neighborhood have faded. I realized that I had never observed these flowers after they lose their blooms. Hard as they are to miss against the grey background of late winter, I forget about them and their distinctive colors as the season goes on. But even though we are two weeks or more past their blooms, the plants are still above ground. I went hunting and found the seedpods of one squill variant, Puschkinia scilloides
…a shrinking lexicon of words related to sense experience. I’m relying here on an observation Ivan Illich makes in “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show,” and, by extension, the sources he cites. “Dozens of words for shades of perception have disappeared from usage,” Illich notes. “For what the nose does, someone has counted the victims: Of 158 German words that indicate variations of smell, which Dürer’s [d. 1528] contemporaries used, only thirty-two are still in use. Equally, the linguistic register for touch has shriveled. The see-words fare no better.”¹
I would add to this, on a strictly anecdotal basis, a similarly diminishing lexicon of names for natural phenomena such as flora and fauna. Generic categories do a lot of work in ordinary speech: birds, bugs, trees, etc. More specific names seem to elude many of us.
Relatedly, while language tethered to the material world appears to diminish, language tethered to the virtual realm endlessly proliferates and fragments.
While the overall trend wouldn’t surprise me–you can say best what you do, and even then you have to practice saying it–I would be interested in confirming this phenomenon in a modern empirical setting. No one could go back and verify how many words for the birds and bees a medieval everyman would have used, but trends over even the last few decades might tell something.
And I would be surprised if all the senses suffered equally. As John Berger teaches, much of the modern world is an intensely visual culture, and even if we most people today see differently than their ancestors, there is an argument that the “ways of seeing” have proliferated.
And perhaps there are fewer words for, say, things smelled, because the range of things to smell has diminished in post-industrial modern settings.
