On the Road for 50 years

I've been following the NY Times open forum on the 50th anniversary of On the Road, which has racked up almost 300 comments so far (just before noon, Wednesday).

More praise than criticism, I'm pleased to see. Much of the condemnation of the book amounts to an ad hominem against Kerouac himself for his treatment of women, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. Much of the praise amounts to lyrical affirmations of the counter-culture movement. But nowhere, so far, has there been any mention of the typewriter's role in that novel.

The book that Truman Capote dismissed as "typing, not writing'' is the quintessential typewritten novel, and the story of its making is the stuff of legend: Kerouac, pumped up on coffee and amphetamines, composed On the Road during a 20-day marathon in April 1951. To avoid having to stop repeatedly and insert paper, he stitched together a 120-foot scroll beforehand and fed it into the platen.

Kerouac could thus type as he had traveled, the pages rolling through the typewriter like the road rolling under the wheels of cars on their way west. On the Road couldn't have been written any other way. The typescript sold for $2.4 million in a 2001 auction.

Today we write with whispering keyboards on electronic screens. We run spell-checkers, move blocks of text around at will and print perfect copies that never have to be marred by an eraser or a handwritten correction. Fifty years ago, Kerouac created the prototype for one part of the modern technology: Word processors provide a "virtual'' scroll that allows us to glide along without interruption, from page to page, on a spotless white road that stretches to the vanishing point of an imaginary highway.

The Kerouac scroll was a rough, two-lane Rt. 66.

The major drawback of our modern word processors is that they make editing and revising too easy. They distract writers with limitless opportunities to second-guess themselves, to tinker with every sentence, to rethink and revisit everything they write. That writers get anything accomplished is a wonder.

His scroll compelled Kerouac to move relentlessly forward, along with the momentum of the work. It moved in one direction only, through the story and out of it, with no way to retrace his steps or reconsider his course. The lack of an opportunity for second thoughts set him free.

I think the immediacy of blogging is a healthy correction to the impulse for always producing faultless copy. In the rush to continue this freeforall online conversation, we publish errors and infelicitous phrasing. That in itself is a healthy, humbling discipline.

I think that if Jack Kerouac were alive today -- and sober -- he'd be blogging with the rest of us.

(Note: Parts of today's entry are re-cast from a 2001 article I wrote for the Columbus Dispatch.)

More generalizations about blogs and narcissism

Edward Champion's recent LA Times article "Blogging: a crash course on introspection" is probably the most muddled commentary on blogging I've encountered in the past year.

His thesis is that "confessional" writing has been "spurred by cyberspace," with narcissistic bloggers baring their most intimate secrets with shameless abandon, pandering to "our voyeuristic culture." Champion wonders "why so many writers want (or need) to expose themselves."

The number of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations Champion manages to compress into the opening paragraphs of the article is truly dazzling. If only he'd taken the time to consult an undergraduate-level textbook on modern literature, he might have also gotten some of his terminology right.

The "confessional" writers were a movement of poets (primarily) who in the 1950s and 1960s began treating an autobiographical "I" as the primary subject of the work, delving with stark frankness into emotional and sexual experiences in a way that violated previous taboos about what constituted proper poetic material.

Champion conflates confessional material with introspection, though they are not the same thing at all. T.S. Eliot, for example, was a deeply introspective poet, but he avoided personal revelations in his own work. I've heard it argued that Anne Sexton, one of the leading confessional poets, was herself not terribly introspective.

The article also seems to equate "confessional" with "narcissistic" and (though Champion doesn't use the word himself) "exhibitionist." However, the "I" of the confessional poets was, more often than not, something other than the "real" I, an invented self or persona that enabled the writer to explore a wider range of themes than his or her personal experience permitted.

What this article contends this all has to do with blogging remains a mystery. Supposedly, writers like Ginsberg and Plath and Lowell are off in the afterlife kicking themselves for having died before the Internet came along and gave them limitless opportunity to indulge in their narcissism and expose themselves to an online audience. Supposedly, a new generation of confessional writers has emerged, again "spurred by cyberspace."

If that is indeed the point of the piece, Champion selects an odd assortment of writers to prove it. His examples -- Amy DeZella, Jane Ganahl, Jonathan Ames, Josh Kornbluth and others -- are professional journalists and performers who were already working with personal materials publicly, before moving to the Internet. In their interviews, they all seem fairly discontent with their online experiences, probably because their presentational styles are better suited to print or stage than to the blogosphere.

If there really were a new confessional school of writing in the process of emerging online, I'd be interested. But Champion hasn't found one.

The future of online text - looks a lot like poetry

Earlier this month VentureBeat reported findings by Walker Reading Technologies regarding the inefficiency of conventional linear text, the kind you're reading right now.

Since "the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular," they say, our effort to focus on a single line, our brains are force "to a wage a constant subconscious battle with itself to filter and discard the superfluous inputs" from the lines of words above it and below it.

So Walker Reading Technologies has unveiled its LiveInk program that analyzes "written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material."

The resulting lines of text, which they illustrate in a jpeg, are remarkably similar to free verse, or simple found poetry.

Poets, of course, liberate their language from the forced march of prose linearity by breaking lines, to indicate both the natural pause of the human voice taking a breath, and to reveal deeper semantic and syntactic levels of utterance. It's coincidental that a program is developed to break prose into poetic lines at the same moment when contemporary poetry is moving from the printed page into what is often spontaneous and unique oral performance.

The company claims that LiveInk increases reading comprehension by "10-15 percentile points on nationally standardized reading tests." If their claim can be substantiated by educators, LiveInk could unleash the potential of the e-textbook at all levels of education. The great objection to online and electronic text is that it's difficult to read, because of the limited resolution possible on the screen or monitor, in comparison to the high resolution of the printed page.

But the physical book is limited by practical considerations of physical space, the size and number of pages that can reasonably be bound and carried -- a limitation that doesn't apply to hypertext, since the formatting of lines will have minimal effect on the size of the file or its demand on memory space.

If LiveInk truly enhances comprehension and improves comprehension, it will mark a revolution.

The one question is whether students will resist LiveInk's reformatting of the line. After all, it looks suspiciously like poetry, a form of writing that most students in my classes over the past 35 years have rejected as being too "weird-looking" to understand.