Bits & Pieces

Writing small things is about to get big, says A.O. Scott. Obsessed of late with tiny things, including little essays, I like what he’s saying here. And I love Barthelme and O’Connor. But I have a bone to pick: Referring to blogs and Tweets, Scott says that “the new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity” and adds that “the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith.” Why narrative? I can understand pith and its connection to brevity. But narrative?

The new media of Web 2.0 likes bits and pieces. The bits don’t even have to be connected to other pieces. What else is Twitter but a stream of tiny consciousness? Stories, narratives don’t seem to be valued in this realm. Meaning might be, but Scott surely knows better than to collapse those two things?

I am heartened by our distance from narrative. I think narrative constricts things, forces them into a linear rank and file that more often than not reinforces the status quo and basically allows us to be lazy readers and thinkers. I’m working on something that challenges this. But it’s too long to post here.