Hanging out your ass...

Something my husband once said to me vis a vis my first blog, "So this is what being a writer means. Letting your ass hang out." To which I shrugged, I think. I can't remember. Today, I don't think that's what being a writer means. Far from it.

This afternoon, I read a post about a young girl with a video on YouTube, who talks about being raped, and about her inability to talk to anyone about it, except the faceless hordes on the Internet. Sadly, I believe her. But this is also an example of letting one's ass hang out, and I don't think there's much wrong with that. Problem is, it opened her up to stunted musings from the faceless horde, none of which were pleasant to read. I hope she felt some relief in talking about her ordeal, but I suspect she didn't. I suspect she came away vastly more confused, if not more sorrowful.

This video opens up some interesting questions about the glut of artless information available on the 'net. There are those who expose everything about themselves in their blogs. I've read a few of them with the avidity I reserve for true crime books, and car crashes on TV. It's my own laziness in full throttle. Artless info demands nothing of us except that we consume it.

Artful information requires some distance to write and some effort on the part of the reader. Once again, I'm very glad for my years of art school. There I met perfectly horrible people who made sublime art I admired. Very soon, I learned to make a quick division between the person and what he did.

I go into this, because I've just read a review of Martin Amis' latest book of essays, The Second Plane: Terror and Boredom. Michiko Kakutani writing for The New York Times dumps all over Amis, mostly for being wrong-headed, but says nothing about the quality of his wrong-headed writing. I agree with her that Korba the Dread made little sense to me, and that every time Amis tackles an historical event he winds up tied in knots. Amis is a stylist and the point of him is how he writes, not what he writes.

Amis is an important novelist, an uneven short story writer, and a marvelous literary essayist. He's a fine example of artful information, with the emphasis on art. And art is not about raw facts on the printed page, but rather art concerns language. And it's only the use of language and form which can hold information up to the light. Only in that can we find any bit of wisdom.

With the torrents of information assailing us, sometimes I think the Internet is the verbal equivalent of corn fructose: fattening us up but leaving us hungry.

We're starving in the midst of plenty, but fatter than hell.