Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but presence makes shit stink brighter.

I’m not sure that the internet’s a bad thing. And if it is, it’s not so much that somebody wants to tweet it’s the way the access to those tweets shape our desire. I think pre-internet we still had the impulse to howl with sound and fury but our audience was limited to a “few close friends.” We still imagined ourselves as Hemingway and Lucille Ball it was just that there were more filters from on high choosing what to give us. Sometimes gold was panned out: the sitcom Taxi, Richard Widmark, Mourning Becomes Electra. Sometimes what remains are just heavy duds: Nicholas Sparks. The internet just takes some of the pretense out of the criticism process, but I get a sense that far too often it’s a) the author or b) the media itself (often tied into choice “a” because the author chose to use that media) that takes the biggest flak from criticism. Instead of disciplining myself to not read tweets or to stay up to 1:47 in the morning doing things of little consequence online, I criticize both twitter for degrading my language and therefore my thoughts that I have spent years developing in that language while winnowing my brain into a fine-tuned-English-thought producing machine, and some asshole for using twitter to waste my time. And that’s the problem with high art, that it always existed alongside the duds and that its access was both: cut off to a large amount of the population on earth, and part of what determined its status as high art in the first place. Maybe the internet just feels like the thrift store; when the novels taught us to thirst for certain written text as a privileged antiquotidian experience, the newspaper brought it to us daily yet stained the valor of written word yellow ( etc.. Fox News Channel) the internet is a dime store novel that complains about itself. As if the romance novel with a sexy naked person on the cover took time in the middle of itself to complain that the publisher didn’t bother proofreading or buying the rights to a fancy font or using high-quality printers ink because he or she felt that it was just goddamn fun or goddamn important to them to get out their words.