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Kevin Smokler
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In June, 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled “Reading at Risk” that charted a dramatic decline in “literary reading” among Americans at every age level. Kevin Smokler, an essayist, book reviewer and speaker, uses the report as a jumping-off point in his new book, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times. The book, which Smokler edited, is a collection of essays by 25 young authors, journalists, Web writers and bloggers that offers their take on the state of the contemporary fiction and non-fiction writing game.
Paul McLeary: In the introduction to your book, you mention the NEA report that says Americans are reading less. Given that the Internet, as a reading-based media form, has exploded, do you think the alarm the report caused is misplaced?
Kevin Smokler: I think the alarm is misplaced, one, because the report does not take into account narrative nonfiction or graphic novels, which to me seems elitist to say the least, perhaps even bordering on intentional selective snobbery; and two, if we say just for example that everything in the report is true, to me the real question is, what do we do about it now?
What we do not do about it is plug our ears and say, “God I hope it goes away,” we don’t start pointing fingers at the Internet and kids and saying they don’t read, because neither one of those will solve the problem. And even if they are 100 percent true, those are not solutions, they are accusations.
PM: Do you think that the traditional public sphere created by a limited number of big newspapers and magazines that has traditionally bound readers together may be in danger, in favor of a more personalized form of news- and information-gathering that is available on the Web?
KS: The fact that the tools are available [to allow] people to read, write and publish easier and in a way that is more interesting to them — or intimate to them — I think that makes reading a lot easier. Sure, it cuts down on this notion we have of a public square where everybody is sort of interested in the same things and talking about the same things and is following the same news. I think we have an overly romanticized notion of those things, because what that meant was that the news most people followed was news of wars and politics and powerful people doing powerful things. And we all know that that isn’t the complete story of the American experience. The American experience is multifaceted, and perhaps the ability to tailor one’s news means one only reads about oneself. Is that too bad? Yes. But I don’t think it’s any worse — and in fact [it] allows more flexibility — than having less information to choose from and having a selected kind of information to choose from. I’d rather there be choice and have people maybe paralyzed at first by choice than having there be no choice at all.
PM: Given the self-publishing aspect of the Web, do you see any major stylistic differences between writers who started out doing it for themselves online, and those who went the more traditional print route?
KS: Not particularly. I think a lot of people, particularly writers just starting out, write knowing that readers have less time and patience than they did before. You see very few books today (with a couple of notable exceptions) that take their time getting started, or do a lot of stretching and limbering and then on page 65 the plot really takes off. Usually the plot takes off by page two now; it kind of has to because people won’t wait for page 65. Not with 100 movies in their Netflix queue and 10,000 songs in their iPod and a full TiVo and an overflowing bookshelf and 100 other things competing for their attention.
But beyond that, no. Pamela Ribon — who is one of the authors in my book, and who started her career as an online journaler — I read her novel and it sound markedly different than her online journal. It sounds more constructed and crafted, less personal, less confessional. Maybe her journal did influence her novel writing, but it did it in a way that we couldn’t have predicted.
PM: Do you think that people who write for both media perhaps become stronger writers because they write in somewhat different styles for print and for the Web? Take Elizabeth Spiers, who is in your book. She started out writing for Gawker, moved to New York magazine, and now is back online at Mediabistro. Her piece is actually pretty traditionally journalistic — is that by design?
KS: That’s what she handed in, and I thought that was reflective of where she was coming from, and her style. It wasn’t as pithy and bullet-y as Gawker was, but it was for a book, and not a Web log.
I was actually more than happy to have a reported piece. I thought Karl (K.M.) Soehnlein’s piece about the state of gay fiction was kind of a hybrid between a reported piece and an op-ed. To me, the voices of this generation are diverse, and I was happy to have Elizabeth sound markedly different from everybody else.
PM: Do you think blogging also leads writers to diversify a little more, in that they don’t pigeonhole themselves as one certain thing and, instead, branch out a little bit more, just because so much information is so readily available? Or do you think the opposite — people are segmenting themselves?
KS: [Blogging] allows more for what the New Yorker calls the “reasonably intelligent person” to write about what they’re reasonably interested in, and I think that’s definitely the legacy of new journalism. Blogging seems to preference extreme niching — like, I read a blog that’s specifically about the design of movie posters — and extreme generalism; someone like Jason Kottke, who is just a person with a huge brain. The blog is a reflection of the highways and byways of that brain.
When you look at new journalists like Susan Orlean, I think you see someone who is essentially a generalist who may get pigeonholed a little bit because she writes for New Yorker magazine, but you essentially see someone who is interested in a lot of different things and her books and her body of work are a reflection of where that curiosity has taken her. I would love to see Susan Orlean blog.
PM: Do you see many of the new journalists writing on their own blogs or on the Web as children of the “gonzo” or “new journalists” of the 1960s and 70s? Did their tearing down the boundaries allow more freedom today in the online medium?
KS: I think much of what we see in what is called “we” media is a legacy of new journalism. It’s a legacy of the need not to have professional credentials and academic training and 20 years of blood spilled on a newspaper beat in order to have the right to write in Vanity Fair or something like that. It’s sort of experience on the fly.
Do I think that bloggers are the logical next heirs to Joan Didion and Gay Talese? Not exactly. But I think the idea of doing something crazy, or doing something interesting simply because it’s worth writing about later — [that idea] that Hunter Thompson gave us, or to a more civilized extent, John McPhee and people like that — I think that’s definitely the legacy of blogging. I think that definitely led to what we call blogging and citizen journalism now.
Kevin Smokler will be appearing at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn on June 7, 2005.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.