o1mnikent

Via Andrew Sullivan:

MySpace is no longer cool. As a matter of fact, its number of users is now one-half the size of rival Facebook. Is this because MySpace is too black for the rest of America? Teenage Internet users may hold the answer. High-schoolers report their use of the social-networking giants along racial lines—MySpace is seen as “black,” while Facebook is “white.” And even within the networks, black kids befriend other black kids, Latinos mix with Latinos, and the self-segregation often practiced in real life is rampant online. Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, compares this dash from MySpace to Facebook to “white flight” from inner cities.

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Steven G. Kellman has an interesting review of Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Ulysses is indeed a triumph of what Northrop Frye called “the low mimetic mode”; it elevates plebeian characters and banal actions to artistic consideration and, celebrating them, performs what Kiberd, in an aptly Catholic metaphor, calls “the sacrament of everyday life.” But his exhortation that “it is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people” is not in itself enough to overcome the paradox that the novel is read not by “real people,” but only by students and scholars. Real men may or may not eat quiche, but the “real people” Kiberd seems to have in mind rarely, according to surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts, read any books, and when they do, the authors are more likely to be Stephen King, James Patterson, or Danielle Steel than James Joyce.

And:

…despite the admirable lucidity of his own style, devoid of preening jargon and turgid syntax, Kiberd’s erudite book—though issued by a trade publisher, W.W. Norton, and not a university press—is not likely to be read by the “real people” he sentimentalizes and patronizes.

Snap!

And later:

Disguised as praise, books that offer practical uses for literary classics are in fact acts of iconoclastic arrogance. Proclaiming their fealty to the ordinary, they are driven by impatience with—even contempt for—the actual experience of reading extraordinary works.

Exactly.

Joan Didion, in her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first collection of essays (highly recommended).

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so tempermentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

[ht: Bethany]