The power's out in the heart of man
Beeminder says this post isn't due until tomorrow evening, but the power went out and there's not much else I can do, so I'm writing this post by torchlight. How romantic.
- Interesting piece in Asterisk this week about the percieved decline in culture since the start of the 21st century, and the inarguable decline in published, professional reviews and essays, and therefore of criticism as a vocation. Of course, 'critics' (complainers, nitpickers, haters etc.) aren't hard to find, but deep analysis, or even the brief but neatly crystalised reviews of someone like Robert Christgau seem harder to come by. Not impossible to find, of course, but almost always tucked away on niche sites and individual blogs and never surfaced by any algorithmic process or ranking by like count. Perhaps the writing from these disparite sources has a greater breadth than what you would find in a print magazine back in the day, but I feel like miss the era where finding good culture writing was more like hunting for diamonds in a few neatly formed piles rather than a massive, desolate field with rubbish dumped on it by the ton.
Might add some more thoughts later. Turns out writing stuff out longhand in the dark and then tapping it out on my phone is a lot more tiring than doing it on the computer. I guess I can count mains electricity as an uncomplicatedly good technological advance for the production of writing, at least.