Big in Japan, Column 2: What We Talk About When We Talk About Tentacle Porn

So, I wrote a new column over at Wordsmoker! Come on over and wriggle around in a big bunch of musings inspired by tentacle porn classic Legend of the Overfiend! Just click here!

Big In Japan Column

[image by someecards/Kora In Hell]

So, there's this new group project called Wordsmoker I've been asked to be a part of, and I finally wrote something for them, as a part of a planned, ongoing "column" where I muse and muse about Japan and whetever else happens to pop in my head and then I post it. You can find it here. Enjoy!

Daedelus as Dracula: Internet Writing as "Undead Language"

...the truth is as a form, [blogging, or internet writing in general] is very new. It reminds me more of when Greek culture went from an oral culture to a written one, of the ambivalence then that they expressed about written language. Oral and written content is differently unstable—oral content requires a precise memory and a performer who won’t editorialize. Written content doesn't easily allow the author the room to feel differently later in a way that's meaningful to the reader at the time they're reading. Internet content takes the core instability of each tradition—the thing that makes it problematic, as it were, or troubling, and fuses them. In the process it creates something that is neither and it makes it public and it increases the pace at which these ideas move.

As it does this, it fuses to the image, the static one and the moving one that speaks. It's neither the dead language the Greeks feared nor is it the living one they loved. Inside these terms, like life but not alive, immediate but not alive, fast but not alive, it makes a language that is undead. This is the new thing we're all figuring out—plastic, immediate, and permanent narrative communication.

This is from Alex Chee's perceptive and telling meditations on the nature of writing on the internet; the whole thing can be found on his blog Koreanish. I plan to add my own thoughts about this a bit in the future, as an expansion of my musings on the Emily Gould kerfuffle and internet writing as variably public self-performance here . But I wanted to make this bookmark now, while it is still timely, at least for myself.