In writing for the Web, I’ve also found that text must be visually designed: its ideal basic architecture consists of sharply delineated, single-spaced paragraphs. While newspaper and magazine readers can flip through and scan the whole of an article before focusing in on it, the online reader typically sees no more than a half page at a time and would have to tediously scroll downward and jump by hypertext to successive pages to survey the whole. Because the eye of the online reader tires and needs refreshment, I build blank space into the article through regular paragraphing. I conceive of the text as floating blocks, much like the hovering rectangles in Mark Rothko’s misty paintings. The paragraphs must be monumental and yet in motion.
The point-and-click method of advancing text produces a freeze-frame effect onscreen. These jumpy rhythms (finger-triggered by the mouse exactly as by the TV remote control) are positively new to reading experience and are so inconstant and improvisatory that they resemble syncopated jazz or jitterbug (once called “jump” music). At final-draft stage, I strip my paragraphs of excess words so that the sentences seem abrupt, which powers the text forward.
I also choose vocabulary that looks interesting on the page, which usually means juxtaposing blunt Anglo-Saxon nouns and high-action verbs with polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstractions. I use far more exclamation points, slang terms, alliterations, rhetorical questions, and expostulations than I would for a mainstream newspaper or magazine. Finally, I favor raucous sound effects, inspired by the reedy “honking” of alto-sax players. The text should be palpable and not just a remote stream of cyphers on a glassy wall.
Because of the blitzkrieg quality of Web bulletins—some of which notoriously turn out to be false—I strongly feel that Internet writing descends from the telegraph, that once high-tech innovation so vital to America’s economic and political development as the frontier moved west. The wire services, which started up in the 1840s, reduced and condensed information to the atomized bits of Morse Code, a radical remaking of language that looked forward to modernism at its most minimalist. During the Civil War, telegraphed dispatches from the front transformed newspaper writing, not only creating the “inverted pyramid” protocol of news stories, where breaking news comes first, but drastically simplifying American English syntax and vocabulary.
There was as huge a gap in style between the punchy, telegraph-transformed, late-nineteenth-century newspapers and their more literary, periphrastic eighteenth-century precursors as exists today between mainstream or Web journalism and the still dismayingly turgid essays in academic journals like PMLA (quarterly of the Modern Language Association). While cast in more lucid prose, the leading articles on literature and culture even in the current New Republic or New York Review of Books are often amazingly verbose, taking pages to make simple points: it’s as if the thought processes of the authors and editors remain untouched by the media revolution of the past century. Internet text at its best is streamlined—a cardinal artistic principle of modernism extending beyond the Bauhaus to an American source, the late-nineteenth-century Chicago School of architecture.
Online articles that sustain reader attention beyond the first page are those, in my view, that take the telegraph as their ancestor. Simplification and acceleration are the principles. The Internet’s residual telegraphic element has brought the frontier or battlefront into every wired home, so that any surfer can play dispatcher, flooded by urgent messages from all over the map. For this reason, I find the Drudge Report, almost universally disdained by upscale journalists, to be a unique and invaluable Internet resource. As a rough-hewn insurgent and outsider without institutional support, Matt Drudge, who styles himself after stentorian columnist Walter Winchell, provides constantly updated, siren-flashing news alerts and links to the world press, a format now widely imitated by other Web sites. Drudge’s range of subjects has a tabloid flamboyance—from Washington and Hollywood scandals to earthquakes, airplane crashes, grisly crimes, and sentimental animal stories.
The Internet’s flair for the “news flash” is something I try to capture in my columns—the on-street excitement that used to be generated by “extras” run off by urban dailies in the pre-TV era when big news broke between the morning and evening editions. The Internet democratizes the news, allowing the average citizen to get information straight off the wires before TV producers and print journalists can shape and doctor it. This unfiltered flow of information direct from stringers on location comes like a bolt of electricity into the private home.
In Salon, I also report on and weigh rumors, which I would never do for mainstream publications. Rumors have a life of their own and often are the first sign of a shift in popular thought, particularly in campaign years; a rumor is myth in the making. (The standard was set in the fifth century B.C. by Herodotus, who collected and analyzed rumors for his Histories.) An Internet column allows one to monitor and comment on contemporary life as it’s actually happening. Since it’s linked by hypertext to past columns and other sites, the text has an organic connection to the entire Web, an amplitude of reference analogous to the ponderous footnote material of print books that never appears, for reasons of space, in newspapers. Organic also is the Web-zine’s ability to correct factual errors or typos in already posted articles—a luxury unavailable to print journalists, who are stuck forever with embarrassing mistakes (as when copy editors fresh from college maddeningly introduce grammar errors at deadline).
In topic sequence, my column has begun to resemble Time magazine, which I grew up with and virtually cut my teeth on in its classic era of superb reportage and acid-etched prose. Although Time has distressingly declined over the past fifteen years, it generally retains its old format, with high-impact national and international political news at the front, followed by science, sports, movies, books (much reduced), and celebrity gossip.
Time’s revolutionary innovation was to package the week’s news when the United States had just become a power on the international stage in the decade after World War One. And the magazine addressed a brand-new national audience, recently created by movies and radio. The Web-zines have gone one step further by expanding their readership internationally. E-mail responses to my column have come not just from Canada and England but from Iceland, Hungary, Russia, Chile, South Africa, Australia, and Japan. Because of this global reach, I carefully adjust my column so that American personalities, events, and places are discreetly identified for overseas readers.
A primary aim of mine has been to keep the column resolutely independent and non-partisan; hence I try to critique all invested positions. (For example, though a registered Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton twice, I have been scathing about the failures of the Clinton administration.) As a consequence, the column has had an unusually broad following. While negative mail is of course a constant for anyone who writes for a public forum, I am always surprised at the ideological and sociological range of supportive letters, which come from evangelical Christian home-schooling moms, conservative retired military officers, harried public-school teachers, anxious grad students, cross-dressing bisexuals, movie-trivia fanatics, opera connoisseurs, and struggling young rock musicians. To bring all these people together—many of whom lack the time or money for multiple magazine and newspaper subscriptions—is a testament to the power of the Web as a potentially universal medium.
MOBILIZATION UNDER FIRE: A CASE STUDY
Because Internet publication is unconstrained by traditional printing-press deadlines, the Web-zines can dispense with a fixed production schedule, an opportunity that Salon was the first to take advantage of. Its rivals used to operate in slow motion, randomly dribbling out new articles in late morning or the afternoon without regard for timeliness or drama. That Salon’s chief editors originally worked for a daily (rather than a bimonthly, like Slate’s editor) has certainly given Salon a more militant intensity.
Each edition of Salon is finalized in San Francisco by the
end of the prior business day, Pacific time, though breaking news stories can be inserted at any hour. The issue goes online around midnight, East Coast time. Hence Salon is seen and read in the United Kingdom and Europe five hours before the workday begins in the United States. Many times, I went to sleep in Philadelphia before my column went online and awoke to find faxes and e-mail queries from the London press, who had been reading Salon at the start of their workday (between 3:00 and 4:00 AM EST). Of the domestic newspapers, only The New York Times (or, less so, The Washington Post) has that kind of reach to European capitals.
The fluid press deadline newly created by the Web was never clearer than in the tragic episode of the death of Diana in a car crash in the early hours of August 31, 1997. This was a landmark in the early history of Web journalism, where Salon, because of its quick reaction, broke Web records in sheer volume of reader “hits.”
That chronology should be documented as the first important example of a Web-zine outmaneuvering the print press. And in the process, Salon scooped and humiliated its rival, Slate, which had closed its East Coast offices for the last week of August before Labor Day (the staff presumably decamping to the Hamptons). In personal terms, this was by far the most traumatic of all my media experiences, because I had been a longtime analyst of the Diana saga for both North American and British media.
The accident occurred just after midnight on a Saturday night in Paris. By chance, I was listening to the radio at home when the first news flash came just after 7:00 PM, Philadelphia time. The initial report said Diana was merely injured. Television responded immediately (as it had so memorably done for the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963), but already-scheduled network programming went on, interrupted by intermittent bulletins. More than two hours passed before all the networks and cable channels switched to continuous coverage. The top news stars were slow to appear on air because they had to return to the studio from their vacation retreats (the Hamptons again).
Just after 10:00 PM EST, the correspondents relayed the official announcement from a Paris hospital that the Princess of Wales had been declared dead. Hence U.S. residents heard the terrible news before they went to bed, whereas most of the British public, fast asleep in the middle of the night, still had no idea an accident had even occurred. The British woke up on Sunday morning to a stunning fait accompli, while many Americans had had three tense hours after news of the crash to prepare for the worst.
The accident occurred too late on Saturday night to make the Sunday newspapers in either the United Kingdom or the United States. On weekdays, the press deadline for major American dailies is between 5:00 and 6:00 PM, and it is much earlier on Saturdays. Hence it was not until Monday morning that newspapers could report on Diana’s shocking death, which had occurred more than a full day earlier.
Into this press vacuum, when for over thirty hours there was nothing substantive for shocked people to read about the event, leapt Salon. The editors in San Francisco sprang into action (“like firehouse dogs,” Talbot later said) as soon as Diana’s death was announced on Saturday night. They immediately solicited reaction and commentary from within Salon’s staff and outside it: the articles went online by stages from midday Sunday on and received a mammoth amount of traffic from all over the world. On following days, more pieces of reportage and background were added, and the epic Diana package remained flagged on Salon’s main screen for weeks.
The perils attendant on Web publishing are illustrated by an unexpected reaction to my first remarks about the accident in Salon, where I lamented that Diana had been foolish to trust her safety and security to the Egyptian playboy Dodi Fayed (a point later substantiated by the inquest report). After the translated article was reprinted several days later in Le Monde, two rather menacing airmail letters from Paris arrived at my university office accusing me of fomenting anti-Muslim prejudice and propaganda. Despite the risk of incurring a fatwa, however, writing for Salon has been a golden opportunity to contribute to the World Wide Web at a pivotal point in its cultural development.
Whatever Salon’s fate, it has already been enormously influential in creating the paradigm for online magazine publishing. Its graphic and tech design has been consistently cutting-edge. And its feature writers and columnists developed, through trial and error, the distinctive tone and style of online commentary, now imitated by Web sites across the political spectrum. In literary history, I submit, Salon can be compared to two bold and witty London periodicals, Richard Steele’s The Tatler (1709–11) and Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator (1711–12; 1714). Despite their short lives, the Tatler and Spectator prefigured and helped beget the rhetorical forms and strategies of modern journalism.
* [From Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, 2nd ed., ed. Lance Strate et al. (2003).]
ART
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ON ANDY WARHOL*
HUFFINGTON POST: You’ve referred to Andy Warhol as a hero, and yet his world-view seems to capture what you despise about contemporary culture with his blasé, bourgeois, insular, irreverent, too-cool-for-school attitude. Do you see Warhol in this way, and if so, why is he your hero?
CAMILLE PAGLIA: Warhol had an enormous impact on me as a college student in upstate New York in the 1960s. I have proudly called myself a “Warholite” ever since. It is baffling how Warhol could ever be called “bourgeois,” because he was the product of a poor immigrant family in industrial Pittsburgh, and he boldly brought the dissident sexual underground into then-stuffy major museums in both Manhattan and Philadelphia. He surrounded himself with male hustlers, drug addicts, drag queens, and decadent, androgynous socialites. Warhol was openly gay long before the birth of the gay liberation movement. He was contemptuously ostracized as “swish” by closeted gay artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in New York.
Neither would I accept the term “blasé” about Warhol, since that implies a far more sophisticated and affectedly fatigued persona than the one he projected. A colleague said that Warhol pretended to be “the village idiot”—that is, a dysfunctional, marginalized, passive observer of society. Warhol’s primary response to anything that interested him was “Wow”—the exact opposite of blasé. He was a voyeur who voraciously consumed mass media and who identified himself with the popular audience. Many of his early large-scale pictures were blow-ups of tabloid newspaper photos of automobile or airplane accidents. What he was demonstrating was the saturation of society by the sensationalistic visuals of modern media—a return to a primitive form of consciousness that pre-dated literacy.
To continue with the adjectives you have proposed, I see nothing “irreverent” in Warhol either. On the contrary, he transferred the religiosity of his youth in Eastern Rite Catholicism to his passionate reverence for Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, whom he turned into shimmering saints in an updated Byzantine style. “Marilyn Diptych,” the subject of a chapter in my book, is really a giant icon screen like the one in Warhol’s baptismal church in Pittsburgh. Similarly, those who see irony in Warhol’s acrylic paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans are simply imposing their own contemporary preconceptions backwards onto him. Warhol, who began his career as a commercial illustrator, loved brand-name logos and saw them as modern heraldry. Campbell’s Soup cans were beautiful to him—exactly as they were to me as a child growing up in the sooty factory town of Endicott, New York. I used to cut out colorful logos from magazine ads and play with them like paper dolls.
Warhol’s experimental films were also crucial in shaping my sensibility. I am not referring to the later, well-known feature-length color films directed by Paul Morrissey but to Warhol’s grainy, improvised, black-and-white short films, which have strangely never been released on DVD (though they are available for viewing at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh). The one that hit me like a thunderbolt in college was Harlot (1965), where a lounging drag q
ueen in a blonde wig slowly peels and eats a banana, while hunky bystanders gradually shift position; the soundtrack is simply offscreen banter in campy male voices. This parody of Hollywood sex queens—simultaneously trashy and sublimely cultic—seemed like a dream vision, revealing the deep structure of popular imagination, with its adulation of stars of both sexes. The last of Warhol’s great films was Chelsea Girls (1966), a three-and-a-half-hour split-screen epic that mesmerizingly alternated between the banal and the surreal.
In short, Warhol’s callow imitators may be blasé, bourgeois, insular, and irreverent, but he certainly was not.
* [Priscilla Frank, interviewer, “Camille Paglia’s Glittering Images: Controversial Writer Speaks on Warhol, Arts Funding, and Star Wars,” The Huffington Post, November 7, 2012.]
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MILLENNIUM MASTERWORKS:
THE MONA LISA*
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503. The Louvre, Paris.
Why does Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa remain the most famous painting in the world? Its subject’s thin smile has become synonymous with sexual mystery—with the secrecy, obliqueness, and heartbreaking elusiveness of woman.
Provocations Page 35
