I feel compelled to quote Proust's rebuttal, not that I agree with it--

"Friendship is a dispensation from this duty [to live for the artist's self], an abdication of self. Even conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute, whereas the march of thought in the solitary work of artistic creation proceeds in depth, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along which we are free to advance--though with more effort, it is true--towards a goal of truth. And friendship is not merely devoid of virtue, like conversation, it is fatal to us as well. For the sense of boredom which those of us whose law of development is purely internal cannot help but feel in a friend's company (when, that is to say, we must remain on the surface of ourselves, instead of pursuing our voyage of discovery into the depths)--that first impression of boredom our friendship impels us to correct when we are alone again, to recall with emotion the words which our friend said to us, to look upon them as a valuable addition to our substance, when the fact is that we are not like buildings to which stones can be added from without, but like trees which draw from their own sap the next knot that will appear on their trunks, the spreading roof of their foliage."

Well you see? This wise and witty exchange is just what I meant.

Proust talks like an Alexandrian just deciding to go out into the desert and be a hermit. And of course he was one of the great cavernous saints of art from that lost age, Joyce, Henry James, Flaubert, Mallarme. But also a guy who liked to go to parties and talk. Joyce could break off at 5 and drink and talk for the evening, without hurting the next day's work (though most of the talk in the evening was about words).

I friended you this week.

Farah

In fact, the complaint many folks have about LJ is that it isn't setup to facilitate conversations in the same way that Usenet did. Back in the days when you could have conversations on Usenet. Of course, I hear these complaints mostly from my set of friends, many of whom came to LJ from a Usenet group called rec.arts.sf.fandom, where conversation was truly special and it was likely very idiosyncratic to that group.

MKK

The interesting thing, to me, about this Modern Salon, is that it permits an ongoing conversation at all hours. I can drop in to discussions on just about any topic, any time, with any circle I choose. It's kinetic, active.

I look forward to participating in any conversations that arise here. And I'm very much looking forward to the new LITTLE, BIG. If you're so inclined, please take a look at my own work, here: http://pics.livejournal.com/coppervale/pic/00054w70 and you can see why the illustrator selected would interest me.

Regards,

James A. Owen

It seems to me that an important feature of the salon is that it provides a gracious audience. It is not enough to be witty; you should also admire other people's efforts. Otherwise, it's all broken glass by strobelight.

Online fora are delicate in this regard: too many people show up wanting to be paid attention to, and nobody's paying attention any more. May yours be otherwise.

I love the image of and idea that the medicine ball of conversation must be kept rolling around the circle in order for its magic or healing powers to be efficacious. The best conversations do seem to take us to places none of us could have predicted beforehand, places that shed their traces in the feeling-tones left lingering in our limbs and memories.

I remember as a child that there was no more magical way of falling asleep than to the voices of adults in gentle converse all around me -- to be on a blanket on the floor or on a couch, but in the middle of it, that was the thing. Or to awake and find myself there, wrapped in the soft mesh of intertwined voices. Lovely.

Ron Drummond

so true how the mechanics of trying to generate conversation that produces connection can overwhelm the humanity that would be revealed by the dialogue. part of what drew me to LJ was the idea of it being a modern salon. something that unfurls in a fractal manner.....ideas triggering thoughts and feelings that can go to such amazing places.

how much do you think conversations are changed by being written rather than verbal? and can the enrichment of a verbal conversation with all the non-verbal aspects of communication, carry over to the post/comment format?

i imagine that there are times and subjects where the written word carries a huge potential for connection, and i'm also reminded of the structure and experience of a kaffeeklatch. in some ways those feel a bit like an LJ conversation; going from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. (which may be my excuse last summer for wishing for a pop-up version of "little big", so that the house could be opened with the book. heh.)

the immediacy of communication provided by technology astounds me on a daily basis. especially considering how long it would take for language and people to travel from place to place 2000 years ago. which, in the scheme of things isn't that long ago. but i end up struggling to make the words i type carry the thoughts and feelings behind them. i wonder if that's part of the issue with technology that seems to connect even when it's not? not sure, just pondering, and greatly appreciating your thoughtful post.

heh, you're right about the potential for muttering (reminds me of the story frank capra told about how some famous director told him to shoot crowd scenes: "just tell the other actors to mutter".)

and good point about how having to take the time to carve meaning out of the words, can represent something hopeful about language. i've only had an LJ for about two years, and the experience of talking online, and *then* meeting people has been remarkable. all those ideas and thoughts present in the flesh, and pre-dating any assumptions i might unconsciously make if i met them at a social gathering first.

i like what you've said about the "manner, dress, smell, tone". all those cues we process, the patterns we read and organize for ourselves in a nano-second, can work for us, or against, depending on the context and expectations? it feels like a delicate balance to utilize the tools in order to generate connection and not be swallowed up by the function or the process. especially given the amount of noise and activity that our daily lives are immersed in. maybe a written conversation has the potential to allow for some quiet with which to contemplate the subject, as long as the noise of the machinery doesn't take over?

hee! very true. it's good to write for fun and conversation. i spend so much of the day documenting various things. and the proliferation of strange abbreviations is horrifying and sometimes amusing. you've reminded me of how the extreme specialization of language can create barriers. working in the health care field i think i might as well be writing in cuneiform. which i wish i could do, but there you go.

ps. oh, and i've gotten so used to using some of the internet emotion abbreviations. i try to curtail it, but being able to share "very evil grin" by typing *veg* has it's moments. anyway, it feels like another example of abbreviations that can be useful, and sometimes not so useful.

true, and there should be a list of them somewhere... (stopping here and going to search a bit) and here's the wikipedia page with links to pages with classical and medieval abbreviations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviations

here's a page that i get lost in... it lays out the development of written language in a way that doesn't actually cause a brain to implode: http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html the only problem with this one, is that one page leads to another, and another....and the next thing you know it's several days later. utterly addictive. ;)

i love how the development of the written language seems to reflect and ebb and flow of the process of developing an image to reflect 'something'. amazing to think about the evolution of the human brain and consciousness and how that's reflected in the symbols we produce. do you suppose we might get away with calling emoticons "pictograms"?

"I think it's remarkable that, having been told for so long that the Written Word is on its way to the ash heap of history, in fact we all (and not just the hyperliterate) spend so much of our day writing things, well or badly."

Those of us who spent our youth using mimeography to connect to the friends and lovers who would define our lives--which is to say, spent our early years involved in the demimonde of science fiction fandom--find this entirely unsurprising.

Indeed, the whole thing, LJ, blogs, MySpace, looks like nothing more than fandom pushed through step one of the Singularity.

Matter for fiction -- no doubt already multiply is.

oh you've described it perfectly. it's as if we're caught in the moment of shifting, putting the facets of our experiences and conversations together with the different context and setting.

maybe it takes a bit to get used to the tone of voice?...but it fairly quickly merges with the tone of their voice in their writing. and then when i read their posts after we meet, i can hear their spoken voices as well. er, it is hard to articulate, so i hope this makes sense. it makes me want to gesticulate, use my hands to punctuate what i mean. ;)

To say nothing of that vertiginous moment of cocktail-party revelation, when you suddenly realize that your new acquaintance is somebody you've known online for ages by another name.

"Hey! You're the blue-shark-icon-guy from LJ!"

That's really well put. There's also the thing that some people are the same and some are different -- subtly or sometimes not so.

We met about 15-17 years ago, when World Fantasy was in Schamburg, IL. I was a psychology professor at Lake Forest College at that time, and Don Keller (then a Tor employee) dragged me to a party. Some months later, at some con or other in Chicago, I was on a panel with and Gene Wolfe on the topic of memory. I was in heaven! Later, I haf dinner with Gene and Rosemary, and later still you invited me for a drink in the bar. A great and memorable night for me (though I won't feel the least slighted if you've long since forgotten it).

That was just a few months before I started promoting Klingon throughout the world, and several years before my own writing career (such as it is) began.

Yeah, the nihilism seems a little silly from where I'm sitting. Technology isn't a cold, metal monster making us bend into new shapes to suit it, it's directed and shaped by our desires. Good conversation won't die as long as we hunger for it. There'll always be someone willing to provide a forum; pretty parlor in meatspace, tacky dorm room, blog or otherwise.

It's true that a blog isn't the same as face-to-face communication, all nonverbaltextual cues are invisible, we don't even have tone of voice to suggest interpretation, hence the smiley. :) But that's actually one of my favorite things about it. I'm shy and awkward and inarticulate face-to-face. In this space, I feel liberated from my age, my sex, my difficulty interpreting body language, etc. LJ doesn't have the same pressure of spontaneous wit, either. Which is such a relief. If I choose to speak, I have time (so much lovely time!) to think and rethink, to type and then revise, until I've written something so much truer to my thoughts than I could ever tease out of my brain through my mouth.

I don't know if sitting and listening for hours without speaking was really an option in the salons of old? But my most favorite thing about LJ is the opportunity to choose not to speak, to lay back and, like Ron Drummond describes doing as a child in earlier comment, bliss out listening to the gentle murmur of so many humane, articulate voices. It can be wonderfully uplifting. And I'm really pleased to be able to add your voice to their chorus.

LJ may be a lesser church of humanism than a college, perhaps, but it's all the same faith, I think. And that's the best thing of all.

I find myself thinking about 1950s sf stories in which everyone becomes telepathic -- and as a result, we all understand and love each other.

I considered this unlikely back then, and I now think it's even less likely.

It's an odd, twenty-first-century sort of conversation, though. The blog comment thread, or online forums, or Usenet of old, are to conversation what the cube is to the square. This is hyperconversation.

I mean, Mme. de Pompadour could only sit in one place at a time, and thus only be expected to focus on one cluster of speakers, one stream of ideas, at a time; or a very limited number, at any rate. But here, any number of conversations can all be happening at once, and anybody can take part in as many of them as they please. The participants branch out into multiple iterations of themselves, combining and recombining and radiating out in all directions from the starting point.

I'm still trying to figure out what the effects of this advance will be--aside from providing us with a vastly more muscular method of procrastination--but it seems significant.

Many of us spend a lot of time sitting around watching stories; we call it television (or in my case DVDs and more so, DVD extras - I love to watch creative folk explain how they create).

We haven't met, but we have acquaintances in common. Welcome to LiveJournal.

Paula Kate Marmor

Why, thank you!

My name is Autumn Gray, I live in Seattle. I've added you to my friends list because I heard that you have one from a friend who did Clarion West a while back (lj username rimrunner). I read Little, Big about... maybe 10 years or so ago, and it's one of my favorite books; Engine Summer and Beasts also rank among my top 15 favorite stories (along with some LeGuin & Butler stories/novels).

I saw you speak a few years ago at a Clarion West series reading, and I very much enjoyed hearing you read, even though I've not yet had the chance to read the book (being in school full time & working tends to limit my time for fiction). I can't seem to find out the title of the novel online, so if you have time to respond to this, I would really like to know what the name of the book that you read from is - it was a story about a Russian man and a young woman.

Thank you for developing your talent to share it.

Autumn

Amazon has the paperback in stock. :-)

pk

I am starting at the beginning of your LJ pages and reading through. I am doing that with Joculum's also. As you may know in the LINUX computer world the cognoscenti are cruel and attack newbies fiercely and tell them to read the faq pages before ever posting a question or making an uninformed remark.

Anyway, it is true enough that to enjoy, or more importantly, to join in and add something to the conversation, one needs to know where the conversation is and where it has been. Not to just show up and say hey, anybody heard of a guy named Goethe? I found this cool book Werther, but it's making me a little depressed.

I said something similar about finding friends and a salon atmosphere on my first posting to my own LJ pages, and now, I feel just a little embarrassed that I did know of your first posts. Joculum informs me that my choice of topics reflects his early postings also.

I suspect that many who cluster around your pages do so sensing they have been through some of the same refining fires?

I want to give you a compliment now, even though buried here, (where I wonder if you will still receive notice that it has been posted) and that is: you possess in your writings a distinct, essence of John Crowleyness, like a world-class local beer that is just not available anywhere else. From your early works to your later works this essence has "aged" in the best sense of the word. This essence is even found permeating your shortest LJ entry. 100 proof JC-- I'd buy that in a bottle.

Ah! I should also say that if you wonder if that means your style has become more and more mannered over time, I say that is OK. I prefer a story with a mannered style, because it preserves better than no style, or uncontrolled style, the fictional dream. Your readers will bond to your writing all the more for that. Only your detractors will use that against you (I must make a great leap here and imagine that you might have some somewhere?). Style itself denotes mannerism, and while it should be controlled, it's the only thing that keeps writing from reading like encyclopedia essays.