"I'm now going to start a new journal. I left Harper's magazine in order to start something called Lapham's Quarterly -- God willing, the first issue will come out sometime next spring or early summer -- where I will take an idea that's in the news, perhaps states of war, or predicament of women, or dream of empire, or a failure of economy, and so on, and write a brief introductory essay and then run out a series of texts, maybe forty, fifty of them, on that theme, taken out of a historical record. So, I'd be editing people like Seneca or Thucydides, but I'd also do fictions, I'd allow myself to do Shakespeare and Balzac and Cervantes, as well as Gibbon. We will try to give the reader a sense of the historical context, that we'd been there before and we can learn from the past. We have nothing else, really, with which to build the future, except the lumber of the past.
I find that a lot of people today lack that context. If you don't have that context and if you're lost in the perpetual present of the television -- television is a form that there's really no past and no present, there's no cause and effect, it's the eternal now -- that is a very frightening place to live. It instills in people a sense of credulous anxiety. If you have a sense of your own history it gives you a place to stand.
I have a quote from you: "Print allows for narrative and continuity, for a beginning, a middle, and an end, for cause and effect, straight lines and novels of Jane Austen, etc. The electronic media dote on the emotions, on discontinuity, impressions, improvisation and pattern recognition."
I was borrowing those ideas from McLuhan. He says this in his book Understanding Media, which was published in 1964. When I read it in 1964 I didn't understand it because he has a tendency toward an oracular style, but then in 1994, three [decades] later, I [was] asked to write an introduction to a new edition of Understanding Media and learned a great deal from it.
He is distinguishing between the different forms of sensibility that come about in response to different forms of media. He begins with a premise that we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. The electronic revolution is, to his mind, equally as important as the revolution that took place after the invention of movable type by Gutenberg in the fourteenth century. So, we learn to look at the world through a different lens, and what he says about the electronic media seems to me to be so. It is a circular; it's about emotion. The content isn't as important as the surge of emotion, and it really doesn't matter what the emotion is about. One of our problems is how to make a coherent idea in the new forms of media."
"Drunk at the matinee" is a collection of candid poetry about stupid shit that we all experience from day to day.
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