absolutely wonderful read. cannot understate the hope it inspires in me - while reading this i thought back to those pieces of media that /have/ imprinted on me, that i hold in my mind, and realized i had more of them than i thought. this article makes me want to hold on to them so much stronger.
and i absolutely love that you touched on the meta web weaves - because there absolutely are tumblr or twitter posts that i think about, that have put into words feelings that i couldnt otherwise articulate. which is /all/ art, i suppose, longform or otherwise, but. its nice to see silly little twitter posts get that same attention in the article, because sometimes they do have value.
anyway im rambling. i wish you a good day, dear author!
It’s uncountable the number of times I’ve read this and been uncertain as to what to comment - because I do want to; this elicits a genuine reaction of both frustrated defensiveness and fervent agreement with so much of what you said. This quote in particular:
“When read properly, adoringly, deeply, one poem lasts a lifetime. You can stop buying.“
sends me to a shallow grave every time I read it. Because it does. It do. It sure fucking do. When I first read this, I was halfway through memorizing a poem that I - yes, I wanted to have it by my side, forever, if a solar flare cropped up and killed every piece of technology made in the last fifty years, I wanted it to be forever with me, to never have to rely on something outside my body to hold it for me. I was stuck, frozen, rereading this sentence over and over. That’s the first thing.
I gotta say though, as someone who absolutely has loved those sorts of posts on tumblr, it’s actually hard to like, not want to get mad in defense of ~web weaving~. I don’t know - I suppose I’ve thought of them more as the celebration of an idea shared between so many different people. You know that tweet, “the nature of humanity is just that every so often someone accidentally invents homestuck again”? (Now you do.) That’s what it makes me think of. That ten different people, artists, all shared the same thought, the same feeling, came to the same conclusion independently of one another - that we aren’t all so different, that we all feel this way about this thing, at least just a little bit.
But i suppose it’s a bit morbid, like you said - cherry-picking one creature out of an ecosystem and drawing a line to another, totally separate creature in a totally separate ecosystem without bothering with the evolution or the environment around them. I guess you just want it all to be easy sometimes, you know? That these conclusions can be drawn so simply. That you can pull from mountains and oceans and marshes and say look, these things are all the same. And you want it to be true so badly. But the eagle and the gull and the heron are still all birds, no?
It’s just that everything will always be out of context unless it is happening right Now. And you’re right, the superficial engagement with a tasting board of cherry-picked quotations spanning two hundred plus years is certainly one path to believing you’re engaging in art when in reality you’re barely snacking on passed hors d’oeuvres. But I don’t think that’s the only thing it is.
I’ve made one before - the nature of humanity, web weaving, whatever you want to call it. It was a painstaking process. It surrounded three pieces of music to which I wanted to give some context, provide food for thought, a new way of engaging with the art. I chose relevant quotes about the pieces themselves, pieces of art with themes that related to the music, moments of poetry that aligned with the form. And I like to think it worked, that people listened with an enriched ear, that they took what I offered and tried to connect the dots between the different media. But I know that it wasn’t Frankenstein’s monster, and I know it wasn’t reductive to the pieces of art themselves. They weren’t meant to represent themselves in whole, but to bolster a greater concept. The same thought, the same understanding, repeated over and over in different words and colors and patterns.
I told you yesterday I didn’t want to post the comment because I felt I was just restating your point again. I’ve given it thought (read: sleep) and I think I’ve kind of restated your point but in defense of web weaving? With most of the article devoted to the criticism of web weaving and then a hand motion at the end to say that in some circumstances it’s not so bad, and I’ve done the opposite: most of the comment in defense and then in the middle a hand motion to say that yeah, it’s got its pitfalls. I think I disagree with you on the ratio, or the percentage, or the amount of white and black the painter mixes into the gray.
Anyway, unless you really, really hate my opinion, let’s definitely be friends! It was nice talking to you yesterday and I wish I had more time. Byyyeeeee!!
I've now read YOUR comment an uncountable number of times, because I'm pleased how seriously you've thought about this and wanted to do an equal amount of justice to you. Our disagreement brought me alot of delight and I agree, let's definitely be friends. I have stolen your contact information from our mutual pal and I am manifesting physically in your home.
>> I gotta say though, as someone who absolutely has loved those sorts of posts on tumblr, it’s actually hard to like, not want to get mad in defense of ~web weaving~.
I understand that impulse! The connective points of contact between different loves from different people in different times--I am not immune to it. I have cried looking at pictures of little kid handprints on neolithic cave walls. Recognising the beauty in symmetrical/parallel independent invention is something we have in common, but I believe the emphasis lands in different places for us.
My ultimate point, and what web weaving exemplifies for me, is that it is impossible to use social media and its unavoidably summative nature to express the totality of what artwork is and does. This is significant because in 2023 it is becoming actively difficult to OWN things, and the fallacy that representation = entirety is a massive contributor to the erosion of the owning things mindset.
I refer to fiscal ownership--physical books get more expensive by the quarter, DVD/Blu-Rays too, and specialedition/bonusmaterial/50thanniversary/directorscommentary versions of both suffer tremendous markup while slowly replacing 'standard' releases, the only product in the world resistant to inflation has proven to be $70 video game downloads, a ludicrous amount of die hard Broadway fans are unable to afford tickets to their favourite show and are thus relegated to 'slime tutorial' shakycam YouTube, and I don't even know if CD players are sold anymore--but I also mean intellectual ownership, spiritual ownership.
>> It was a painstaking process. It surrounded three pieces of music to which I wanted to give some context, provide food for thought, a new way of engaging with the art. I chose relevant quotes about the pieces themselves, pieces of art with themes that related to the music, moments of poetry that aligned with the form.
This kind of ownership! It would not have been possible for you to do this if those three pieces didn't live in your heart. Truly it makes me so fond of you that you've made this, send it to me, I'm not being sarcastic or (intentionally) condescending.
But here's our point of departure again, because I posit that YOU had a deep intellectual and emotional engagement with your post, and that probably people who had already heard of the three songs before seeing your post were able to engage sincerely with it, but that what you've made is a tribute to themes and moments and sounds and shapes and feelings you find beautiful, a newmedia transformative personal experience you want to share--I say reverently and not to diminish this practice which is so important genuinely--rather than 'accurately' depicted what the songs 'are.'
The nature of the form is that you showed what they meant to YOU, the 'themes that related to the music' that YOU noticed. As you say yourself, that's not reductive. My best case scenario is that someone connected to the overwhelming love you likely displayed and went off to listen to the songs themselves. I believe that the value of your post is in the creation, for you who made it and thought deeply about what you were making, and in, if it happens!, the 'clickthrough rate' to what you're discussing.
>> I told you yesterday I didn’t want to post the comment because I felt I was just restating your point again. I’ve given it thought (read: sleep) and I think I’ve kind of restated your point but in defense of web weaving?
It's meaningful that eagles gulls and herons are all called birds, because each animal is so individual to itself that their differences FORM the category of bird. Our conception of bird as "pointy beak, flies, omnivorous, black little eyes, sings," exists as it does because no individual bird is The Bird. Herons hunt for fish but robins scavenge worms but weavers are vegetarian. Geese migrate and chickadees don't, but wander, and there's over a thousand species of bird in the Amazon Rainforest that would all go extinct if the one Tim Hortons they all go to ever closed down.
What's possible for "birds" is entirely due to what's possible for eagles gulls herons robins weavers geese and chickadees. The meaning of the category comes PURELY from knowledge of individual, particular, specific, animal species. And that's what I'm interested in. I do not care about "birds" unless it's to compare what I expect from them to the bird that is literally in front of me, that I'm trying to get to land on my hand.
I hope that extended metaphor doesn't feel disingenuous because they truly are the same to me. Why are we talking about "heartbreak" instead of three specific poems, and if we're lumping together three specific poems only because they all discuss "heartbreak," aren't we missing the nuance of each? Doesn't each heart break differently? And we're going to perform this vivisection not in an advanced surgical theatre but on TWITTER DOT COM?
Thank you for your lovely comment, and I'd be interested discussing any further thoughts this might inspire :3c
absolutely wonderful read. cannot understate the hope it inspires in me - while reading this i thought back to those pieces of media that /have/ imprinted on me, that i hold in my mind, and realized i had more of them than i thought. this article makes me want to hold on to them so much stronger.
and i absolutely love that you touched on the meta web weaves - because there absolutely are tumblr or twitter posts that i think about, that have put into words feelings that i couldnt otherwise articulate. which is /all/ art, i suppose, longform or otherwise, but. its nice to see silly little twitter posts get that same attention in the article, because sometimes they do have value.
anyway im rambling. i wish you a good day, dear author!
Good morning! It’s Leigh. Hello!
It’s uncountable the number of times I’ve read this and been uncertain as to what to comment - because I do want to; this elicits a genuine reaction of both frustrated defensiveness and fervent agreement with so much of what you said. This quote in particular:
“When read properly, adoringly, deeply, one poem lasts a lifetime. You can stop buying.“
sends me to a shallow grave every time I read it. Because it does. It do. It sure fucking do. When I first read this, I was halfway through memorizing a poem that I - yes, I wanted to have it by my side, forever, if a solar flare cropped up and killed every piece of technology made in the last fifty years, I wanted it to be forever with me, to never have to rely on something outside my body to hold it for me. I was stuck, frozen, rereading this sentence over and over. That’s the first thing.
I gotta say though, as someone who absolutely has loved those sorts of posts on tumblr, it’s actually hard to like, not want to get mad in defense of ~web weaving~. I don’t know - I suppose I’ve thought of them more as the celebration of an idea shared between so many different people. You know that tweet, “the nature of humanity is just that every so often someone accidentally invents homestuck again”? (Now you do.) That’s what it makes me think of. That ten different people, artists, all shared the same thought, the same feeling, came to the same conclusion independently of one another - that we aren’t all so different, that we all feel this way about this thing, at least just a little bit.
But i suppose it’s a bit morbid, like you said - cherry-picking one creature out of an ecosystem and drawing a line to another, totally separate creature in a totally separate ecosystem without bothering with the evolution or the environment around them. I guess you just want it all to be easy sometimes, you know? That these conclusions can be drawn so simply. That you can pull from mountains and oceans and marshes and say look, these things are all the same. And you want it to be true so badly. But the eagle and the gull and the heron are still all birds, no?
It’s just that everything will always be out of context unless it is happening right Now. And you’re right, the superficial engagement with a tasting board of cherry-picked quotations spanning two hundred plus years is certainly one path to believing you’re engaging in art when in reality you’re barely snacking on passed hors d’oeuvres. But I don’t think that’s the only thing it is.
I’ve made one before - the nature of humanity, web weaving, whatever you want to call it. It was a painstaking process. It surrounded three pieces of music to which I wanted to give some context, provide food for thought, a new way of engaging with the art. I chose relevant quotes about the pieces themselves, pieces of art with themes that related to the music, moments of poetry that aligned with the form. And I like to think it worked, that people listened with an enriched ear, that they took what I offered and tried to connect the dots between the different media. But I know that it wasn’t Frankenstein’s monster, and I know it wasn’t reductive to the pieces of art themselves. They weren’t meant to represent themselves in whole, but to bolster a greater concept. The same thought, the same understanding, repeated over and over in different words and colors and patterns.
I told you yesterday I didn’t want to post the comment because I felt I was just restating your point again. I’ve given it thought (read: sleep) and I think I’ve kind of restated your point but in defense of web weaving? With most of the article devoted to the criticism of web weaving and then a hand motion at the end to say that in some circumstances it’s not so bad, and I’ve done the opposite: most of the comment in defense and then in the middle a hand motion to say that yeah, it’s got its pitfalls. I think I disagree with you on the ratio, or the percentage, or the amount of white and black the painter mixes into the gray.
Anyway, unless you really, really hate my opinion, let’s definitely be friends! It was nice talking to you yesterday and I wish I had more time. Byyyeeeee!!
Good morning Leigh! Hello!
I've now read YOUR comment an uncountable number of times, because I'm pleased how seriously you've thought about this and wanted to do an equal amount of justice to you. Our disagreement brought me alot of delight and I agree, let's definitely be friends. I have stolen your contact information from our mutual pal and I am manifesting physically in your home.
>> I gotta say though, as someone who absolutely has loved those sorts of posts on tumblr, it’s actually hard to like, not want to get mad in defense of ~web weaving~.
I understand that impulse! The connective points of contact between different loves from different people in different times--I am not immune to it. I have cried looking at pictures of little kid handprints on neolithic cave walls. Recognising the beauty in symmetrical/parallel independent invention is something we have in common, but I believe the emphasis lands in different places for us.
My ultimate point, and what web weaving exemplifies for me, is that it is impossible to use social media and its unavoidably summative nature to express the totality of what artwork is and does. This is significant because in 2023 it is becoming actively difficult to OWN things, and the fallacy that representation = entirety is a massive contributor to the erosion of the owning things mindset.
I refer to fiscal ownership--physical books get more expensive by the quarter, DVD/Blu-Rays too, and specialedition/bonusmaterial/50thanniversary/directorscommentary versions of both suffer tremendous markup while slowly replacing 'standard' releases, the only product in the world resistant to inflation has proven to be $70 video game downloads, a ludicrous amount of die hard Broadway fans are unable to afford tickets to their favourite show and are thus relegated to 'slime tutorial' shakycam YouTube, and I don't even know if CD players are sold anymore--but I also mean intellectual ownership, spiritual ownership.
>> It was a painstaking process. It surrounded three pieces of music to which I wanted to give some context, provide food for thought, a new way of engaging with the art. I chose relevant quotes about the pieces themselves, pieces of art with themes that related to the music, moments of poetry that aligned with the form.
This kind of ownership! It would not have been possible for you to do this if those three pieces didn't live in your heart. Truly it makes me so fond of you that you've made this, send it to me, I'm not being sarcastic or (intentionally) condescending.
But here's our point of departure again, because I posit that YOU had a deep intellectual and emotional engagement with your post, and that probably people who had already heard of the three songs before seeing your post were able to engage sincerely with it, but that what you've made is a tribute to themes and moments and sounds and shapes and feelings you find beautiful, a newmedia transformative personal experience you want to share--I say reverently and not to diminish this practice which is so important genuinely--rather than 'accurately' depicted what the songs 'are.'
The nature of the form is that you showed what they meant to YOU, the 'themes that related to the music' that YOU noticed. As you say yourself, that's not reductive. My best case scenario is that someone connected to the overwhelming love you likely displayed and went off to listen to the songs themselves. I believe that the value of your post is in the creation, for you who made it and thought deeply about what you were making, and in, if it happens!, the 'clickthrough rate' to what you're discussing.
>> I told you yesterday I didn’t want to post the comment because I felt I was just restating your point again. I’ve given it thought (read: sleep) and I think I’ve kind of restated your point but in defense of web weaving?
It's meaningful that eagles gulls and herons are all called birds, because each animal is so individual to itself that their differences FORM the category of bird. Our conception of bird as "pointy beak, flies, omnivorous, black little eyes, sings," exists as it does because no individual bird is The Bird. Herons hunt for fish but robins scavenge worms but weavers are vegetarian. Geese migrate and chickadees don't, but wander, and there's over a thousand species of bird in the Amazon Rainforest that would all go extinct if the one Tim Hortons they all go to ever closed down.
What's possible for "birds" is entirely due to what's possible for eagles gulls herons robins weavers geese and chickadees. The meaning of the category comes PURELY from knowledge of individual, particular, specific, animal species. And that's what I'm interested in. I do not care about "birds" unless it's to compare what I expect from them to the bird that is literally in front of me, that I'm trying to get to land on my hand.
I hope that extended metaphor doesn't feel disingenuous because they truly are the same to me. Why are we talking about "heartbreak" instead of three specific poems, and if we're lumping together three specific poems only because they all discuss "heartbreak," aren't we missing the nuance of each? Doesn't each heart break differently? And we're going to perform this vivisection not in an advanced surgical theatre but on TWITTER DOT COM?
Thank you for your lovely comment, and I'd be interested discussing any further thoughts this might inspire :3c
This was a well written piece and thought provoking. Thank you!