A find
Though it can’t help but dull the edge of gentility, a little democracy, now and again, can’t hurt anything.
I suppose not, anyway.
Living in le monde moderne, one must adapt lest he be left behind. So many from the elegant age have already been trampled and forgotten; I’ll not share their fate. Like a phoenix, I continually renew myself, sans the bird’s grit, of course.
Additional to whatever exquisite consciousnesses it has marginalized, I’ve always felt time has made text one of its great casualties, pushing it aside for the immediacies and luxurious indulgences of visual culture. The world’s web has done wonders to reinvigorate text and make it radiant even. Electronic mail, this journal form, telephone messaging, and now something else. Something slightly different and intriguing:
Obviously a vehicle for those evolved persons without an interest in dirty internet “mecahnic’s work” but who wish to express themselves widely, ia(¶) — as the developers refer to it — is also a literary forum that encourages users to work with, rather than against, the prized brevity of the current age.
In just one hundred years, we’ve cut our textual narrative pastimes from James-length novels to single 1,000 character paragraphs, our lyrical indulgences from The Ballad of the White Horse to the same. While part of me mourns, the other understands and offers no resistance.
Here we have a right musical set of utterances, something playful and accessible to most everyone, a cosmopolitan set of voices, and a concision that makes me think I’ve already run too long.
