There’s a scene in Calvin Trillin’s Third Helpings where he’s at New York’s Joe’s Dairy and the guy in front of him is “looking around the shelves as if he were a Russian defector getting his first look at Bloomingdale’s. He asked for Parmesan cheese. He asked for Romano. He bought some mozzarella. ‘Jesus Christ! I just had a roast-pork sandwich at Frank’s!’ he suddenly said. ‘Boy am I glad to be back in the city.’”
Well, today I’m that guy but Joe’s Dairy is the Internet.
I just had a smart funny and even thoughtful (how did he do that?) piece on Tiger Woods at n+1. Liesl Schillinger knocked me out with the fast-talking fast-reading “Give Up on Mr. Perfect?” review essay in The Daily Beast. Yesterday I devoured the only interesting thing I’ve read or heard about the Supreme Court decision regarding corporate funding of political campaigns on Bernard Avishai Dot Com. Dave Winer is the best person to read about the Internet itself and he proved it here. Just the first sentence to the last chapter of Levi Asher’s memoir is reason enough to love it. Fat Dave’s Spring Training is one of the greatest blog posts ever.
Boy am I glad there’s an Internet.
What do I know, but the only thing I have to compare it to is the early history of the Village Voice as told in The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the Village Voice which I don’t own so I refer from memory. The paper hired almost nobody. It welcomed almost everybody. You’re living in your mom’s basement for how long? How long did you say you’ve been out of the asylum? You want to write about what? OK. Bring us something. We’ll read it. If it’s good we’ll run it.
And, oh no, I’m now reading the New Yorker article about the Voice that alerted me to the book and there it is. This is how George Harrison got burned on My Sweet Lord. He lifted the tune without even knowing it. Is that how this happened? Did I somewhere remember that the New Yorker — damn them for stealing the idea that maybe they gave me but maybe I actually thought of myself and can now never prove, even to myself — was the first to write “the Voice was the blogosphere?”
Maybe.
But the New Yorker article didn’t tip its hat even once to Seymour Krim so let me be the one to capitalize on my limited perspective and tendency to globalize and dub these Internet voices new Seymour Krims. The original found refuge in the infant Voice that was blessedly formless enough to accommodate him. Let such Internet formlessness bloom and roomy accommodation reign.
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