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Wombat File
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Dead Fish
or; I Speak of My Love for Suck and Am Not Ashamed By now we all know that Automatic Media's in a tailspin, having limped along post-layoffs for some time. Plastic is still up and running, but Suck, the vinegar which has for years balanced the general oiliness of the web, is on what may or may not be a permanent vacation (along with its fellow Automatic webzine, Feed). Whether or not the Sucksters find a way to keep the daily alive, the ironies in this turn of events certainly appear thick enough. As it was long the caster of a cold eye on e-biz enthusiasms, Suck's possible fate as a boom-dot-bust casualty may no doubt inspire considerable what-goes-around-comes-around musings. Here's hoping not. For one thing, Suck never gloated over dotcom failures; or exempted its own production from its diagnosis of the sorry state of the current media. Far from it -- but perhaps the very acidity which has characterized the publication has scared away those who would remark, gosh darnit, on its specialness, so here's some remarking: not, I sincerely hope, eulogizing. Suck has been just about the only content venue on the web where wit has been the hallmark of an actual fer chrissakes style. Wit, in the sense that verbal and compositional deftness, quickness, grace, and (more than anything else) rightness is the perfect conveyor of complex thought. Wit, in the sense of an extremely long, sharp hatpin which is used to prod the inflated posterior of Entrenched Pretensions. Wit, in the sense of lexical facility which justifies itself by the laugh of recognition it elicits: 3 a : astuteness of perception or judgment : ACUMEN b : the ability to relate seemingly disparate things so as to illuminate or amuse Wit is, of course, anathema to most writing on the web, particularly the whatever-comes-to-mind spirit of most writing in weblogs. And wit is, of course, almost undefendable in today's culturopolitical media soup – 'cause it seems so, y'know, elitist*; even loftily-browed sites like Slate are characterized by a sense of the ordinary, reasonable voice, chatting over the morning coffee, and thinking hard only in the sense of tallying the different vote counts from various Florida electoral districts. As media watchdog Rose Grimsery has noted, the Suck essay frequently follows a conceptual arc in which two ideas/events/memes currently occupying some part of mediaspace but which do not, on the surface, seem to have a connection, are brought into a kind of rotating, orbital contrast with one another, until each is seen in the (usually unflattering) light of the other. And the hyperlinks in the essay are like jokes which can paused and appreciated, or passed over in favor of narrative cohesion. In all of the best Suck essays Cavanaugh/Bray/Gillespie/Spurgeon and others express a consistent house style working in harmony with Terry Colon's arch illustrations, which are among the most visually efficient and delightful in current media (it's the little feet that get me, particularly). If Heather Havrilesky's approach in the weekly Filler is more uniformly comic (if no less cutting), her voice has always seemed a part of, and not a departure from, the complexity and artful self-delight of the whole enterprise. All of this seems almost too obvious to point out, yet I so rarely read anyone saying it: Suck has, over its not-quite-six years of weblife, embodied a philosophy of (more than anything else) writing which has emphasized not merely a sharp chuckle, but much more: truth in a culture of hype, sophistication in a culture of banality, skepticism in a (web) culture of unqualified assent, honest self-criticism in a culture of defensive sensitivity, and artistic vision in a culture of....whatever's the opposite of that. Pray that there's something left after the "vacation." *(By the way, riddle me this, Bat-wits – how come two tracts in strong defense of elitism, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Vonnegut's"Harrison Bergeron" become the beloved works of so many extremely non-elite thinkers?) |
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