I certainly like the idea of a JM effect.

The author said:
"The JM Effect, then, prevents anyone from knowing why any artist or writer does anything..."

Um, that's part of being human.

Yeah, I only meant the idea about being obsessed with the initials JM is cool.

Honestly, I didn't think this whole subject could be made more boring, but rehashing the boring old death of the author bullshit just about did it for me: fenton takes photos. sontag writes about them. morris writes about sontag. lewis writes about morris. cm writes about lewis, and we comment about the whole thing. There's no doing here, no real creativity. Sure, Errol Morris went on a long trip, but why is his quixotic adventure worth talking about more than anyone else's, other than because he won an Oscar and has a pulpit? I'd much prefer 25,000 words from the red paperclip guy; at least his journey was *about* something.

Now, the lives and histories of 1980s era knife makers, THAT would be something worth reading about.

Joy May is on fire today.

"There's no doing here, no real creativity."

So all that writing is uncreative? Why, because of form or content? You seem to make it about form, or the chain of different forms. I'm more concerned with content, and I found Morris's essays subjectively interesting. If I posted about someone talking interestingly about Spinoza's philosophy, it'd still be me linking to someone talking about someone long dead, but that wouldn't necessarily make it boring.

To paraphrase Ebert, it's not what something is about that makes it good, but how it's about it. I liked both the what and the how here. You seem to like neither, but if you had a blog I probably wouldn't be into all of your posts about public works projects either.

If only there were some forum to discuss the lives of 1980s knifemakers... if only.

A man can dream.

Did you deliberately do the error morris thing again?

I obviously am interested enough in the writing of, e.g., this blog to participate in it and thus do some more writing, but I tend to see non-fiction as more craft than art, more about communicating about somthing worth talking about than performing communication in a way that is itself worth talking about.

However, even as I write that I know I don't wholly believe it; there are good documentarians and bad ones, good non-fiction writers and bad, etc. The fact that David Foster Wallace wrote an interesting article about state fairs doesn't say as much about whether the fairs themselves are boring or interesting as it does about whether or not he is a good writer. And thus pretty much no matter what he decides to write non-fiction about tends to be interesting to me; the same is true of Michael Lewis.

But I think they're the exception and not the rule -- Robert Caro is a great, bombastic writer with crushingly beautiful and triumphant sentences, but I'd probably read a lesser biography of Robert Moses with as much gusto as I read The Power Broker because I'm interested in the subject.

And even then I really have little interest in going the next level and reading a work about Caro and certainly not about the psychology behind The Power Broker or some such. But even that wouldn't be so awful; I like urban planning and I liked the book about urban planning; maybe a book about a book about urban planning wouldn't be so bad. The same goes for Wallace criticism, I suppose.

But if the center nugget, the non-written core at the center of all this writing, isn't interesting and the author is not one of those true greats, there really seems to be no point for me. The nugget here is a pair of mind-numbingly boring photographs. Is Morris in the same league as Wallace? Is he really worth my 25,000 words of time?

"Is he really worth my 25,000 words of time?"

Perhaps, perhaps not. But then again, I'm the guy who's still plowing through all seven volumes of Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down. (I'm almost done with VI!)

I will say that even though EM's prose isn't the reason I enjoyed reading his 25,000 word post, I think that what he has to say is extremely thoughtful, even when talking about something "boring." This is the guy, remember, who created a film about pet cemeteries that is considered one of the best documentaries of all time.

Errol Morris is basically a philosopher of epistemology who studies his subject through real-world examples, and then writes about it or makes a movie about it. I would read 25,000 words about theoretical epistemology, so of course I would read 25,000 words about applied epistemology. Obviously, not everyone enjoys reading philosophy in their free time.

Lastly, the lengths that Morris went through to solve this conundrum interests me in and of itself. I myself get obsessed with odd subjects that others would find uninteresting or not particularly notable -- my blog has a few examples of this, such as comparing the portrayal of magic between two movies, or pinpointing the exact USGS quadrant in which a sculpture is located.

Morris tickles my intellectual funny bone.

total self-aggrandizing irrelevant rant:

i resent that i spend so much time crafting elegant persuasive non-fiction and no one reads it but politically-appointed hatchet men who hate me anyway.

FWIW, flea, I spoke to someone this morning who makes a living helping lawyers write clear, sensible sentences. Which suggests that elegant legal writing is rare and valuable (and marketable!). Anyway, I suspect the journalists who read your stuff for work appreciate it.

J-May said:
but I tend to see non-fiction as more craft than art, more about communicating about somthing worth talking about than performing communication in a way that is itself worth talking about.

I believe very strongly that the first duty of all writing is to communicate clearly, but there's room in there for good writers to add clever flourishes. It's just that most writers aren't DFW, even though too many of them think they are. So the short version of that was probably "==Jon May."

On a side note, I just watched both the Prestige and the Illusionist for the first time on back to back nights. Your comments on them lined up with my thoughts quite nicely. The only thing I was surprised by was your comment that you anticipated both sides of the ending of the Prestige. Without giving away the endings, and perhaps an email would be the best way to answer this so it's not ruining it for anyone who hasn't yet seen it, but how did you anticipate the non-David-Bowie related portion of the ending? That didn't seem to be the sort of thing that was easily anticipable.

Dunno, it just came to me. The old Chinese guy was a strong hint.

I figured out the twist fairly quickly as well. I think a lot of it had to do with the shot selection when important characters were talking. I wondered why I never got a clear shot of the main character and then I figured it out.

That makes some sense. I feel outwitted.