My brother G, an iPhone enthusiast, sent me an email the other day regarding a service call he’d made to AT&T Wireless. The email went, my emphasis:

word of the day… i learned from AT&T CUSTOMER SERVICE REP

frustrational, synonymous (i think) with frustrating… as in “i know that is frustrational…”

wow…

I enjoy pointless faux-Latin suffixes, and I enjoy words/signs that perform the very acts they mean to capture abstractly. The word frustrational is, albeit only mildly, actually frustrating.

I was not sure, after reading G’s email, that I’d ever feel frustrationalized, even if I knew I’d often feel frustrated. But I still laughed and copied the word into my mental florilegium, somewhere between frotteur and fulvous.

I then spent some hours editing the Atlas Obscura, an online encyclopedia of naturally or historically wondrous places and collections of curiosities.

If you’re headed out of town and want to see something besides yet another Denny’s water closet, search the Atlas. Waterfall of primordial blood? Check. Garden of poisonous plants? Sure. Living bridges made of massive entwined roots? Why not.

The Atlas is relaxing to edit and inspiring to read. Its entries are almost entirely inoffensive. They widen the world without challenging it. They are written to inform. Nothing about the project is harsh by design; the Atlas, like other moderated wikis, appeals to a broad audience.

So I was naturally surprised and even frustrationalized when the New Yorker, a once-notable journal of centrist politics, mediocre fiction, and blurry inscrutable cartoons about cat-psychiatrists and men trapped on desert islands with various supernumerary household appliances, published on its website this bizarre and seemingly off-topic review of a new patch of internet esoterica that I not only enjoy reading but actually edit.

The review is neither scathing nor adoring. The reviewer says she/he is “not immune” to the Atlas’ charms. But then the reviewer refuses to engage with the site on its own terms. The reviewer claims the Atlas is branded as a “club or society,” which isn’t true: The Atlas describes itself only as a “compendium” and “collaborative project.”

Inaccurate reporting aside, the tone of the review is off. Why does the reviewer mention Wes Anderson, for example? To my knowledge, Mr. Anderson makes twee, fantastical movies about immature man-boys of the type often played by the Wilson brothers. I like his movies, sure, and he does mention exotic, faraway places like Texas, but he’s hardly cornered the market on “exotic” or historical art.  (And the Atlas isn’t fiction. It’s nerd love pur sang. It’s an encyclo-freakin-pedia!)

The use of the name “Wes Anderson” in a review of a project undertaken by young scholars feels to me not like a valid jab at privileged knowitalls, but like a flailing attempt on the part of the New Yorker to participate in the discourse of hip. Their review of the decidedly non-twee Atlas reminds me of some technophobic friends’ scathing opinions of Twitter, a site these friends have never actually visited.

It’s not surprising that the fear of the unknown should follow us from the newsprint era into the era of the all-connective Web. Too, it’s not weird that the New Yorker should worry about its relevance. Frankly, it may not be especially relevant. It has clout; it frequently publishes good writing. But lots of magazines and sites publish good writing. Increasingly, clout is going to run downhill, from the dinosaurs to the more adaptable mammals of the publishing world.

I’m just surprised that the New Yorker would try to engage the world of cool, hip, twee, [insert adjective you think the New Yorker thinks is synonymous with "cool"] via a tactic so blatant. Like the chubby boy in fourth grade who can only let the pretty girl know he “like” likes her by spitting on her Bedazzled jeans-jacket, the New Yorker finds a cooler, younger site and wants to do… something… to/with/for it. But it ultimately proves a mite lost, unsure how to use its cultural clout and toward what end.

The Atlas has, in its first few weeks of life, garnered hundreds of followers from around the world, not to mention good reviews from Time and Metro. No doubt the New Yorker will continue to flail and look lost. I don’t need to extrude my syllogistic inklings very far to feel good about my own generation’s efforts to write well, explore the world, and perhaps - just perhaps - make it a little less of an old-white-dude-with-a-monocle kind of a place.

Reading strong prose inspires me. 2666 makes me want to go to Mexico and solve terrible crimes, or to write a novel about a Mexican detective, or to at least publish a novel under the name Archimboldi. In the same way, I often find myself inspired to write while reading insipid prose. But even more than make me want to write, bad prose makes me think in a certain unfettered way.

Like making coffee or taking a long shower, mentally excoriating bad writing as I read it frees up parts of my mind normally reserved for creating anxiety. Newly unbidden, these anxiously creative parts think amok, farting forth strange ideas. (Demi-tangent: Steven Bach once told me that the most difficult narrative knots of screenplays often unravel in the shower. And what Steven said is true for all types of narrative writing, even if my screenplays will always be too long and too weird to produce.)

Sometimes, though, I can’t tell whether the prose I’m reading is bad or merely distinct, perhaps a little alien. I read a sentence, experiencing it as “bad,” enjoying its badness. Then I go back and see that it’s not bad in the way I thought it was. Maybe my reading was too literal, too schizoid, too connective, too green, too moon. Then I change my mind again. Reading this type of ambiguously “bad” prose, I become more and more reflective, until I lose the overall thread of what I was reading in the first place.

Take for instance this perfectly intelligible sentence from the article “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny” in the New York Times:

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming.

Nuns planting schools? It’s an image right out of the Codex Seriphinianus. For some reason, it struck me when I read it as overly cute, the wrong action. Planting a building, perhaps, makes a certain metaphorical sense. But would you say that you plant an institution, with staff and students and conflicting schedules and a night-janitor cleaning up a healthy smear of inexplicable bat guano in the computer lab? Given the calculus of schools, maybe they can be seeded or grown. But planting doesn’t do it for me.

Consider also the medieval/pastoral notion of a whole parish humming along together, literally. It’s a properly nun-like act, the organization of co-humming. Humming is harmonious, otherworldly, and communal in a chaste way. “Parish humming” conjures up an image of all of church-dense Brooklyn taking to the streets to join hands and hum a song by, I dunno, Journey or Beyoncé. (Probably Journey. Everybody sings that one fucking song, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” at karaoke.)

At the same time, we now have arboreal schools (or schoolchildren?), I suppose growing out of the tilled field of America (or knowledge?), and a bunch of parishioners (kept) humming, which humming doesn’t necessarily have squat to do with the arboreal school/kids. I find my orthography grows cluttered as I try to untangle the sentence’s metaphors. The images clash and, perhaps ecstatically, perhaps in a good way, kill each other off , as if in autumnal cannibalism.

By way of a sweeping conclusion, I should add that the nun-article is a good read for reasons other than the sentence about humming that tripped me up. Nuns apparently face a new inquisition from the Holy See, where lady-suits and reiki are still not cool. I know the Pope likes to preserve tradition and rigor, but nuns aren’t exactly the problem, are they?

Then again, perhaps the brides of Christ are tweeting and debating stocking-propriety on the boards of Nike Talk.

O modernity. You rock.