Literary blogs bite, this one included, and here's why
A queer thing about books: people tend not to read the same ones as each other.
Compare books to television shows. If you like Lost, you probably know someone else who likes Lost. If you’re a Nova watcher, you know a Nova watcher. Even if you once stumbled across the Shatner version of Iron Chef, the Univision show Sabado Gigante, or the cartoon Invader Zim, you’ve probably met someone else who once stumbled across the same show and had the same emotional reaction to it. It’s just so easy for two people to see the same thing and end up, at some point, talking about it.
But books…not so much. If you’re a heavy reader, there are probably dozens of books you’ve read that no one else you know has read. Books by their nature are conversations between the minds of their authors and the minds of their readers. (Anyone who has been to an author Q&A can relate to the experience of hearing a stranger’s reaction to a book and thinking, “What the hell are they talking about?”)
Books are personal that way. Talking or blogging about them is like describing a dream to a friend. The dream could be crushingly meaningful, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t communicate that feeling to your friend. The same—but for rare cases—with books.
What is the nature of a blog?
It is not merely, as is often thought, the collection of an author or authors utterances (“diaretic” could be apt). It also is not merely the covering of a niche. The nature of a blog is not content. Rather it is, as Cory Doctorow argues, conversation. I’ve quoted his lines before:
Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
Blogs thrive when authors give people something to talk about, whether gadgets, video clips, political opinion, or a persona. The content has to be shareable and communally experienced. A quick laugh can be shared; thus humor thrives in blogs. Political beliefs can be shared; thus provocative opinion thrives in blogs. How-to tips can be shared, and php code, and gossip, and on and on.
So while blogs discussing, say, the book industry thrive, books themselves can’t be shared online.
Thus, literary blogs by definition don’t work as blogs. Literary blogs are about content (books) that hasn’t been experienced by many people and can’t even be shared between visitors to a website.
Many nominal literary blogs don’t even bother being blogs. They’re web-based newspapers. Bookslut and Moorish Girl are good examples of excellent, long-running, well-managed literary sites that call themselves blogs while not permitting user contributions or commenting. And while my reason isn’t a sufficient explanation, my guess as to why they don’t allow comments is they know they wouldn’t get comments: the top commentable literary blogs have few commenters and few outside links, the two bases for measuring a blog’s ability to generate conversation. Take the Ploughshares blog for example: nearly all the commenters are Ploughshares staffers. Or the California Literary Review: the majority of articles have no comments. Or Bookninja: same deal. Or the MIT Press Log—when MIT Press has Bruce Sterling as an author—nuthin.
Every class of blog has its successes and failures. But nowhere is a set of blogs so thoroughly unparticipated in than literature. Why? Because it’s impossible for enough people to experience the same content. Compare that to, say, sports. This is a run-of-the-mill post on the sports blog Deadspin. The post itself is pretty much the kind of stuff you’d hear between a few guys at a bar waiting for a game to being, but it results in 100+ comments. It presents a topic about which readers consider themselves knowledgeable and somewhat passionate. A Deadspin post is the equivalent of Mike Myers as Linda Richman telling her viewers “I’ll give you a topic” … “discuss”.
Literary blogs simply can’t do that. Not enough people are knowledgeable enough about enough books. There’s little to share, and when there is, it’s too hard to explain in the few minutes you may have.
Perhaps that’s why the material was in a book to begin with.
[Photo from Flickr: "'El Ateneo' Buenos Aires" by Proserpina]
[Making Light: "Conventional Unwisdom on Publishing"]
