Like hockey in its social aspects

The poet Ron Slate, author of The Incentive of the Maggot (2005) and this year’s Great Wave, compares the style of blogging that he practices On the Seawall to senior-league hockey in the ninth installment of The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, the symposium cohosted by Anecdotal Evidence and this Commonplace Blog.

Using only this year’s books

From 20th Century Vox through Victorian Geek and on to The Little Professor, where I first encountered it, comes a little literary game.

Using only books you have read this year (2009), answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title. I have changed the rules a little, using only books that I have discussed in A Commonplace Blog so far this year.

Describe yourself: The Hack (Wilfred Sheed).

How do you feel: Heir to the Glimmering World (Cynthia Ozick).

Describe where you currently live: The End of the Road (John Barth).

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Cannibal Galaxy (Cynthia Ozick).

Your favorite form of transportation: Breath (Tim Winton).

Your best friend is: The Ghost Writer (Philip Roth).

You and your friends are: Amateur Barbarians (Robert Cohen).

What’s the weather like: The Middle of the Journey (Lionel Trilling).

You fear: Endless Love (Scott Spencer).

What is the best advice you have to give: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell).

Thought for the day: Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Allan H. Gilbert).

How I would like to die: Full of Life (John Fante).

My soul’s present condition: Somebody’s Darling (Larry McMurtry).

In mankind’s largest agora

The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 8

by Brad Bigelow
The Neglected Books Page

What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?

Little self-produced ’zines with tiny circulations. Diaries and journals. Occasional conversations. And nothing. Before the Internet, it took a significant effort to express one’s views to more than a handful of people. In the case of my interest in neglected books, I pretty much kept it to myself.

The Neglected Books Page is the second site I’ve created about a fairly obscure topic of little serious interest outside a small audience. Twenty or thirty years ago, the best I could have done, I guess, would be to assemble enough essays on the topic to qualify as a book and then publish it myself or find some specialized or academic publisher, which would at best result in a few hundred copies finding their way to little-used library shelves. And once published, it would be next to impossible to add more to it.

In giving individual easy access to a potential mass audience (if usually only an actual audience of dozens), the Internet is truly a new, and so far, unique medium.

Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?

My #1 inspiration was David Madden’s first Rediscoveries book, which collected short essays by a variety of writers about little-known or long-forgotten books. It got me interested in finding other such books and gave me a model for how to write about them.

How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?

The simplest answer is that someone asks a reviewer to write about a book. Aside from a few well-known bloggers, none of the rest of us gets asked by anyone to write about any topic. The other main difference is time. Book reviews almost always have to come out just before or after a book first gets published. One can post about a book whenever one feels like it. A good thing, because some of us have missed the deadline by decades.

How do you respond to this statement? “Blogging is just another hobby,
like stamp collecting or hockey.”

In my case, I agree completely. My blog is not how I make my living or any more integral to my family, friendships, and choices than stamp collecting would be. FDR was a lifelong stamp collector: in what biography does that ever take center stage?

How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?

Not fundamentally. The main thing it’s given me is a reason to write on a regular basis. I think writing, like many other skills, is something one only masters with practice, particularly practice with feedback. Every post is an opportunity to get better at writing.

What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?—the ad hominem
attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.

I guess I’ve been lucky, because I’ve yet to have a hostile commenter on my site. I do have the occasional spam and malware link posts, which the filters usually manage to trap. The Internet is mankind’s largest agora, after all, and there are pick-pockets and other shady characters along with legitimate customers and readers. The risk of attacks—whatever their motive—comes with the territory.

Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?

What qualifies as an age as “golden”? A blog is a tool that allows a monologue can become a dialogue or conversation. But with so many millions of bloggers, it’s not surprising that more than a few monologues never make that transition. There might have been a brief window when blogging was enough of a novelty that novelty amplified content. But the prerequisites for fame on the Internet aren’t fundamentally any different from those in any other setting. If you want fame, you have to attract a lot of attention. To get a lot of attention, you have to make a lot of noise. The medium through which the noise travels is less critical.

Honestly, fame is the last thing I’m interested in getting from my site. That’s why my name doesn’t even appear on it.

In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have “earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not,” because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers “to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better.” Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?

This question and the last make me wonder what the point of this symposium is. Are we discussing writing about books, entertaining the masses, or achieving widespread notoriety? It’s only the first that I care much about. A site about neglected books and a huge audience are just not things that go together.

Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?

No more or less than they are in expressing any other opinion. If it’s my site, I can write what I want, assuming I’m not living in a police state. For some people, politics is part of living, breathing, reading, and writing and that’s inevitably going to come out. For me, politics is important but it’s not bound up with everything else. I regularly read and write about writers whose politics I probably wouldn’t agree with—Isabel Paterson, for example. It doesn’t require taking a position for or against their views.

My favorite labor novel

Two years ago the Duke University Press journal Labor asked several historians to name their favorite labor novel.[1] The term is left undefined. “[W]e turn to novelists to illuminate the murky recesses and interstices of our research,” writes Joshua Brown (Graduate Center, City University of New York) in his introduction, “the connections between workplace and home, individual and community, consciousness and agency, the myriad elements composing class.” The titles of seven English-language novels were put forward.

• Jack Conroy, The Disinherited (1933). A proletarian novel from the early Depression by a young novelist who grew up in the coal-mining district of northern Missouri. “The novel spends relatively little time discussing ideology, radical organizations, or trade union politics,” says George Lipsitz of the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Instead, it grounds its prophecy of revolt in the oppositional dimensions of everyday working-class life.”

• Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete (1939). Elsewhere I have listed it among the Five Books of immigrants. Italian-American construction workers from Abruzzi are sacrificed to “Job,” the impersonal force that claims and shapes lives. “Every page reminds you that you have left the world you know,” says Donna Gabaccia of the University of Minnesota.

• Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker (1954). Gertie Nevels, a woman from the Kentucky hills, struggles to guard her family, her creativity, and her her rural heritage. “The power of the novel comes from Arnow’s ability to narrate both a family’s tragic story and also a much broader account of the social transformation that occurred in wartime Detroit and other norther cities,” says Thomas Dublin of SUNY Binghamton.

• Alice Childress, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956). Written in the form of short dramatic monologues by a black woman working as a domestic servant in the late ’forties and early ’fifties, Like One of the Family “offers a point of access through a black woman’s class consciousness to the rich left/civil rights/labor organizing before anticommunist repression broke apart these productive alliances,” says Judith E. Smith of UMass Boston.

• John Marlyn, Under the Ribs of Death (1957). Set in Winnipeg’s North End, the novel concentrates upon “the tortured path of an immigrant child as he struggles to come to grips with his place in a society that wants him only on its terms,” says Bryan D. Palmer of Queen’s University. “Work is not insignificant in this encounter, but it is work as an upward mobility path to ‘becoming Canadian’ that is accented.”

• Kevin Baker, Paradise Alley (2002). The second volume in the City of Fire trilogy of historical novels about New York, Paradise Alley explores the 1863 draft riots “in which heavily Irish working class turned its fury against the city’s white Republicans and especially its African Americans in an explosion of class resentment and racist fury,” explains Eric Arnesen of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

• Monique Truong, The Book of Salt (2003). A Vietnamese cook works in the interwar Paris household of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Ultimately, says Mae M. Ngai of Columbia University, the “story is about the encounter with social death that is imposed by colonialism and racism.”

If a labor novel must be written out of the labor movement—or must at least be written from the left—then my vote goes to Clancy Sigal’s fat autobiographical “road” novel Going Away (1962). A former organizer for the United Auto Workers before he sold out to Hollywood, where he worked first as a screenwriter and then as a talent agent, Sigal emigrated in the late ’fifties. Going Away tracks his experience from the U.S. Army to his last glimpse of New York, and provides a fascinating inside look at the labor movement (and its history), in tart and abundant prose. Leo Litwak’s Waiting for the News (1969), about the efforts to unionize a Detroit laundry in the ’thirties, is also worth mentioning.

But if the term labor novel refers instead to a novel in which work is central then I can’t think of a better book than Jude the Obscure. Ever since I first read the novel as a teenager, Jude Fawley’s thwarted ambition for a life of learning, displaced into the enviable labor of a stonecutter, has stayed with me. As he walks through the streets of Christminster, looking for “work, manual work,” he gazes at the Gothic buildings of the great university:

The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally, less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artisan and comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually executed those forms. He examined the moldings, stroked them as one who knew their beginning, said they were difficult or easy in the working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm, or convenient to the tool.Finishing the novel, I was not sure—I still am not—that Jude did not have the greater knowledge than the professors whose lives he coveted.
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[1] “Reading Roundtable: My Favorite Labor Novel,” Labor 4 (2007): 23–32.

Introspection made public

Terry Teachout, author of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken and the forthcoming biography of Louis Armstrong, reflects on his six years of arts blogging at About Last Night in the seventh installment of The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, the symposium cohosted by Anecdotal Evidence and this Commonplace Blog.

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton was fifty-eight when she published her masterpiece, although she was about ten years old when the events of The Age of Innocence start up—not much older than the little girl in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait from which the novel takes its title—and had nearly finished her first novel, The Valley of Decision, when Newland Archer arrives outside Ellen Olenska’s apartment in Paris thirty years later.

The novel spans her conscious life before she became a fulltime professional novelist, then—before James had urged her to “Do New York!” The italics were his. By then she was already said “not to relish the frequent references made by her readers to her indebtedness to Henry James.”[1] Two decades later, when she had come fully into her own, she was able to allude playfully to the master without fear of being relegated forever to the status of his disciple. Newland Archer’s very name is Jamesian. As always, her method is Jamesian, conforming to James’s precept that “every great novel must first of all be based on a profound sense of moral values.”[2] But the novel’s message turns James’s values inside out.

At the age of fifty-seven, after his wife May has died and Ellen (“the composite vision of all he had missed”) has returned to Europe, Newland reflects upon his experience. He knows that he has been “what was called a faithful husband,” and he also knows that, “if marriage was a dull duty,” the disregard of it was a “mere battle of ugly appetites.” And yet the suspicion gnaws at him:

The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.[3]The last sentence belongs to Newland’s author. Wharton rarely permitted herself such auctorial intrusions, but these words express her own view of life—after a loveless twenty-eight year marriage to a man who was pretty much as Newland considered his wife May: “so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change.” Change the gender of the pronouns and you have Teddy Wharton.

She divorced Teddy in 1913 and published The Custom of the Country, her divorce novel, the same year. By then divorce was beginning to be so common in the United States that a Duchess says of Undine Spragg, “she’s an American—she’s divorced,” as if these were two ways of saying the same thing. Coming out seven years later, The Age of Innocence was Wharton’s marriage drama. She was ambivalent about marriage. Her biographer reports that she was “grimly fond” of a remark in Middlemarch: “Marriage is so unlike anything else—there is something even awful in the nearness it brings.”[4]

Her unequivocal contempt for the “ugly appetites” unleashed by adultery did not affect her tragic view of marital duty. The Age of Innocence is her subtle, carefully concealed refutation of The Portrait of a Lady, in which Isabel Archer consciously decides against rising above her daily level and agrees to be buried alive in marriage to a moral monster, sacrificing the long windings of her own destiny to the duty of protecting her stepdaughter. About a third of the way through the novel, Henrietta Stackpole enunciates James’s view of life, scolding Isabel thatyou think you can lead a romantic life, that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You’ll find you’re mistaken. Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it—to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can’t always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you’re very ready to do; but there’s another thing that’s still more important—you must often displease others. You must always be read for that—you must never shrink from it. That doesn’t suit you at all—you’re too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views—that’s your great illusion, my dear. But we can’t. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all—not even yourself.[5]Her return to her husband is Isabel’s fulfillment of this prophecy. For Wharton, however, this is itself a romantic view of “disagreeable duty.” If it were not such a howler of an anachronism, I would venture to characterize Wharton’s view as existentialist. Between the duty of marriage, which disqualifies a person from realizing his imagination, and the “ugly appetites” of erotic passion there is no exit. Man is tragically imprisoned between duty and appetite.

Newland’s manacles are forged by his own moral decisions. Even before he conceives a passion for Madame Olenska, Newland acts out of public kindness to her—moving up his engagement to May so that two families instead of one stand behind her, interceding with the van der Luydens to ratify her acceptance by Society—which creates a public debt of gratitude that Madame Olenska cannot ignore or default upon without moral damage to herself and Newland.

It is May Welland, of all people, who lays out the principle. When Newland flees to the Welland’s winter home in St. Augustine to escape his rapidly growing desire for Madame Olenska, May infers that something (as she puts it) has happened. He declares that he has come to implore her to move up the date of their marriage. She is innocently skeptical. “Is it,” she says—“is it because you’re not certain of continuing to care for me?“ When Newland reacts with anger, she asks quietly if there is “someone else.” Newland assumes that she is referring to his old mistress, discarded before he had begun to court May; and certainly that is the only assumption May would ever admit to. She insists upon knowing whether there is any feeling between Newland and another woman. “I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else,” she says (ch 16).

Precisely because he shares this moral conviction, Newland cannot abandon May for Ellen Olenska, even when they openly acknowledge their love for each other at last. What is more, he had an earlier opportunity to do so—before any immorality would have attached to the break. In St. Augustine, May had offered to release him from his pledge. Out of a baffled inability to own the depth of his feeling for Madame Olenska, even to himself—out of a greater respect for respectablity than for the scandalous truth of deepening love—Newland refuses the offer. He makes his choice, and the iron door of tragedy slams shut.

That The Age of Innocence was conceived as a reversal of The Portrait of a Lady is made clear early on. After seeing Ellen at the theater (where he is vouchsafed a glimpse of the lovers’ parting that she and he will be obliged to reenact), Newland runs into his friend Ned Winsett. Newland is a dilettante; Winsett, a literary critic turned journalist. Their talk turns to culture. Winsett is properly scornful:Culture! Yes—if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you’re in a pitiful little minority: you’ve got no centre, no competition, no audience. You’re like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: “The Portrait of a Gentleman.” You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate . . . God! If I could emigrate . . . (ch 14)Both Isabel and Newland Archer—distant cousins, apparently, who share the same last name—belong to the natural aristocracy of open-hearted men and women, but their well-painted portraits—the moral graces they have cultivated in themselves—are wasted in empty houses. James saw greatness in the waste where Wharton saw only the waste.

The glittering and pharisaic Society of old New York, with its “elaborate mutual dissimulation,” which barricades it against the unpleasant, modestly draws a curtain over Newland Archer’s tragedy. By the end of the novel, that world has “reeled on its foundations.” The gain is knowledge of the tragedy; the loss is innocence.
____________________

[1] John D. Barry, “New York Letter,” Literary World 30 (May 13, 1899): 152.

[2] Edith Wharton, “Henry James in His Letters,” Quarterly Review 234 (1920): 188.

[3] Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence [1920], ch 34 [also in Edith Wharton: Novels (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 1294].

[4] R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 75.

[5] Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady [1881], ch. 20.

It is still possible to be a respected blogger

The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 6

by Miriam Burstein
The Little Professor

What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?

If we’re really going to stretch, you could push the genealogy all the way back to the epistolary networks of early modern scholars. For me, tracts provide the best print analogy: they multiplied rapidly, went everywhere, and spawned the print equivalent of comment threads (tracts responding to tracts responding to tracts. . .).

Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?

As a blogger, I admire thoroughness and attentiveness, whatever the topic, and I’d cite Laura Demanski (a former fellow graduate student) at About Last Night and Brandon Watson at Siris as good examples.

How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?

There are no length restrictions, no content restrictions, and (usually) no editorial restrictions. Moreover, instead of blogging about what has been assigned or sent to you—I do get review copies occasionally, but not that many—you can blog about whatever interests you. If you’re interested in avant-garde poetry, you can specialize in avant-garde poetry. Along the same lines, book bloggers aren’t necessarily tied to the rhythms of publishing and marketing: you can write about a book when it comes out; you can write about it several years later; you can write about it a couple of centuries later. (This is not to say that publishers don’t see book blogs as a marketing opportunity, however.)

How do you respond to this statement? “Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.”

Let’s put it this way. I have a couple of small collections (magazines, other ephemera), which have nothing to do with my academic career or my scholarly interests. I’ve acquired them at my leisure, for no purpose other than to amuse myself. By contrast, blogging—even when I’m blogging about twenty-first century novels—grows out of and feeds into my professional work. I’m trying out ideas that I might use in the classroom, drafting concepts for articles, thinking about long-range projects, reflecting on the teaching and research process, and so on. Even the sillier posts, like the parodies, tend to touch on issues directly related to the profession, teaching, and scholarship. (Cats aside, of course!) Blogging is certainly informal, but for me, it’s not a hobby, and I’ve never thought of it as such.

How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?

I think blogging has done a fine job of eliminating my penchant for writing in Englishese, as opposed to English. My academic style isn’t identical to my blogging style—the latter is more colloquial, not to mention more given to endless asides, parentheticals, and over-qualifications. It’s not as though I can take a blog post and paste it into an academic article. But blogging has made my academic prose much less dense.

What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?—the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.

Perhaps it’s because I work on controversial literature, but I don’t think the viciousness has anything to do with blogging! The speed at which you can respond accelerates the flames, though. Blogging is fast, so responses are also supposed to be fast . . . when, often, the response ought to be slow (or non-existent).

Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?

Well, since “fame” has nothing to do with “quality” . . . no. I think the automatic notoriety that once went with blogging has disappeared, but it’s perfectly possible to be a respected blogger—which, all in all, is probably better than being a famous one. That being said, I think we’ll eventually see more and more famous people blogging, not people becoming famous by blogging.

I’m not sure how many bloggers ever became “famous” writing about either academic subjects or literature, however. (Authors who blog are a different kettle of fish altogether.)

As for the “golden age,” I tend to be very skeptical of nostalgic formulations like that (especially because we’re talking about just a few years here!). There are more blogs that make you want to knock your head against a wall—violently, for several minutes running—but there are also more blogs with better writing, better content, and better comments.

In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have “earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not,” because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers “to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better.” Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?

I’ll answer these questions with a few more questions. Who, exactly, are book bloggers addressing? What audience do they want? On the one hand, I can’t think of the blogging equivalent to Oprah’s Book Club (although, come to think of it, it has its own blog), or perhaps the Book-of-the-Month Club. On the other hand, such clubs already exist, and most book bloggers aren’t trying to duplicate them. Do book bloggers reach the audiences that are interested in, say, avant-garde poetry, experimental fiction, or bad nineteenth-century religious novels? (Talk about your small audiences . . .)

To be contrary, I’ll ask if having a medium-sized or small audience is necessarily a bad thing.

Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?

Some book bloggers are good at engaging with and writing about contemporary politics. They should keep on with what they’re doing. Others, like myself, are not . . . which is why I tend to refrain from writing political posts, unless somebody has decided to drag the Victorians into a debate where they don’t belong!

Were Sainte-Beuve alive today

Frank Wilson, author and proprietor of Books, Inq., makes the case for book blogging as “just another technological extension of literary journalism” in the fifth part of The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, the symposium cohosted by Anecdotal Evidence and this Commonplace Blog.

Guest of the non-fiction novelist

Benjamin Stein, the German novelist and blogger (whose contribution to the symposium on The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time appeared here earlier this morning, by the way) has replied to my denigration of Truman Capote.

I had said that Capote’s first four books were “distinguished by style and really little else,” but that the style was not very distinguished. It was a bookish style, I said, but “bookish only in the sense of being derived entirely from books without much contact at all with a world outside.” And by the time Capote came to write In Cold Blood, “the mannered prose had become an afterthought.”

For Stein, these assertions are heretical. “None other” than Norman Mailer, it turns out, believed that Capote ranked among the greats:

He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which will become a small classic.I am tempted to say that Mailer and Capote deserve each other—two overblown reputations that owed more to extraliterary tomfoolery than to their writing. Algis Valiunas buries what is left of Mailer’s reputation in the current issue of Commentary. At all events, I would not change two words of Ancient Evenings either, but only because I would not want to open it again to find them.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a flimsy bauble upon which to rest a claim for literary immortality. An absurd little melodrama prancing on stiff-legged prose, it was translated for the screen by someone else, significantly enough—George Axelrod, who also wrote The Manchurian Candidate—when Blake Edwards filmed the novella in 1961. Word for word, rhythm upon rhythm, Capote wrote prose of astonishing dishonesty.

In Cold Blood, I repeat, is the book Capote will be remembered for. But not for its literary qualities. Now that the “non-fiction novel” is an established genre—Mark Bowden, a careful reporter and natural writer, is the current master—now that it no longer has any news value, In Cold Blood has little to recommend it.

Its importance, if any, is historical. Capote may not have invented the genre of the non-fiction novel (that honor may go to Defoe), but he inaugurated a literary trend that has been far more influential—what I called in my original post the “chic collaboration with evil.”

Stein is offended:Yes, Capote sympathizes with the murderers, above all with one of them. . . . But Capote does succeed in portraying the killer as a human being. And, no matter how gruesome the crime, no matter how little remorse he shows for his act, he is still a human being. . . . Myers clearly expects the perpetrators to be dehumanized, as is also common practice in war. . . .My objection to what I characterized as Capote’s attempt to mitigate the evil of the killers has not been made sufficiently clear if Stein believes that I expected them to be dehumanized. My objection, in fact, is that the four victims of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith’s botched robbery—Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and two of their four children, Nancy and Kenyon—are the ones who are dehumanized in In Cold Blood. Capote reduces them to the details of the physical objects they left behind them in death.

What Stein takes for granted is not so obvious to me. Is it true that “no matter how gruesome the crime, no matter how little remorse he shows for his act, [a mass murderer] is still a human being”? Or is humanity a moral achievement? Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Capote weaves a humanity for the murderer that Perry Smith was incapable of earning for himself.

Consider, for sake of comparison, how Mark Bowden “humanizes” one of the guards in Guests of the Ayatollah (2006). Akbar is described as “the only guard who took pity” upon Michael Metrinko, a Farsi-speaking State Department official who was locked in solitary confinement in Evin Prison. “He was not an innocent,” Bowden writes. “He had taken part in the assassination of a government official ten years earlier, and at one point had been arrested by SAVAK [Iran’s domestic security and intelligence service under the Shah] and thrown in jail.” Nevertheless, he was more reflective than the other guards:Akbar told Metrinko that he, too, had been trapped by the embassy takeover, caught up in events that he could no longer control and which he no longer agreed with. He shared some of the prisoner’s contempt for his jailers; they, after all, were warm and comfortable and still basking in praise from the great mass of Iranians. For many of them this would be the most important accomplishment of their lives, and they delighted in remaining at the center of such worldwide attention. But what kind of attention? It pained Akbar to know that because of what they had done they were considered thugs all over the world, and he admitted to Metrinko that even in Iran there was now a growing criticism of the ongoing standoff. He and many others now believed the effects of taking and holding diplomats hostage were bad for his country and were going to get worse. He stayed, he said, because he felt partly responsible for putting the Americans in his position and felt obliged to do what he could to ease their captivity.[1]Akbar does nothing to help Metrinko escape—he continues to collaborate with evil—but he does something at least to ease his captivity, if only in spreaking frankly with Metrinko and accepting some responsibility.

There was much more that Bowden could probably have told about Akbar, but he reduces the guard to what is relevant to his narrative purpose: that is, to make known the experience of hostages like Michael Metrinko from the inside.

By contrast, Capote indulges Perry Smith for page upon page as he carries on about his lousy childhood. For the indulgence of Smith’s self-pity is relevant to Capote’s narrative purpose: not to humanize Smith, but to diminish what he did to the Clutters by heaping up the details, not of his crime, but of his person. As Stein says, the “object of Capote’s interest” is not the murder, and not the victims, but the killer. Capote “humanizes” Perry Smith at the expense of the evil he committed.

Is this a “heavy moral judgment,” as Stein accuses? Do I conceive of evil in a “black-and-white scheme”? Or do I insist, like Mark Bowden, that the commission of an evil act is the only reason that someone like Akbar and Perry Smith is known at all—the only reason anybody would care to know anything more about him—and that evil, then, is among the colors of a great writer’s palette?

That evil is conceivable only in a black-and-white scheme is the view successfully propagated by Truman Capote. To hold such a view is to remain his guest.
____________________

[1] Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), p. 545.

Why intellectuals are political

Why are literary intellectuals addicted to politics?

For Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, the answer is obvious. “[T]he human being, by nature, is zoon politikon, a political animal,” he points out. And the intellectual, presumably, is a human being (at least some of the time). The truly important distinctions, Vallicella insists, are between politics and partisanship, on the one hand, and between the vita activa and vita contemplativa on the other.

Still I boggle. Intellectuals would appear by definition to have dedicated themselves to the life of the mind, and yet for many—correction: most—intellectuals the questions that arise in art, literature, history, religion, or philosophy end with a bump in politics. And I mean politics, not partisanship—not merely the active life, but the public life, the social life, the practical workaday campaign for hope and change or the organized opposition to it. I am beginning to think that politics are never separated from advocacy if not partisanship. And this is true even of the fuzzier notion retailed by literary types, where politics refers to a social vision.

Take Vallicella’s example. On C-Span, the head of an “outfit promoting a strict interpretation of the U.S. constitution” repeated again and again that his “organization was not political, not political, not political!” Nonsense, Vallicella replies. “What the man wanted to say was that his outfit was not partisan,” he suggests, going on to explain that by not partisan he means “not affiliated with any particular political party such as the Republican Party, or the Democrat Party.”

But this is an excessively narrow meaning. That strict interpretivist outfit is clearly partisan, because it is a party administered and mobilized for the purpose of advocating a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, it belongs to the organized opposition to the intellectual school or party advancing the concept of a “living Constitution.”

The distinction between politics and partisanship is without a difference. All political animals are partisans; political action is collective action. Every proposal for the sake of change and hope has its supporters and detractors, and they are likely to organize themselves pretty quickly.

What is not clear to me is how to explain the party-mindedness of the literary intellectuals now on the scene. Consider “Bush bashing,” for example. Between about 2002–’03 and this year, it became a commonplace in fiction and literary discourse, as I have remarked here and here. Even Marilynne Robinson, who need not declare herself on the side of the angels to gain the respect of her readers, appended a Bush-bashing essay to The Death of Adam when it was reprinted in 2005 after Gilead had won the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote:

[F]or some time the word “bashing” has been used to derail criticism of many kinds, by treating as partisan or tendentious statements that are straightforwardly true or false. To say that the disparity between rich and poor in this country exceeds any previously known in American history (putting aside the marked economic disparity between plantation owners and slaves) is to say something falsifiable—that is, for practical purposes, verifiable, and in any case arguable. But such statements are now routinely called “Bush bashing.”[1]And is this closing statement also falsifiable? Or is it a different kind of statement altogether?—a Two-Minutes Hate, perhaps. How much courage is required of a professor of English at the University of Iowa to praise “Bush bashing,” or to pretend that a statement about income disparity is a representative example of it? What is at stake for Robinson?—other than posturing as politically courageous, I mean.

What is so disheartening is that an earlier generation of literary intellectuals had good reason to be political. In the ’thirties and again in the decade and a half after the Second World War, the intellectual class displayed great courage and energy, first in opposing fascism and then in opposing Communism. In the first decade of the new century, however, there has been no comparable passion for anti-Islamism. Politics have decayed to a stylistic flourish.

The source of this undemanding political attitudinizing antedates George W. Bush. In the two decades between the emergence of the New Left and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the political obsessions of literary intellectuals were oblivious to totalitarianism. They were narrowly fixed on what the intellectuals decried as American imperialism. (Since America was not legitimately an empire, they were obliged to modify the object of their indignation to cultural imperialism.) Thus the events of 1989–’90 brushed past them without effect. During the holiday from history that ended on September 11, 2001, they were holed up in their departments, systematically replacing Western civilization with multiculturalism.

But the generation of intellectuals who identified themselves as anti-fascist and anti-Communist were not cultural relativists. Indeed, they sharply differentiated themselves from those on the Left, like I. F. Stone and Lillian Hellman, who found a way quietly to abandon their anti-fascism after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” Hellman famously told the House Un-American Activities Committee in a 1952 letter.[2] But by then she had already cut her conscience many times over.

There are those, then, for whom politics is cause for urgency and those for whom it is an image on a T-shirt, a means of sympathizing with force in the name of justice. The problem is not that intellectuals are political, but that so many belong, not to an active political party, but to what Edith Wharton calls “the throng of fashion.” They imitate the language of real politics, because it is the way they trim their texts to suit the current fashions.
____________________

[1] Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Picador, 2005), p. 257.

[2] Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 353.

As long as it is insightful and disciplined

The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 4

by Benjamin Stein
Turmsegler

I started writing short stories and poems when I was ten. I didn’t just play around but was sure from the beginning that I wanted to become a professional writer—somehow, someday. What I needed in terms of technique came from reading adventures and from weekly teaching and consulting hours with a married couple of two poets that had befriended me. I was immersed in literature—poetry in particular—and when I saw at twelve my first poem published in a newspaper I was sure that I had found my way. (Sure enough, an illusion, but still.) I was eighteen when I finished my first novel and twenty-five when I published the second. By then I was deeply inflicted with the virus of the word. During all those years I had never been tired of writing or reading, and most of the time I was sure that I was contributing to the eternal. It was a great time.

Everything changed when I started working as a salaried editor. Writing for newspapers, weeklies, or monthlies is like writing for the recycle bin. Goodbye, eternity. I first stopped writing prose, then poems, and finally I even stopped reading. I got lost in the utilitarian business of text production.

Ten years, a honeymoon and two kids later, I decided to get back on track. And I was sure it had to be done in reverse order: start reading again, start writing with discipline again, try to find some verses worth surviving; and then—maybe—there would be another bigger adventure in prose some day.

So I started my weblog Turmsegler for two purposes. First, I wanted to force myself to write one publishable text per day. And second, I wanted to “remember and discover” (that’s the blog’s motto), wanted to immerse myself in literature again—as in a mikveh.

I did not care about other blogs. I was inspired by two books: Pound’s ABC of Reading and a collection of world poetry, edited by the German poet Johannes Bobrowski. Its title, My One Hundred Dearest Poems, set the course for the new blog. Why Bobrowski? Because he remembered poems that mattered (and not only for him). Why Pound? Because I wanted to show in my posts that writing at least can be true art. The name of the blog was taken from a poem by French poet René Char.

What I like in blogs is the fact of immediate publication and the possibility of correction of minor mistakes. This is very different from writing for printed magazines or—even more terrifying—novels. I don’t want to publish rubbish, so I have to remain disciplined. And one thing that never happens: no dreaming or ignorant editor messes up my text (as was done to me, and as I myself did to others). In publishing a book, there is only one single chance: printing mistakes, messed-up covers, you name it—that’s it, and can never be changed a matter of fact in today’s book market).

Blogging has not only brought back the pleasure in writing. It liberated me as a writer. In former times I was unable to write a line of proper prose without prior weeks of contemplation. Today I work as a business consultant, and I can write wherever I stand or go, no matter how noisy it is or how short on time I might be. Thanks to my blogging discipline over two years I was able to write a new 450-page novel during the nights, between two meetings, in the subway, on the bus, in eleven months. It will be published next January by C. H. Beck in Germany. My training as a journalist and editor combined with my new blogging discipline made the novel possible. Blogging has changed forever the way I write and plan for my writing.

Sometimes blogging is little but distracting. Ad hominem attacks are a problem. Trolls work my nerves. I have a strict rule to make me survive: Ignore any idiot out there. Readers must get their first comment approved. Later on they can comment in real-time. Troll comments are deleted within seconds, insults as well. I don’t tolerate heartless behavior in my salon.

I still blog out of enthusiasm for the authors and works I’m blogging about. Some bloggers may blog for getting big audiences, income by ads, fame. I don’t care. Whether blogging is (still) hip or not doesn’t matter to me as long as it is fun and insightful and helps to maintain my discipline in the daily writing routine. I have to keep the instrument playing. My next novel project is already on its way. And I’ll hold myself to the rule: One page per day in publishable quality, no less. From my blogging years I know I can, so everything else is solely a question of discipline. This experience alone is priceless.

Sticking to his last

Michael Gilleland, author of Laudator Temporis Acti, is surprised that anyone bothers to read his blog, despite its endless fascination, in the third part of The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, the symposium cohosted by Anecdotal Evidence and this Commonplace Blog.

Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 2

by Mark Athitakis
American Fiction Notes

What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?

Funny: The first thing that popped into my head after I read this question was “the society column.” That’s unfair and inaccurate and diminishes what blog bloggers do, but it probably came to mind because book blogs a) occasionally speak to a small, somewhat esoteric group that shares many of the same opinions and social graces and b) because they play a largely supplemental role in the media landscape, and even within the book-reviewing landscape.

In the days before blogging, I worked as a reporter and critic at an alternative weekly that had a couple of popular “items columns”—slots for stories that were brief, perhaps good for a laugh or food for thought, but didn’t rise to the level of a full-fledged news story or feature. Plenty of newspapers have, or had, similar columns, or have recast them as blogs—think of the “news and notes” sidebars in the sports section next to the official gamers, or the “reporter's notebook” pieces from whoever covered city hall or the statehouse. (My former employer, Washington City Paper, has transformed its news and notes column, City Desk, into a blog called City Desk—which in turn has fed the print version of the column.)

These columns are largely surplus information—interesting tidbits, but really only intended for the true aficionado of the particular subject. Book blogs often behave in a similar way. (Sorry, but I’ll be using “often” and “largely” and other self-insulating modifiers a lot in my responses. You’re asking questions about all book blogs, but that’s a big category, and they don’t all behave the same way.) Even ones that produce a lot of original content spend at least some time being responsive to stories and trends in the literary world that have been covered by the larger media outlets. If you’re dedicating yourself full-time to providing original literary content, you’re no longer running a book blog—you’re running an online literary magazine, which is a different creature.

Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?

Before I started my own book blog in January 2008, I read a lot of what I’d suppose you might call the usual suspects: The Elegant Variation, Maud Newton, the Millions, Blog of a Bookslut, the New York Times’ Paper Cuts. But in terms of them being inspirations and models, I largely looked at them as models for what not to do. Not because I disliked them, but because I figured that they had already claimed their particular patches of turf, forcing me to avoid their most common habits. (No knee-jerk whining about the contents of the New York Times Book Review, I told myself; no dutiful mentions of the death of a Syrian poet I’d never read and never heard of until the obit popped up in my RSS feed.)

As I blog more, I inevitably read more blogs—partly because I learn of the bloggers who are reading me—and I’ve seen book blogs roughly break down into two types. There are those that are concerned with books as a consumer good (ie., blogs about the publishing industry, or publishing trends), and those that are concerned with books as literature, or that discuss particular books, or actually engage in criticism of them. I read and respect both, but my ambitions lean toward the latter. I got into this racket because I want to become a better reader, not because I want to better understand the publishing biz. (I got burned out on covering pop music in part because I was spending too much time learning how the sausage got made.) Though I don’t mind being aware of what’s happening with e-books and the upcoming Dan Brown novel, I really don’t have the energy or expertise to speculate on “why it matters.”

But to answer your question directly: I have a ton of admiration for Sarah Weinman, who can successfully navigate both worlds and is a sharp journalist besides. Otherwise, I tend to gravitate to the blogs that are going to teach me something I don’t know, and are engaged in thoughtful readings about books—Blographia Literaria, Conversational Reading, and A Commonplace Blog. (If that sounds obsequious, all I can say is that I wouldn’t spend time writing lengthy answers to questions from a blogger I didn’t admire.) And I still have plenty of admiration for what Sarvas, Newton, et al do as well.

How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?

I don’t wind up reading a lot of book reviews on book blogs, mainly because I don’t wind up coming across too many of them. (In saying this, I’m making a distinction between Blog of a Bookslut and Bookslut proper, which includes reviews and interviews; and between Conversational Reading and its associated review site The Quarterly Conversation. For what it’s worth, I find the review sites interesting, and they often introduce me to books that aren’t getting covered otherwise, but they can be frustratingly erratic in terms of quality.) I think there’s a lot of thoughtful engagement with books on blogs—a lot of quick-hit riffing and expressions of enthusiasm, and I participate in some of that myself. That has its place—I wouldn’t do it if I think it didn’t—but it isn’t a replacement for the kind of considered reviewing that appears in newspapers, magazines, and the better-financed online publications. I still believe that, overall, more interesting writing about books is in the pages of Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books than in any one blog. But there’s writing about books on blogs that’s much more clever, engaged, and surprising than what you might find in a mediocre daily newspaper or most alternative weeklies. That’s why the print-versus-blog debate is frustrating and often silly; who “wins” depends entirely on the perspective from which you approach them.

Regardless, I think it’s true that blogs are filling in gaps that those mainstream publications won’t dedicate space to. I appreciate that a lot of book blogs concentrate on areas the more established publications ignore—romance, small-press books, works in translation, etc. My only complaint is that I could do with less of the keening on those sites about how the NYT or whoever isn’t dedicating enough space and attention to your particular enthusiasm. If you know you’re doing a good thing, bellyaching about how other people aren’t doing it either just makes you look unconfident.

Blogs are also much, much better at stoking conversations about books than print reviews, even the ones that appear on comment-enabled Web sites. To perhaps overgeneralize, book reviews are declarative statements; blog posts are questions. The former puts forth a line of argument; the latter invites others to help formulate lines of argument. Or at least the better blogs do that, leaving the door open for additional commentary. Both have their place, though—there’s something to be said for reading somebody who has produced a thoughtful interpretation on something, and it can be entertaining to read somebody trying to work it out as well.

How do you respond to this statement? “Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.”

I’d say it’s just as true as this statement: “Book reviewing is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.” If we define “hobby” as an avocation pursued more out of passion than out of a need for money, book reviewing is a hobby for the overwhelming majority of people who do it. I can only imagine what would happen to the membership of an organization like the National Book Critics Circle if it included only those who make a living reviewing books. I work a day job unrelated to the book world or book reviewing, so I can’t get too outraged at this supposedly provocative statement; I’m a hobbyist myself.

Others are welcome to judge if that means I’m therefore unfit to review books. But I think the question buried underneath here is more like, “Do you feel diminished when somebody says blogging is just a hobby?” Nah. I’ve gotten lots of edification out of blogging and even a little bit of work; I feel more engaged with books, and feel better equipped to write and talk about about them. I feel it’s improved how I’ve written about books, and pointed me to ones I otherwise wouldn’t have heard about. I certainly know more about the things I don’t know. When I started doing this, I nursed a slight concern that it would peg me as “just a blogger.” Perhaps that’s the case—after all, the New Yorker still hasn’t rung me up. But I don’t think it’s lessened me in the eyes of the publications I do write for, and I’ve met more smart people than I would have if I’d never started my blog.

How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?

One thing blogging does is remind you that you have an audience—people will read what you have to say, comment on it, and call you on your errors, flaws in logic, etc. That’s a great improvement from years back, when a book review in a paper may have had more authority than a blog, but you didn’t get much of a sense of what readers were thinking. So blogging keeps me on my toes—I write now being much more mindful of the fact that there will be people scrutinizing it with a mind for logical gaps, cliches, and just plain bad writing. I’ve worked as a reporter and editor, so I had a lot of that beaten into me anyhow, but it never hurts to have a little extra downward pressure.

What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.

Occasional viciousness is true of online conversation in general—I don’t think it’s limited to book blogs, or blogging in general. After all, in the early 90s we got Godwin’s Law: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” (It may speak to the level of our current national conversation about politics that Godwin’s Law has moved offline and into in-person conversations, where people apparently believe that putting brush mustaches on pictures of the president equates to thought and argument.) Something about online discussions just happen to spark this stuff—the stakes are low and the environment of one-upmanship is high.

Arguments happen; smart people can choose to engage or disengage as they see fit. Hopefully, those same smart people can detect when somebody is trying to launch a discussion (perhaps through “harsh disagreement”) or just pushing a finger in somebody’s chest. Ultimately, there are only two ways a conversation can go—either people can find some common ground and room for compromise, or they can keep barking about the points on which they disagree. Both of which are fine (though the latter seems silly after a while). It only gets annoying when things degrade into taking-my-toys-and-going-home behavior: removing somebody’s blog from a blogroll, unfollowing them from Twitter, huffy posts about how you shall never speak of [Blogger X] again. A good rule of thumb regarding arguments, both online and in everyday life, is to ask yourself, “Will this matter six months from now?” I’d suggest that more than 90 percent of the time it won’t.

Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?

No. At least, I don’t agree with the logic of the argument put forward by this “some.” Who said that the end goal of blogging is fame? And how might a book blogger become famous, anyhow? People magazine has a circulation of 3.7 million; the New York Review of Books has a circulation of only 130,000. Is the NYRB thus a failure? Conversations about books are esoteric in the larger world; within the Web world, we all might as well be in a cult.

I suspect that when somebody says that blogging had a “golden age,” the person means that there was a time (circa 2002) when it felt new and exciting, and the media wanted to do stories about it, and some people got a lot of attention really quickly (book deals! movie options!), and everybody got to have lively discussions and post pictures of puppies or argue about string theory, and it was a thrill because we all had a brand-new toy to play with and we knew who was reading us and we were finally, finally, getting some interesting e-mail. That moment has passed, so it’s easy for media folk to say blogging is old hat and move on to the new. But blogging remains a valid form, and Twitter is no replacement for it. (Twitter is more a supplemental form, I think—a supplement to a supplement.) What other online format besides blogging allows people to write at various lengths, distribute to a wide audience, and spark conversations? I suppose Facebook might qualify, but it’s a poor vehicle for lengthy, considered thought, and its system is designed to push your ideas only to your closest friends. If blogging is over, nobody’s created a suitable replacement for what blogging does.

(Aside: For the record, there are non-online formats that allow people to write at various lengths, distribute to a wide audience, and spark conversations. They’re called newspapers and magazines. Nobody’s invented a suitable real-world replacement for those, which is why I’m not in the hurry that some are to declare them dead.)

In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have “earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not,” because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers “to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better.” Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?

I’ll start by addressing the second question, which strikes me as presumptive—or, at least, doesn’t define its terms precisely. The Los Angeles Times’ book blog, Jacket Copy, is among the top 3,000 blogs around, according to Technorati; so is Whatever, a blog by science fiction author John Scalzi, who often discusses books and prompts plenty of lively discussion about them. The number one site on Technorati is run by an author, Arianna Huffington, who has provided a platform for dozens of authors to express their opinions. So who’s a “book blogger”? And what’s a “huge audience”? We are not starving for discussions of books online, and there are a few of those places that are attracting a sizable (perhaps even “huge”!) audience.

I imagine the second question is designed to prompt me to wring my hands about the matter addressed by the first question—that perhaps book bloggers are not being trustworthy enough, or entertaining enough, or reflect our collective consciousness enough, and therefore aren’t huge enough. To that, the only appropriate response I can think of is: Screw it. Even setting aside that all litbloggers, regardless of quality, are playing small-ball in an online space dominated by sex, politics, celebrity, and technology, building trust and regularly producing quality has never been a recipe for success. Newspapers, after all, have traded on their authority, quality, and ability to connect with readers for decades, and it hasn’t done a thing to help their rapidly diminishing circulation.

(Please indulge me a brief rant on this point. That same Malone article perpetuates the canard that newspapers are dying “because they violated readers’ trust that they would deliver timely, accurate and unbiased news.” Newspapers are dying because the advertising market collapsed and because in the past ten years people have been introduced to many more ways to receive information, all lobbying for the rapidly evaporating pool of advertising dollars that remain. Bias didn’t kill newspapers any more than poorly written reviews of Dan Brown novels killed newspaper book sections [though they certainly didn’t help]. “Newspapers are dying because they betrayed our trust!” is a lie that partisan types tell themselves when the New York Times doesn’t splash their hobby horse on A-1. I wish all the people who keep telling me that the papers are full of bias would follow through and cancel their subscriptions. Then I could get through the morning paper without reading letters to the editor about media bias.)

If the real question here is, “How can we create better book blogs, and how can we get more attention drawn to them?” I’m not sure that can be done in any organized fashion. I certainly wouldn’t want to be charged with trying to make it happen. Book bloggers already exist in a competitive environment for their audiences: To get attention, they have to do things that other blogs aren’t doing, find their points of differentiation and run with with them. Sometimes you can get attention by stuffing your blog with linkbait like a top-ten list or a passing mention of a celebrity. But ultimately a blog’s success is going to have to be defined by how often you provide interesting commentary about books, without gimmicks. The online advertising landscape is so screwy at the moment that it’ll be some time before book bloggers enjoy any real financial rewards for their efforts. I do believe that moment will arrive, and I’m still a firm believer in the notion that the good stuff finds its audience. But as far as “huge audiences” go, I’m reminded of Daniel Clowes’ comment that being praised as the greatest living comic artist is a little like being called the world’s best badminton player. No matter how good you are, there’s only going to be a limited pool of people who care.

Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?

Bloggers are always wise to speak out on what they’re passionate about. This was perhaps the hardest hurdle for old-school newspaper journalists to clear when it came to blogging—they’re trained not to write in the first person, or to register political opinions, and their initial stuffy attitude toward the first-person led to all those accusations that newspapers don’t get it when it comes to online commentary. Online readers want to know who they’re dealing with, and they want some sense that person blogging is somebody with a life and relationships and enthusiasms. But book bloggers who post about their politics are a little like political bloggers who post pictures of their cats—-it’s not illegal, I suppose, and it won’t make me remove you from my RSS feed, but it does often feel ungainly and irritating.

On a personal note, I imagine that part of my aversion to deep political readings about books has to do with the fact that I was an English major at the University of Chicago in the early 90s, during the height of the PC wars in academia. Back then, my efforts to be a dutiful student were unsettled by the squabbling among cultural studies theorists who would pre-dismiss any thought in my head as a tool of oppression, by virtue of the fact that I’m a white middle-class male. That squabbling started for some good reasons, I know, but it’s made me averse to divisive, overstated political readings of books ever since. (It also put me off going to the graduate school in the humanities, which I’m confident was a good thing; I imagine it’s no fun spending a whole career feeling weaponized.)

All that said, not all political commentaries on blogs are created equal. Posts on the order of, “We Interrupt This Litblog For a Very Special Announcement of My Thoughts about Health-Care Reform” won’t do much for me. But though I’m not much of a socialist, I like reading Scott McLemee’s writings from that perspective on his (too rarely updated) blog, Quick Study. I just want to be convinced that politics are relevant to the argument. As we know from various books on online communities (Infotopia by Cass Sunstein [lefty!] being one of the better ones), political commentaries online tend to resolve into echo chambers. If you feel like finding fans who will applaud you for sharing the same political leanings you have, go for it. If you’re hoping to convince people with different leanings to agree with you, you’ve assigned yourself a hopeless task.

Moral obligation to write well

What makes Philip Roth a great writer? No other writer I can name has accepted with such utter self-abnegating devotion to what I can only call, in a blatant allusion to John Erskine’s famous 1915 essay, the moral obligation to write well. This is, I believe, the sum and substance of what it means to respect the institution of literature.

Symposium

The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time

Newspaper book-review pages are going the way of the sestina and the villanelle. Is it utopian to hope that book bloggers, an unregulated bunch, can fill the cultural void? Skeptics claim blogs long ago lost their luster, back in the good old days, even though the word blog turned an impish ten years old just a few months ago.

Anecdotal Evidence and A Commonplace Blog asked a number of book bloggers to speculate about the past, present, and future of this youngest of literary genres. Their replies will be posted to Anecdotal Evidence and A Commonplace Blog over the next several days and (in most cases) cross-posted to the contributor’s own blog.

The symposiasts were asked nine questions to nudge them into reflection:

• What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?

• Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?

• How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?

• How do you respond to this statement?—Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.

• How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?

• What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?—the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.

• Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?

• In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have “earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not,” because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers “to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better.” Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?

• Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?

At the end of the symposium, Patrick Kurp and I will offer our own reflections on the subject, summarizing, synthesizing, and perhaps even drawing up a manifesto for bloggers–think of it as a sestina or maybe a villanelle—who wish to join us in storming the gates of literary culture.

We hope our readers will join the conversation by adding their comments, criticisms, gripes, insults, congratulations, proposals, propositions, rejections, and giggles. And we hope you look forward as much as we do to reading and discussing our symposiasts’ ideas on The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time. The first contribution, from Walter Aske of Elberry’s Ghost is posted at Anecdotal Evidence. Look for it there.

From eternity to here

All this week, the Amateur Reader has been examining historical mysteries. Yesterday he made me a lifelong fan by cursing The Lemur by John Banville—one of the most overrated writers, especially in his own mind—as a “completely hollow novel.” Not that I was intending on reading it anyway.

Patrick Kurp advances the name of Joseph Mitchell for inclusion in the Library of America, since (along with A. J. Liebling) he “covered the waterfront and the rest of New York like nobody else.” And since Liebling has now been “certified as Literature by inclusion in the Library of America.”

To celebrate Forgotten Book Friday, Tim Davis wholeheartedly recommends Javier Sierra’s Secret Supper, which is about a fifteenth-century plot to subvert the Church of Rome.

Nige describes Keats and Chekhov as Menschen. Does the German word have the same connotation as the Yiddish mentshn? At all events, Nige says that “Chekhov is the only great writer who can unequivocally be called a good man.” What about James, who became a British subject to demonstrate solidarity with the United Kingdom during the Great War?

Kate Sutherland reports from Sweden, where she is “dashing about looking for English translations of Swedish crime writers whose books are difficult to come by in North America.”

In the Nation, James Longenbach praises Wallace Stevens’s “music of austerity,” and shows how it influenced later American poets.

Miriam Burstein gets deliciously lost in what she calls the “loops” of Zachary Mason’s novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which pretends to be a collection of fragments by the Homerids (the poetic descendants of Homer, who survived until the fourth century BCE), plus a “faux-scholarly” introduction to the false anthology. She makes it sound like a lot of fun.

Joseph Epstein decides that the “truth quotient” of Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism is “damnably high,” even after allowing for his “ripping tirades” and “penchant for amusing over-statement.”

A day after I reviewed it, Yvonne Zipp locates That Old Cape Magic in the Russo canon, describing Jack Griffin as a “less-accident-prone version of Hank Deveraux Jr.” (Straight Man) and concluding that Russo’s “wry compassion” ought to be enough to “carry fans past some of Griffin’s navel-gazing.”

Colleen Mondor seeks out Binnie Kirshenbaum’s Hester Among the Ruins, which blew her mind. The book’s idea, she explains, is “to look at the German generation who grew up in the shadow of WWII—knowing generally what happened, but not wanting to ask their families specifically what they did.” The result is “raw and sexy,” she concludes.

The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association has announced the nominees for its 2009 awards. In the fiction category the contenders are: Ron Carlson’s Signal, Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, and T. C. Boyle’s Women.

Stephen Romei asks whether universities should provide a moral education. Are you kidding? Me? My colleagues?

Foe of persistent obscurity

Today is the one hundred and seventeenth birthday of the American idealist philosopher Brand Blanshard, author of the slim but indispensable On Philosophical Style (1954). His thesis in this seventy-page essay (originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Manchester) is that, although philosophy is a specialized intellectual activity, it examines questions which are of vital concern to everyone, and ought therefore to be written in language exacting enough for professional philosophers and yet accessible to the educated laity. When a man’s thought is incomprehensible, Blanshard held, there is something deeply wrong with it—or with the man.

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, offers a witty apothegm from the book: “Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.”

He publishes the sentence under the title What Blanshard might have said to Derrida.

Update: Patrick Kurp also wrote about Blanshard’s On Philosophicl Style early in his blogging career.