Chekhov’s Mistess

Jury duty today. I am an important part of the system. I must be happy about that. Why is there always one person (within earshot) in the jury room who insists on collaring the person next to them and talking about themselves incessantly? “I’m really artistic, but I don’t do starving well” Ugh…

Bloggers are often criticized for doing little more than linking to articles in the mainstream media so it’s notable that the best book about blogs yet published is nothing more than a collection of blog posts reprinted on old fashioned paper. Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web is an anthology of blog posts assembed by Sarah Boxer, the New York Times’ first Web critic, who discovers, according to her recent article “Blogs” in the New York Review of Books (of all places), that choosing a few good blogs is a daunting task:

“With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It’s not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It’s that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references— doesn’t sit happily in a book. Yes, I’m talking about bloggy writing itself.”¹

Actually, I do know how difficult it is, but for different reasons. A few years ago I put together an anthology of posts by MetaxuCafé members, but found as I went down the path that the writing I assembled – assemblage to my mind is something altogether different than editing – did not stand up for a book. I realized that my purpose of introducing outsiders to blogs through showing them a collection of posts would be frustrated by highlighting but one aspect of what makes blogging so different and interesting. To attempt to print blog posts in book form is to transcribe every other word of a conversation.

So Ultimate Blogs is something of an artifact and leaves us with more questions than answers. Is it a guide to the best “bloggy” writing? An introduction? Is someone who needs to read a collection of blog posts in print ever going to read them online? Should it have been published at all, or, said differently, could it not have been a pamphlet with links and descriptions instead of a 343 page book?

Blogger Carolyn Kellogg answers some of these questions in the LA Times where she says “I’m not sure to whom – perhaps those who choose to go to Bayreuth for the Ring Cycle rather than surf the Web or people who simply haven’t noticed that they are reading blogs already – but for them, this introduction of blog masterworks is as timely as fine wine.”

Carolyn implies, by comparing the 15 hours of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” operas to the fairly frenetic pace of blog reading, that the spectral difference between the two are incompatible. She may be right: bloggers have also been criticized, quaintly, for not writing 5,000 word posts. Her observation might imply an age difference too since it’s well known that not only have young people stopped reading, but they also don’t listen to classical music, because, I suppose, they’re too busy twittering. But really what I think she’s getting at is that the twain shall not meet, and that observation seems more true every day. We are still left with the question of why this book was published.

Let’s also ask why in particular would Ms. Boxer publish a book ostensibly championing something she seems to have a distaste for. Following the line of her NY Review of Books article (mentioned above), it’s difficult to find any enthusiasm for blogs:

“One of the surest ways to hoist your blog to the top of the charts is to bring down a big-time politician or journalist…”

“Sex, of course, can also give your blog a lift…”

“For many bloggers infamy is better than no kind of famy at all…”

“Of course I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that bloggers have fouler mouths, tougher hides, and cooler thesauruses than most of the people I’ve read in print… “

Boxer concludes her bitchy article with a final attack:

“…It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, ‘Dude, the ball.’

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ;-)”

Curious, no? You might infer from her bipolar hostile-yet-championing of blogs that she seeks to make a point other than what “Masterworks” implies. Hmmm. Similarly, a book published about book blogs last year, The Bookaholics’ Guide to Book Blogs: The New Literary Force was as gossipy and unthoughtful as the medium it sought to elucidate is accused.

Then why would I say that Ultimate Blogs is the best book on blogging yet? Well, to start with, I lied (we do that sort of thing down here). I don’t read that many books on blogs (indeed, I haven’t read all of Boxer’s, preferring to read the blogs themselves) so I could never say what is best, and of those I have read, David Kline and Dan Burstein’s Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture is the most thoughtful and interesting; one of the few that chronicles this time with enough variety of opinion and information as to be of lasting value.

If you were tempted to buy Boxer’s book, I’d suggest instead you go to Carolyn’s blog post about it and follow the links there to just read the blogs from the book as they are, links and warts all. Among them you will find mi amiga Lizzie Skurnick’s Old Hag, a curious (or telling) representative of the blogoshphere. Lizzie’s blog is distinctive for her voice, but the blog is no longer very active.

Even to attempt to read “the best” blogs of these millions would still be to miss a big point of blogging (and the reason I never try to pinpoint the best to any critic). “Bloggy” writing is one to one, personal and specific to the interests of a writer and a reader even if there are many of each; it is an entirely subjective matter. Silly superlatives such as best and ultimate (as intellectually dishonest as they are anyway) should be the first words to be chucked when thinking of blogs. But now I’m beginning one of those blog-flogger rants, so I’ll stop.

In short, if you want to know more about blogs, don’t waste your $10.95, look ‘em up on Wikipedia. (N.B. Litblog), or dare, dear journalist looking for a meal ticket, start a blog, read them!

¹ For what it’s worth, links on blogs are nothing like footnotes. Footnotes are like footnotes.

Sounds like I may be the only person in the litblogosphere that Frank Wilson didn’t invite to write for the Inquirer – hmmm – but I will miss his blog, BooksInq., which is closing along with his long career at the newspaper. He and his blog were an absolute positive influence on our corner of the world. I’m betting that Mr. Wilson has a lot to say about books and maybe a bit about philosophy or fly fishing or something and will be hosting a lively blog under his own auspices sometime in the future.

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic’s Daily Dish linked to my post on blogs and criticism on Sunday and in five years of blogging I’ve not seen a traffic spike like that, even from being one of the few people linked to from Miss Snark, but of course as soon as the post slipped off the page, the traffic came to a halt – do you see a pattern emerging? I’m like the towneys in Radiator Springs: “Wait, Come Back! We’ll be here!” Still it was nice to be agreed with by a popular kid, only I wish some of the comments here on the site would have come from an outside skeptic.

I went to the AWP writer’s conference last week. A friend told me I would enjoy it and she was right. It was as though all the people I seek out at BookExpo were concentrated in one room (well three) together. But, surprisingly, there were few bloggers. At least any that I knew. I was only there for a few hours on Thursday and I did get to say hello to the amazing Dan Wickett, but I would have thought it would be old home week for the blogging cabal. Maybe I should have gone to the parties. Alas! Flask is a butterless man.

Otherwise, AWP was fun. I’ve been to a lot of conventions and most of them are sickening to one degree or another, but there was a certain harmony of purpose at AWP and despite one table of dour interns (from a publisher we know) everyone was pretty enthusiastic about what they were doing. I heard the convention hall was packed on Saturday, though not enough I suppose for Apple to make an e-reader for them.

Expect the brief posts to continue for a while yet as I’m nearly back on my feet from being bowled over by a couple of peanuts.

“A healthy literary culture is one where books can be publicly discussed in a serious and informed way. I don’t think the blogosphere comes close to providing such a space at present, largely because it is completely unregulated, but also because blogs are so bitty. What you get is little snippets of opinion and gossip—the virtual equivalent of a conversation in a pub. That is a valuable thing, of course. But sustained critical evaluation of books is different—and to my mind it is even more valuable.”

- William Skidelsky, in Prospect Magazine

Right and Wrong. Blogs do occupy the space of a pub and they do indeed spurt opinions and sometimes gossip all day – Isn’t that how people get along at a pub? Regulation comes in the form of oblivion; that is to say, from below instead of above. No editors, but if you don’t write well enough you won’t sustain an audience and will disappear (a great number of the oft quoted millions of blogs out there don’t actually exist for very long). Some of the blogs that become successful do so because there is and always will be a larger audience for wittily quick opinions over thoughtful discussion, but below the surface there are many fanatically informed and serious writers who devote their energies for little reward other than the potential for an audience that can’t be found in a pub (or I should say in a starbucks ) or via mainstream publications. However small they are, these writers have a readership most likely matching or exceeding what they might enjoy in a well-regarded journal with one difference being that the audience is theirs alone.

To amend your sentence: A healthy literary culture is one where [not just the books with the biggest marketing budget or buzz SHOULD] be publicly discussed. This, I believe is one of the greatest assets of the literary blogoshphere. It is here where translation is not a dirty word. It is here where the publicity schedule means little. It is here where literary authors from independent presses get equal or better attention than whatever hotty the New York Times is billowing about this week to accommodate the tastes of myriad general readers. This is where being bitty becomes an asset. It’s specific, it’s personal, it’s opinionated. Those traits aren’t mutually exclusive with being critical; in fact they are the very assets that gives criticism life and probably why so many professional writers are finding themselves writing online, inviting comments from their readers, discovering others who happen to share their interests, no matter how specific.

I watched in horror last year as a group of critics assembled by the Hudson Review to discuss “The Form and Function of Arts Criticism in Our Changing Cultural Landscape” demonstrated precisely why they are becoming irrelevant. Snobbishness and insularity are, it would seem from the behavior of these eminences, the true characteristics of a critic. I’ve also watched the unfolding debate over poetry (difficult poetry vs poetry for the people sort of thing) in the pages of Poetry and other journals where the exchanges were little more than embarrassingly tendentious and personal attacks, which, in and of themselves are truly a destructive force behind our critical ennui. Where shall wisdom be found? Probably not where we used to look.

So be skeptical about blogs. So am I. But don’t sit them out, stop paying attention to the “kerfuffles” and weed them out to find what’s serious. The verve and intellect to be found in the literary world online is there if you look for it and as a matter of fact it’s intimidatingly abundant.

Friends have often told me “You should have a bookstore, Bud.” But the truth is if I had a bookstore of my own I’d go out of business within a month. Example: Customer walks in and asks for a copy of Nanny Diaries to which I reply, looking over my reading glasses, “I’m sorry, we don’t carry that title. May I interest you in, perhaps… War & Peace? You know, we have two new translations and I’m happy to discuss which you might find more appealing [strains of Bach’s B minor Mass in the background].”

“Uh, no thanks.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”


But there are people who are serious about bookselling, to the point of putting together a well-thought business plan for their potential store. And, just as important, there are people out there with money willing to fund such a plan based on its merits, even to the point of overcoming their pre-conceived notion of how disastrous it might be to open a bookstore in the age of Amazon and high rents. Congratulations, Jessica! She won the Brooklyn Business Library PowerUp! Business Plan Competition to the tune of $15,000 for her business plan to open a bookstore in Brooklyn. Read about it at her blog, The Written Nerd.

I have a rich but limited sphere of things that get me excited: Coffee is one of them. Coffee speaks to my purist heart as I think about a bean’s life from mountain to cup, the right roast, perfect grind, accurate water temperature. Every cup (or pot) may be different. Process is everything…except! the right tools. Usually we think of equipment only in terms of expensive espresso makers (mine, a Francis Francis model causes me much anxiety) leaving most people content to make their coffee in a drip or Melitta, or if you think of yourself as an aficionado, a French Press (I use a Chemex and I recommend you do too).

Enter the siphon coffee bar, a machine the New York Times says cost $20,000 (all-in, I don’t think the machine itself) and is powered by the precisely controlled heat of halogen lights; the only one like it in the whole U.S. of A. Okay, so I’m not going to go out and buy one of these and by the sounds of the article you have to earn the right to own one anyway. But besides the siphon’s beauty (see photo above or slideshow at the Times), what I love is the process:

“The goal is to create a deep whirlpool in no more than four turns without touching the glass. Posture is important. So is timing: siphon coffee has a brewing cycle of 45 to 90 seconds.

‘The whirlpool, it messes with your mind,’ said Mr. Freeman, the owner of the Blue Bottle. ‘There’s no way to rush it.’

Mr. Freeman said he practiced stirring plain water for months to develop muscle memory before he brewed his first cup of siphon coffee. Even now he starts every day with a five-minute warm-up. The evidence of good technique is in the sediment: the grounds should form a tight dome dotted with small bubbles, the sign of proper extraction.”

This is the sort of thing – as absurd as it might sound to some – that forces you to slow down and pay attention to details – every little detail:

“‘It’s kaleidoscopic,’ Mr. Freeman said. ‘It’s forcing you to pay attention to every sip, because the next one is going to be different. I feel like when we serve it we’ll have to ask people to just pour it in their cup and smell it for the first minute or so.’”

The gastronomic version of a poem, wouldn’t you say?

I’ve finally given in and picked up Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals so that I can probably read his In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manfisto when it comes out in paperback. My resistance, thin as it was, came only from the idea that with non-fiction I want my beliefs challenged not merely affirmed and I figured OD would fall into the latter camp. Ah, but it’s just too fun to read about what a sorry state we’re in – what was it that Lawrence said in Lawrence of Arabia, “A fat people in a fat land” (emphasis his, verbally). So far I’ve read how we Americans are basically made of corn because it permeates all of our foodstuff in ways you would never imagine:

“It does take some imagination to recognize the ear of corn in the Coke bottle or the Big Mac. At the same time, the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five thousand different items or SKUs (stock keeping units) in the supermarket – seventeen thousand new ones every year – represent genuine variety rather than so many clever re-arrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.”

It was Omnivore’s Dilemma that sent me to Pollan’s Website. I knew he had written the evocatively titled Botany of Desire (I do admire writers who make an industry of themselves on a topic, seriously), but I’d never heard of A Place of My Own, which sounds like a Waldenesque story about Pollan building his own structure to write in. Wow – it looks amazing to me; a castle, no? So small, yet so so complete. There are a couple more photos on the Website.

So if you happened to be thinking about Martin Luther King day and how far we’ve Not come since his time, maybe you’ll want to be moved by Mavis Staples singing “We Shall Not be Moved” on her album We’ll never turn back. When Mavis sings she sings directly to you and she evokes the era in a way that makes you feel like you’re sitting on a hot summer southern porch (even if you’re stuck on the BQE in January), particularly in “My Own Eyes” when she does just that.

Or, marginally related (at the least because the always excellent Ry Cooder also produced Staple’s album), you might like Ry Cooder’s story-telling album, My Name is Buddy, which is reminiscent of early labor movements or “dust bowl songs” as they’re described. I listened to both of these albums all summer long (my Union Summer, I suppose) and more recently,

the Oxford American Magazine music issue CD, which has Reverend Charlie Jackson’s “Morning Train”, Teddy Grace’s “Hey Lawdy Papa” and the one I keep listening to, Amy LaVere’s “Killing Him.” So, through a loose connection of thoughts about civil rights, the South and story telling

Greg, I mailed your copy of Cortázar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille. Sorry it took so long but it seems like everything is slipping through the cracks these days.

So I’ve started Hopscotch again for the third time. I get farther each time (probably three hundred pages now all total) and am now just as intrigued by my interest and inability to get through it as I am with the book. It seems like the key is rhythm, which owing to competent translation, gives the book a force of presence that I love. It’s present right here in the opening pages:

How was I to have suspected that what seemed to be a pack of lies was all true, a Figari with sunset violets, with livid faces, with hunger and blows in the corners. I came to believe you later on, later on there was reason to, there was Madame Léonie, who looked at my hand which had gone to bed with your breasts, and she practically repeated your exact words: “She is suffering somewhere. She has always suffered. She is very gay, she adores yellow, her bird is the blackbird, her time is night, her bridge is the Pont des Arts.” (A must-colored péniche, Maga, and I wonder why we didn’t sail off on it while there was still time.)

I’ve been reading it in “hopscotch” manner, flipping to the back with each chapter. That might be how I lose focus, I’m not sure, but I enjoy it that way. I think those “expendable” pieces in the back take on more meaning when interjected between chapters rather than read linearly, so I’m reluctant to abandon that way even if it means never actually finishing. Besides, a part of me thinks I might never read them unless they mingle with the rest of the book.

I’m also drawn to it because this new book sits before me – the title alone begs me to read it – but I think I would feel it would be an incomplete reading if I didn’t finish Hopscotch first (that can’t be entirely true because I never finished Gravity’s Rainbow and my mind let me read Against the Day just fine). I read these days in hopscotch manner anyway, catching a few minutes when I can, on a train, waiting in line, the occasional coffee shop or very late at night when the kids are asleep and I just can’t stand working any more. The book deserves more than that, but there’s no waiting.

So I haven’t forgotten that I invited you to discuss Hopscotch here on the blog and I’d still like to do that and maybe even extend that to Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. Let me know what you think.

Best,
Bud

This is what happens when you get four hours of sleep a night. The best thing you can come up with to write is a list. And a list of literary pet peeves no less (I’ll save the non-literary ones for elsewhere because the list is potentially huge and mostly has to do with NYC government and people driving cars). Let me just get this out of my system and I’ll go back to what I was doing.

1. Novelists who can’t think of something more creative than to have novelists as characters.

1. Poets who can’t come up with a better title for their books than “Poems.”

1. People who spell Finnegans Wake with an apostrophe.

1. Critics who are afraid of Ardor

1. Literary Journals that charge $14 per issue and expect people to read them all.

1. Any periodical that doesn’t already post all of its content online.

1. Readers who treat books as goals to be added up

1. cheeky bios

1. Those ghastly ghostly Marion Ettlinger author portraits.

1. Publishing people who use the word “best” and other silly superlatives to describe things they know are not.

1. Lists, of course (particularly bitchy ones) and any attempt to distill literature into anything that can be rated or voted upon.

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