Chekhov’s Mistess

100 Million Blogs, Which Book About Them are You Going to Read?

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.

comments

Carolyn Kellogg’s opening “explanation” for why someone would be interested in the book makes no sense to me.

I’m not sure whether she was trying to score culture-points by mentioning Bayreuth’s annual Ring Cycle performance, but it’s still not clear to me at all what she’s saying in terms of the comparison to blog surfing.

You seem to interpret it as making a quantitative comparison (the length of the Cycle’s four parts when performed together), whereas for me it seems she’s making a qualitative comparison. And what the hell does “timely as fine wine” really mean in this context?

Am I losing my mind?

    – Matt Cahill (02/13  at  12:48 PM)

you might be if you have a blog - anyway, Carolyn doesn’t need me to defend her (just so you know, she’s a friend) but I think she was trying to draw a polar opposite and say something to the effect that if you don’t know about blogs your living in a some sort of antiquated world - something like that.

    – bud Parr (02/13  at  08:08 PM)

I have thought a lot about blogging and being snarky. I tried it a few times on my blog, Ghost Word, and it definitely drew a reaction. But then those off the wall snide comments stay forever on the Internet, evidence of a person’s worst self. Yet clever writing does seem to make the difference in a blog’s popularity. Hence Gawker and the like.

I waver between doing thoughtful posts and gossipy posts about the book world and authors, always with an eye to traffic. After three years of blogging, I still can’t decide if readers want real content or snappy bits.

However, this kind of writing does not lend itself to longevity. I can see why all these blogging books feel out of date by the time they arrive in print.

    – Frances Dinkelspiel (02/14  at  12:11 PM)

Matt Cahill: You have lost your mind.  Find your four lobes and read the essay again.  I’m sure you’ll find thinking easier once your synapses have recoupled.

The point, however, is this: why the hell should the medium matter?  If one reads “Ulysses” in a bathroom stall, is it any less great?  Writing should be judged by the words.  And bloggers, by contrast, need to start taking themselves more seriously.  This morning, I observed four litblogs that had misspelled “Coen brothers.” This is amateurish in the worst sense.  As ignoble a commonplace error as misspelling Dick Cheney.  I was mocked at Bookninja for pointing out this error.  But they can go fuck themselves.  Because, quite frankly, folks, BLOGS ARE IT.  And may, very soon, be the ONLY place to find books coverage.  So if we don’t up our game, then cultural journalism as a whole suffers.

Today, 7% of the New York Times journalists were laid off.  There were also Sam Zell’s mass head rolling days before.  Now if these two venerable institutions are hurting, then that seems to me that the future is looking quite digital.  We have an obligation now to fill in that gap with good writing and support it wherever possible.  Pure and simple. 

Let’s stop with the distinctions.  The token celebrations of blog writing.  And let’s simply ENCOURAGE good writing.  Particularly good writing from the misfits and the misunderstood, who are often cast to the sidelines when the laurels are unfurled.

    – ed (02/14  at  03:23 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: February 12, 2008
• Filed Under:
  Litbloggers & Blog Floggers

• Comments:4
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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