Chekhov's Mistress
What is All This Unseemly Hullabaloo?
[In honor of Mark Sarvas, We’re going to use We here today.]
Our day began with yet more rain, a grumpy toddler and wondering from where our next client was going to come. Then, while checking out a few blogs in the morning, things began to heat up…
The short of it is this, if you don’t know the players: Mark Sarvas is a writer who has a very popular litblog. He’s interviewed authors, he’s given other writers opportunities to promote their books and he’s written reviews and commentary on literary events. He’s also undertaken, with others, to form the Litblog Co-op to promote underexposed books. We think this is all valuable stuff and goes beyond what he – and others like him – are given credit for.
We met him last June; he’s quite a personality, he is who he is, as they say, and he seems to me to be a good guy and one full of opinions – that’s why his site is so popular (you don’t see the Guardian or Times knocking on this blog’s door).
The reason we say all these things about Mark is that maybe you’ve somehow found your way here after reading Steve Almond’s article on Salon.com‘s Website. We read the article. It was funny, but our reaction is that Salon is dipping pretty low, mostly because the article was not news or an essay on anything thoughtful having to do with books; it was a personal shot from a guy who, perhaps rightly, has a smoldering anger at Mark for comments about him on Mark’s blog. We’ve not noticed any of his mention of Almond before, but nonetheless, a blog is a personal forum and Salon is, supposedly, not.
So, you could chock-up our weighing in on the matter as one of clubby-blog defend our friends thing, but it’s truly not. We weren’t even going to write anything until we saw Mark’s comments (scroll down) and the comments of others at his site (some) who seem to be making judgement based on the article alone or without any serious perusal of his or any other litblog.
As usual, Ed Champion says it all and with passion, so we thinks we’z just leave it at that and add that Salon enticed us with a subscription of something like $3 last year and more often than not we wonder if it’s worth even that. Almond’s article doesn’t belong anywhere claiming to be journalistic, but it is becoming clear that under Laura Miller’s editorial control (we’ve only read the book section and have written about our ongoing disappointment in the past) Salon is pandering to gossip-worshippers and little more.
We thank you.
comments
While I am also not a fan of many of Miller’s editorial choices at Salon, I did enjoy the opening up of the world of the literary blog, which I have been largely unaware of. I do feel bad though that many of the blogs I have encountered, that have been linked to the article, are as bad as Almond suggests. Perhaps the bloggers could do themselves a favor and actually feature meaningful literary criticism and discussion. Maybe then the rush of interest from Almond’s article could be sustained.
– Don (10/17 at 10:20 AM)
“Perhaps the bloggers could do themselves a favor and actually feature meaningful literary criticism and discussion.”
You are right, Don, that at first glance it would not appear there’s much going on here (the litblog world) that’s meaningful, but I would assert that it’s informality sometimes obscures the underlying discussion - If you sat with a group of friends discussing books, I imagine that you would have to sift through a lot of chit-chat to get the discussion. It’s there, but to glean anything from it, you have to read at least on a fairly regular basis and also sift through the sites that are to your liking.
It’s both a good and bad characteristic to be that way, it’s informality opens the door to forms of discussion that just don’t exist on this scale otherwise and that very same informality gives it a patina of chitchattery that doesn’t look very impressive to the passing reader.
Stay tuned, though, as I will be soon launching a site that will rectify, to some degree, that very issue.
Bud
p.s. Thanks for your comment.
– Bud (10/17 at 04:04 PM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: October 13, 2005
- Filed Under:
Litbloggers & Blog Floggers
- Comments:2
- Links to this Post: Technorati
