Tag Archives: Blogging

The Blog Apology: A Genre

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Having been away from this blog for awhile, I am struck by my vaguely perceived need to offer explanations, as if I needed excuses for beginning again or for stopping in the first place.  And it was also evident to me that I found this impulse, unresisted, littering blogs across the web.  The blog of my friend and former student, Carmen McCain, is rife with repeated apologies for her inconsistent blogging.  Another friend and former student, Liz Laribee, also seems to apologize for not blogging about as often as she does blog.  I know that in the past when I’ve gone on unexplained hiatus, I’ve begun again with an apology.  Just for grins I did a quick Google search for “apologize for not blogging more” and got 16,600 hits for that exact combination.  Apparently we are legion and we are a sorry lot.

There seem to be several versions of this particular literary genre.  In one variety the blogger abjectly denounces herself for moral turpitude, admitting to various venal weaknesses like preferring Facebook or watching television rather than keeping to the rough moral discipline of the keyboard.  Others beg busyness, or grovel repentantly in admitting they were only sick and surely could have opened up the lap top.  Some seek remission of their sins by requesting the reader’s empathy, including long and engrossing lists of ills and misfortunes that make the travails of the biblical Job look like a trip to the gym with a particularly rigorous drill instructor.  My particular favorite is the blogger who apologizes but lets the reader know that he was really up to much more important or much more interesting things and that we are lucky he is back at all.  In some instances it seems that people spend a good deal of their blogging time ruminating about how they should be blogging more, much as I talk about how little time I have for exercise while I am sitting on my couch in the evening.

Many such blog posts recognize that they are enacting an internet cliche by apologizing, but do so anyway.  I’m intrigued.  What does this apology signify about blogging as a form of writing, about the kind of audience the author imagines, about the relationship with that audience.  Novelists do not apologize for the years or decades between novels, nor for that matter do essayists, short story writers, or poets.  It seems more important to have something worth saying than to say something with great regularity. While such writers may flog themselves for not writing, they do so privately or to their editors and fellow writers–readers be damned. Newspaper columnists will announce their absence for a sabbatical, without apology I might add, but mostly they go on vacation without comment other than the dry, italicized editorial note that “[Insert opinionated name here] will return in September after his vacation to the Bahamas where he is working on a book and enjoying his family.”

Only bloggers bother to apologize for not writing.

As if their readers really cared.

I suspect this has something to do with the illusion of intimacy that is made possible by interactivity.  I have come to “know” a number of people through my blog or through twitter and Facebook, and since this electronic transmission is the sum total of our human experience together it is a little bit akin to having kept up a loose friendship by phone and then having not phoned for a good long time.  On the other hand, I suspect too that it has something to do with the fact that bloggers suffer from the anxiety of silence.  The writer who publishes in the New York Times knows that her work will have readers.  The writer for the Podunk Times knows they had at least one reader who thought their work was worthwhile since an editor decided to publish it.

The blogger, on the other hand, flings words into space like dust.

The apology has the appearance of a statement intended to right a wrong I the blogger have done to you the reader by not blessing you with my words and wisdom these last two some odd months and days.

In fact, the apology is a bloggers plea. Hear me now.  Confirm my existence as a writer of some sort or another by clicking on my blog anew.  While I may truly have ignored you if I know you or, more likely, while I may truly have no idea on earth who you are, I need you nonetheless.  To drive up my blog stats.  To share me on Facebook.  To “like” my post and so like me.  To “follow” my blog to the ends of the earth even when there is nothing there to follow. Though I am bloggus absconditus, wait for me like the ancients waited for the gods.  Make me matter.

And so I am back.  For today, with no promise for tomorrow.  Without apology.

Blogging as textual meditation: Joyce Carol Oates and The Paris Review

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One of the surprise pleasures afforded by Twitter has been following The Paris Review (@parisreview) and getting tweets linking me to their archives of author interviews.  I know I could just go to the website, but it feels like a daily act of grace to run across the latest in my twitter feed, as if these writers are finding me in the ether rather than me searching for them dutifully.

(In my heart of hearts I am probably still a Calvinist;  the serendipity of these lesser gods finding me is so much better than the tedious duty of seeking them out).

This evening over dinner I read the latest, a 1978 interview with Joyce Carol Oates, a real gem.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write? Or can you get to work whatever your state of mind? Is your mood reflected in what you write? How do you describe that perfect state in which you can write from early morning into the afternoon?

OATES

One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I’ve found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so. Joyce said of the underlying structure of Ulysses—the Odyssean parallel and parody—that he really didn’t care whether it was plausible so long as it served as a bridge to get his “soldiers” across. Once they were across, what does it matter if the bridge collapses? One might say the same thing about the use of one’s self as a means for the writing to get written. Once the soldiers are across the stream . . .

via Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 72, Joyce Carol Oates.

Oates doesn’t blog, I think, and I wouldn’t dare to hold my daily textural gurgitations up next to Oates’s stupendous artistic outpouring.  On the other hand, I resonated with this, thinking about what writing does for me at the end of the day.  I’ve had colleagues ask me how I have the time to write every day, my sometimes longish diatribes about this or that subject that has caught my attention.  Secretly my answer is “How could I not?”

Ok, I know that for a long time this blog lay fallow, but I have repented of that and returned to my better self. Mostly (tonight is an exception), I do my blog late, after 10:00–late for someone over 50–like a devotion.  I just pick up something I’ve read that day, like Joyce Carol Oates, and do what English majors are trained to do:  find a connection.  Often I’m exhausted and cranky from the day–being an administrator is no piece of cake,( but then, neither is being alive so what do I have to complain about).  Mostly I write as if I were talking to someone about the connections that I saw, the problems that it raised (or, more rarely, solved).

It doesn’t take that long–a half hour to an hour, and mostly I’ve given up television entirely.  I tell people I seem to think in paragraphs–sometimes very bad paragraphs, but paragraphs nevertheless–and years of piano lessons have left me a quick typist.  Sometimes I write to figure out what I think, sometimes to figure out whether what I think matters, sometimes to resolve a conundrum I have yet to figure out at work or at home, sometimes to make an impression (I am not above vanity).

But always I write because the day and my self disappears.  As Oates says above,  the activity of writing changes everything, or at least appears to  do so. Among the everything that it changes is me.  I am most myself when I lose the day and myself in words.

Yesterday on Facebook I cited Paul Fussell saying  “If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.”

Well, though I work at a pacifist school and it is incorrect to say so, that seems about right.

Conrad’s Typhoon: or, An Ode to My iPad

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Joseph Conrad

Typhoon by Conrad, Joseph

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Conrad’s Typhoon: or, An Ode to My iPad

I think one reason I don’t write and publish more than I do is because I am far too slow on the trigger. The ubiquity of blogging hasn’t helped this any since I usually find that someone else much more intelligent and articulate than I has blogged on what I think of as MY SUBJECT in a manner far more perspicacious, acute and interesting than I could manage. Take Charles Simic’s meditation on boredom during the recent power outages along the east coast, blogged over at the NYRB. I had several of those, Yes-that-is-exactly-what-was-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue moments reading lines like these:

“We sit with our heads bowed as if trying to summon spirits, while in truth struggling to see what’s on our dinner plates. Being temporarily unable to use the technology we’ve grown dependent on to inform ourselves about the rest of the world, communicate with others, and pass the time, is a reminder of our alarming dependence on them.”

Of course, these words weren’t actually on the tip of my tongue, but by imagining that the poet is only telling us what we have always known but could not say so well, we are able to give ourselves credit for a lot of intelligence and imagination that we don’t actually possess. Simic goes on to talk about the notable demise of reading and other delights like radio in the fact of our ubiquitous gadgets. Now, of course, reading books on a rainy afternoon or listening to a radio show has the faint reek of quaintness when we can’t manage to champion with a straight face these distractions as relics of authenticity. Simic reminds us that reading too was a form of distraction as surely as an i-phone.

“All of this reminded me of the days of my youth when my family, like so many others, lived in a monastic solitude when the weather was bad, since we had no television. It wasn’t in church, but on dark autumn days and winter nights that I had an inkling of what they meant when they spoke about eternity. Everyone read in order to escape boredom. I had friends so addicted to books, their parents were convinced they were going crazy with so many strange stories and ideas running like fever through their brains, not to mention becoming hard of hearing, after failing to perform the simplest household chores like letting the cat out.

“Living in a quiet neighborhood made it even worse. Old people stared out of windows at all hours, when they were not staring at the walls. There were radios, but their delights—with the exception of a few programs—were reserved for the grownups only. Thousands died of ennui in such homes. Others joined the navy, got married, or moved to California. Even so, looking back now, I realize how much I owe to my boredom. Drowning in it, I came face to face with myself as if in a mirror.”

Be that as it may, I lived out this boredom during the last hurricane by taking up Conrad’s Typhoon, the Project Gutenberg version, on the recommendation I received via my facebook friending of the New Yorker Magazine. (Let’s be frank, folks.  Oprah’s book club is absolutely yesterday).  Too dark to read, yes, but unlike the youthful Simic I had one gadget in hand that bore its own light to me in hand, my trusty iPad, fully charged and functioning.

When I began blogging three years ago at Read, Write, Now (a title I have come to detest, so future bloggers choose carefully), I had a suspicious and doubtful mindset about e-books, e-readers, and many things e-in-general. To be sure, I saw the advantages of blogging as a means of immediate intellectual self-gratification, and even then I think I felt that a great deal of writing and reading, especially in the academic world, would migrate effectively online. But I could not imagine, then, that an electronic gadget could take the place of paper. I wrote about the fact that I freely took my paper books in to saunas and bathtubs, that I could find my way through paper books more quickly and simply than with a scrolling sidebar, that I didn’t have to worry about whether it was sunny outside. And the smell, the smell, the smell. E-books were sterile, it seemed to me. In a word inauthentic.

I may still believe some of this, but I believe it less than I used to, largely due to my i-Pad. To come back to the

The steamer Nan Shan in the Storm

ostensible purpose of this review, Conrad’s Typhoon, it was the first full book I had read on my IPad, if a novella of 100 some odd pages can be thought of as a full book. And the verdict is that it was like reading…well…a book. The interface felt book like, I can adjust the light to the needs of my aging eyes, and can read more clearly than I could have managed by candlelight. I’ve always worried about the ability to personalize the texts, but iBooks lets me underline, and if anything I personalized the text more than I might have some others since my handwriting is unreadable and my notes in paperbooks cryptic and unintelligible. By contrast, the marginalia tool in iBooks is clean and my notes copious. Perhaps above all, I loved my iPad for remaining charged and working when everything else failed, leaving in the dark and to my own devices. Scary what I might find in that mirror. I read the entire book undistracted by facebook or my email apps, but I took comfort in knowing they were available for my distraction should I need them.

Now as to Typhoon itself. I want to say “Yes,” with qualifications. The story is gripping and intense, a naturalist drama of man against nature that becomes a kind of paean to stoic and pedestrian endurance, though one that is ironic and complicated in the end. The main human character is Captain MacWhirr, whose name betokens a machine-like efficiency. He is a man of small intellect, little imagination, and no intellectual curiosity. Because of this it is hard to describe him as actually courageous in the teeth of the hurricane. While a more imaginative man might have hidden his response to the terrors of the outrageous sea in cryptic understatement, MacWhirr is mostly just given to small emotion and small imagination.

Captain MacWhirr was trying to do up the top button of his oilskin coat with unwonted haste. The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words. Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr was moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: “I wouldn’t like to lose her.”

One doesn’t come away from this novel feeling grand and heroic and triumphant about human beings. On the other hand, one doesn’t come away feeling like human beings are small and accidental as you do, for instance in reading Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”. Instead endurance seems something to be achieved, and we end up happy for MacWhirr that he has achieved it, knowing we’d rather have him dull and unimaginative, but steady, were we caught in the writhing seas ourselves.

The story as a whole is gripping and seems to reveal something about both our human frailty and our strength and complexity, making it more than just a good adventure story. If I had read it first, I’m sure I would say that The Perfect Storm reminded me of it in being only partly a book about humans against the storm, and as much or more about humans against themselves.

One thing keeps me from a whole hearted endorsement. It really is the case that the depictions of Chinese in the book are deeply troubling. Passages in which Chinese are cast a jabbering animals or as writhing forces of nature are offensive and hard to find a way to redeem. I have always thought the criticism of Heart of Darkness was perhaps unearned since the thesis of that book had always seemed to me to be the evils of imperialism. But there is no redeeming theme that I can find for the representation of the Chinese coolies as brutes, and I found myself less inclined to defend Conrad, either here or for Heart of Darkness than I was before I began. To say this is not to say that the book is not worth reading, since there is no good human thing that is free of the scent of corruption, but it is to say that the goodness in the book does not overcome that corruption and reminds this reader at least that human beings are mixed creations, leaving us to admire and cringe in the same moment.

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Bodies and Books–II

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I’ve continued reading Karin Littau’s Theories of Reading.  The second chapter is mostly a schematic History of Reading that will be familiar with anyone who’s read some stuff about that history.  Still, I was struck anew or again by two aspects of that history.

First, Littau rehearses the manifest distinctions between our own (gradually eroding??) views of textual authorship and those of earlier periods.  According to Littau there’s no real way to distinguish the copying of a text from the creation of a text in the Middle Ages (which makes me think that more than a few of our students would be more textually at home in the middle ages than in our contemporary academy).  According to Littau, one reason for the fluidity between “copying” and “creating”  was “‘the common classical and Christian view of poetic inspiration’, in accordance with which ‘the poet does not originate the poem but is the inspired channel for a divine act of creation’ (Selden 1988: 303).  In pre-print culture an author, or auctor, was therefore less a creator of a given work than its assembler, whose rights to the work extended merely to the physical object of the manuscript he or she had produced in the first instance rather than the text as the fruit of his or her private consciousness, as is the case in the copyright law now” (16).

The relationship to our own modes of electronic creation almost don’t bear pointing out.  How many blogs are simply compilations of materials generated elsewhere, and yet we still think of them as something we’ve somehow produced or written, unique only in their assemblage, not in creation?

Still, I’m more interested in the implications of the latter part of the quote.  I wonder especially whether this doesn’t reaffirm the notion that trying to get back to original intention springs from a god-like view of authorship.  However, in the ancient world, the idea that the words were divinely inspired allowed them to be disseminated endlessly into new texts and new assemblages, without worrying fastidiously about the point of historical origin in a particular writer in a particular time and place.  By contrast, our own view of the author as Godlike locates that divine authority in a specific moment of history, to which we have to return to the point of exhaustion.

I wonder how this plays out especially among Christian views of scriptural authority and inspiration.  Our own view of historicism insists that grappling with the historical uniqueness and situatedness of the point of creation–with the author is one can be determined–ironically discards a sense of authorship, authority, and inspiration that would have been common at these earlier points in history. To some degree we make the text captive to history, rather than releasing it to new and unforeseen forms of assemblage and creativity.

Well, this is too much for me to flesh out right now, and I’m not sure it would go anywhere anyway.

I, Celebrity blogger

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Well, I’ve had my first interview as a result of my blogging, with the Pakistani Spectator, of all places.  Out of the blue, I hear from these folks saying they’d like to interview me and what I think about blogging.  Apparently it’s a group trying to make a go of blogging in Pakistan, with political and cultural commentary–a lot of it written in Urdu which i have no hope of reading.  It’s a bizarrely interesting site to my mind.  Advertisements for Pizza Hut and chances to meet Pakistani women ride alongside Islamic critiques of the Israeli war in Gaza (and, given that some of it’s in Urdu, who knows what else).  In any case, I’m sure you’ll want to check out my deep and profound commentary on the nature of blogging, as well as my admission that i know next to nothing about Pakistan.

Happy Anniversary to Me

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Ok, this really happened a couple of days ago since I think I started this blog on January 3rd, a year ago.  In the interim I’ve had a few more than 52,000 hits, well beyond my wildest dreams. I think starting out I was thrilled to get ten people a day dropping by.  Now I’m depressed when I have less than 100 hits, although I realize that 52,000 ain’t squat compared to a lot of people who blog.

Clearly the vast majority of my hits were interested in the politically oriented blogs, so it’s probably fair to say that people are much more interested in reading when it is being done by Barack Obama or John McCain than when it is being done by me.  Also, general browsers are very interested in movies, judging by the random hits I get off of Google.  I don’tknow if all of this confirms my general theses concerning reading in America, since I’m not absolutely sure I’ve my general theses, but there you have it anyway.

Happy Anniversary To Me!

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I should probably write something more substantial than this, but all I have to say is that six months and 15,000 hits ago I started this blog and it’s been an enjoyable ride. A few of you–a very few–have bothered to notice I’m not writing quite so much these days, one or two posts a week instead of four or five. A function of sanity, no doubt. The desire to keep it along with other things like my house and marriage, that is. But what began as a lark that I thought I’d try while on sabbatical has really become something I look forward to as a way of interacting with readers and just plain thinking out loud on paper. Er…on pixels. Or something. And actually its thinking silently. When you stop to think about it.

Thanks to all of you who bother to stop by for a few seconds on your way to something more interesting and worth your time.

Blogging, so yesterday

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Well, I’ve been away from this for awhile. I was at the Northeast MLA conference in Buffalo for one thing. For another, we’ve been having a furious though civil online discussion about race and racism amongst the faculty at my college. Finally, April is the cruelest month, at least at my school. Even as I feel “caught up” as of today, I just got 25 papers to grade by next Tuesday. Anyhoo, it means that there hasn’t been much time for thinking, much less blogging over the past several weeks, as the relative dearth of new material suggests.

Hope to have some new stuff to blog about Jeff Gomez’s book Print is Dead, and my experiences reading Treasure Island on Book Glutton. Also a couple of interesting things I picked up on reading from the conference. For the moment, I’ll just say that I discovered over at the Chronicle of Higher Education that in the week I’ve been away from my blog, blogging has become passe.

Hurley Goodall tells me that

“Blogs May Be Rendered Obsolete by New Technology!!!!!”

Figures. I thought blogging made me the It prof.

Should have known that by the time I discovered it blogging would be yesterday’s leftovers.

I don’t quite follow all the terminology, but apparently the problem is that new RSS technology hijacks the discussion on the blog away from the originator of the material–I guess that’s me, folks–and situates it in a different point in hyperspace.

Goodall wonders: “If discussion moves away from blogs themselves, one wonders if bloggers would still have incentive to publish.”

Well, in the first place, I think I would be flattered to discover that my blog meant enough that someone wanted to bother hijacking it and talking about it anywhere. I feel incredibly lucky to be getting about 40 to 50 hits a day, which makes me laughable to some of these blogomaniacs out there. To be honest, I got started on this thing thinking that I might get four or five people a week bothering to stumble across it. So I’m not completely sure that getting four or five or zero hits a day would matter that much to me.

EVEN THOUGH I ABSOLUTELY LOVE EVERY ONE OF YOU AND COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT YOU ANYMORE!!!

Seriously though. This has mostly been more a way of meditating in public about things related primarily to reading, and other related stuff that interests me….like, for instance, myself and how interesting it must be to everyone to sit and read my narcissistic ramblings about how internally gratifying I have found blogging to be.

Whatever else, it proves again my absolute devotion to lost causes. Among other things literature, high modernism, Christianity, Italian opera, and the now completely anachronistic idea that some things are better than other things. I even got focused on my primary academic interest, Ethnic Literatures of the United States, at just the point that all the powers that be–that is, people who make a lot more money than I do, get published much more easily, and who happen to teach at ivy league schools–decided that categories like ethnicity and race don’t make sense any more.

I’ve even gotten interested in reading at just the point in history that no one really reads anymore.

As I think of it, my whole blog is passe.

Let’s just add blogging to my now long list of lost causes.  It’s in good company.

Death by Blogging

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Tiffany over at Yawn at the Apocalypse sent me the following link to a story on the NYT re. the deadly effects of blogging. An excerpt….

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Well, now I know what to blame my bulging wasteline on. You, Dear Reader. You. I am so dedicated to my blogging that I am giving up my health for the cause of….well…of something. Of course, before you came along I blamed it on my job, and before that my kids. And before that my mother. If I ever stop blogging I guess I can blame it on the high fructose corn syrup syndicate.

More seriously, I do think that there’s a peculiar way in which writing is degenerating in to the Grub Street model wherein poorly paid hacks scrabble around trying to make a living by the written word. Or should I say the processed word. Whatever. The more things change the more they stay the same. And other cliches.