on blogs and literature and other things

By? Let me know

The idea for this blog was fairly simple: write a travel journal; the only catch was that the areas I discussed would be fictional. Despite the continued lack of an itinerary, I did sit down and attempt to form a list of locations that would be touched on in the blog. The first drafted included only books and the vast majority were  genre novels.

However, much as I do love my books, they weren't the end all and be all of what I was absorbing or reading or devoting my time to. By the time I made my first post, the itinerary had hugely expanded and I ended up writing about a television show rather than the book series I'd originally chosen.

The rather winding point of this whole introduction is, simply, literature is expansive. I sat down thinking of a literary travel journal that dealt only in books and wound up with a blog that would cover any and all forms of literature that struck my fancy -- television, movie, graphic novel, whatever. In my typical, roundabout way, this brings me to the nature of blogs. Are they literature? I want to say yes and not only because I'm now writing one. Many straddle the line between memoir and self-help with heaping doses of absurdisms and pictures to help it all go down. There's a part of me, reflexively clutching my Milton and Austen, that resists the idea of cat macros and paint pictures being put anywhere near Paradise Lost and Persuasion.

Then I get over it.

Half the books on my shelf, which are cuddling much closer to the sainted relics of the classical tradition, are pulp and genre and wonderful in their own right, but doing something completely different from highbrow literature, which is an absurd concept in its own right. A book that doesn't get read fails, on some level. Words on page can be beautiful, but if they don't find their audience, what good are they?

Back to blogs. Popularity isn't the end all and be all of all writing, but I think that the right audience is. Room to Think is mostly a memoir, but beautiful. The most recent post, Florence Friday, opens up to pictures of the ancient amphitheaters and a phenomenal discussion of architecture and place. This is probably my bias speaking, but the strength of voice and perspective in that post is, to my way of thinking, worth more than a blog that has eight thousand followers and enough retweets to silence Aristophanes (if I'm lucky, two people will get that. If I'm not, I hope two people will google it).

The beauty of blogs, then, is a freedom from popularity, though so many strive for it anyway.  If you think of the publishing industry in its current form, something I don't particularly suggest unless you have chocolate and maybe alcohol handy, books are reduced to sales figures. The question isn't: does this have something to say? It's not even: will this be read? The question is only: will it sell? Small presses pick up a great deal of the slack that the major publishing houses have created, focusing more on the content and less on the bottom line.

Blogs, however, are outside of this equation entirely. A good blog is beyond its numbers and followers and for as long as the author publishes it, it has something to say. This can lead to a lot of awful blogs, but mainstream publishing led to Twilight, so I think we can all agree that no system is perfect.

And, at the end of the day, good blogs return conversation to literature. This is my entirely subjective patch of ground, on which my entire virtual ideology is based. Literature, whatever form it takes, should speak to its audience; it's job is to start a conversation, even if the conversation is mostly 'private detectives are cool.' I'm not asking for profound sentiments, here, just a dialogue and, maybe, a new idea and a bit of inspiration here and there. Blogs, however, carry the possibility for an evolving conversation, one that goes both ways and gives life back to text.

Having now run out of things to say on the subject, I still need to draw in some other example from the blog roll (no, not mine, it's nonexistence would make that challenging) before I bring this to a close. As in all assigned writing, it's not really an assignment until you realize that you're missing an element. Bear with me and here goes.

Wandering Earl is an excellent example of the conversational element I just finished babbling on about ad nauseum. The most recent post on 'How to Survive an Eastern European Winter' boasts both a great deal of conversation happening in the comments and having been inspired by another post from another blog. It's a fantastic nexus of literary microcosms in blogging  with which to wrap up this post, at long last.

In a bit of housekeeping news: Friday's fable will appear this evening (no, really!) and the next destination will be posted this Saturday. I know, I know, three posts in two days, who can hope to keep up? Don't worry, I'll return to my glacial pace once the weekend's over.