I’m in The Dog House
One of my best friends, Ida (pronounced Ee-Duh), who is one of my favorite people to talk to and who I have been friends with since 1990, thinks blogging and reading blogs is a waste of everyone’s time.
When I told her I was blogging, she said, “Who’s going to give a shit about your day-to-day?”
I thought that was a very good question.
She said there are much more important things to read and that blogging, like Starbucks, was degrading our culture and ruining the world. Ida has strong opinions. She thinks blogs are taking people away from genuine, edited, filtered-through-the-publishing-apparatus, literature.
I think she’s right, but I argued that my blog was/is meant to get people to read more literature. If people don’t know me, they’ll never read My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy.
Ida also thinks that blogs are isolating people and when I tried to say that blogs can also bring people closer because they enable people to discuss personal stuff they may not discuss otherwise, Ida said, “Through a computer?!”
I said, “Well, I’d rather sit on my porch to discuss what to do about circumcision, but…OK, good point.”
Ida said, “Don’t get all busy on me and make me find out about how you’re doing through your blog.”
I said, “Don’t be crazy.”
Then yesterday Ida called me and I knew I was in the dog house. I had not told Ida we were having a boy. And she read it on my blog. Ida’s right. Blogs are ruining the world. Sorry Ida. Let’s sit on the porch and talk.
August 5th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Ahoy! And I totally disagree with you both!
How’s that for a personable first comment?
Still, if you have ten minutes to spare, I must needs take exception to your chum Ida’s take on blogs, and your (tongue in cheek? ish?) corroboration. Not because I don’t get the inherent good humor in this piece, but because Ida’s position (as you paint it here) is a fairly familiar, if uninformed one. I’d like to help inform her — using one of online writing’s greatest strengths: its facilitation of dialog among strangers.
Item in the first is a point of clarification: a blog is a medium, not a genre. Many people — usually those who haven’t read deeply in the medium — conflate blog-as-medium with blog-as-ipso-facto-public-diary (and a poorly written one at that). This conflation then enables an ad hominem dismissal of a whole ocean of diverse material.
Any of us who has spent more than a moment in the halls of a college English department will know that debates over what counts in the canon of bona fide Literature (and what doesn’t) is as old as the first papyrus scrawls. This one — over blogs’ literary value — is just another chapter of it, and at least we have to be well enough informed about what, exactly, we’re debating.
That said, certainly, personal narrative and memoir online is rife with the potential of an author scooping herself, and in the process shafting her chums. Ooops! Better mix up Ida her favorite drink for her porch chat with you.
But people publish their writing online in multiple other subject areas and genres: fiction, poetry, political commentary, fanzine fluff, citizen journalism (both vital and schlocky) you name it. The fact that this writing is (usually) unmediated by publishing companies means that plenty of chaff is mixed in among the wheat. But as you might know, fellow lesbian mum author Harlyn Aizley (wrote Buying Dad, edited Confessions of the Other Mother) had a brief tour as a “house” blogger with Parents.com, and they axed her after about a quarter, for no apparent reason but that they ultimately were uncomfortable with her, well, lesbianism. (Dana Rudolph, among others, covered it here. On her blog.)
So the filter at the publishing apparatus does not always guarantee that the literary chaff is separated from the wheat. Often it means that the controversial — hell, even the non-normative, or the potentially less commercial — is separated from its potential readership. Having published with a feminist press, I’m sure you’re well aware of all this. (Ben Bagdikian can’t update The Media Monopoly fast enough, man.)
Writing that’s been self-published online, via the medium of a blog, entails the worst of the vanity press, but also the best of DIY anarchism. Many of us — myself included — began publishing a blog in order to promote existing print work (my essay in Harlie’s Confessions of the Other Mother) and test-drive ideas for future Literary production. Emphasis on the upper case “L.” For myself, I’ll say that along the way, I have become stunned at what can happen when a literary form I dearly love (the essay) moves from monolog to dialog. It can be challenging, it can be messy, and it can do a world of good (as I’ve recently written in brief here, and at length here).
I know I’ve probably racked up more words in this comment than you spent in your piece. (Blame the fact that somehow my previous version was deleted before I finished, and this is the tell-tale, less well-organized second attempt. In the blogosphere, I think what I’ve done would be considered “hi-jacking” your comment thread, or some such.) But I have to say just one last thing.
Literary merits, the homogenizing impact of commercial publishing, and medium vs. genre debates notwithstanding, one point here is beyond dispute. Ida can sidle up to your porch and chat up circumcision, circumlocution, or circumstantial evidence any ole time. I never met either of you, I have just pulled up a virtual chair and chipped in my two cents. Er, two bucks. Whatever. If you ask me — and you did, essentially, by publishing this as a blog post! — that’s something that’s going to breathe life into, rather than snuff the life out of, the written word as we know it. And along the way, it will enable righteous sisters like you and Ida to spread your good gospel that much further.
Amen, and pass the tofu.
August 19th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Polly,
You kick ass! Thank you for that post. I hear you. Yes, blogging can breathe life into the written word. You showed me. I see how what I write becomes a dialogue, not just a monologue and it has made me think and read and think some more and then write. A good, good thing. I’ll tell Ida.
Love,
Andrea