Category Archives: Blogging

Many thanks to those of you who suggested essay collections in response to yesterday’s post. You all reminded me of some of my favorite works and gave me quite a few names I hadn’t heard of. My to-be-read list is now that much longer.

I decided to take a look at the Introduction to Phillip Lopate’s collection The Art of the Personal Essay and was reminded of how great the intro is and how wonderful essays are. Here are a few quotations:

The essay form as a whole has long been associated with an experimental method. This idea goes back to Montaigne and his endlessly suggestive use of the term essai for his writings. To essay is to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether you are going to succeed. The experimental association also derives from the other fountainhead of the essay, Francis Bacon, and his stress on the empirical inductive method, so useful to the development of the physical sciences.

There is something heroic in the essay’s gesture of striking out toward the unknown, not only without a map but without certainty that there is anything worthy to be found. One would like to think that the personal essay represents a kind of basic research on the self, in ways that are allied with science and philosophy.

….

The self-consciousness and self-reflection that essay writing demands cannot help but have an influence on the personal essayist’s life. Montaigne confessed at one point that “in modelling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me.” Thus the writing of personal essays not only monitors the self but helps it gel. The essay is an enactment of the creation of the self.

…

In the final analysis, the personal essay represents a mode of being. It points a way for the self to function with relative freedom in an uncertain world. Skeptical yet gyroscopically poised, undeceived but finally tolerant of flaws and inconsistencies, this mode of being suits the modern existential situation, which Montaigne first diagnosed. His recognition that human beings were surrounded by darkness, with nothing particularly solid to cling to, led to a philosophical acceptance that one had to make oneself up from moment to moment.

Still, we must not make excessive claims. The essay is not, for the most part, philosophy; nor is it yet science. How seriously ought we to take its claims of being experimental? It lacks the rigor of a laboratory experiement; it does not hold on to its hypotheses long enough to prove them. But it is what it is: a mode of inquiry, another way of getting at the truth.

It strikes me, upon reading this, that blogging can be very much like writing personal essays. Can’t writing a blog be a mode of inquiry? Can’t it be experimental, maybe even more so than a personal essay? It is like a personal essay in the sense that the writer can try out ideas, experiment with ideas, create and shape the self like Lopate says an essay can, and it is unlike the personal essay in the way it can be communal, a group form of inquiry, or, at least, a form of inquiry that allows input from others. What else is a blog, but a way of making oneself up from moment to moment?

I’m curious what you book bloggers out there have experienced. Sandra from Book World got me interested in this question when she wrote:

I realise that the tyranny of blogging and of feeling that I have to deliver something ‘new’ has meant that in the 18 months of this blog’s existence, only one of the books I’ve read has been a re-read. That’s not at all typical of my pre-blog reading profile ….

Has anyone else felt that blogging can be tyrannical? Having begun blogging in mid-March of this year, I haven’t been doing it long enough to know, really. My reading habits have changed, but I can’t tell yet if those changes will be permanent or if I’m going through a temporary stage, doing some experimenting I’ll give up eventually. And right now I’m having so much fun blogging that it’s hard to imagine the negatives that come with it, but I’m sure they are there to be discovered.

Blogging has made me a more careful reader, at least to the extent that I take the time to post on quotations I’ve found meaningful and to develop my responses to books enough to write them down coherently. This is probably one of the best things about book blogging. (I’m imagining getting comments and taking part in conversations would be another for a lot of people). Now I have a record of quotations and my thoughts about books. Perhaps I’ll remember better what I read, or at least I’ll be better able to remember the things I’ve pulled out of my reading to write about. Writing about what I think makes me have better thoughts.

By reading blogs, I’m also hearing about more books than I did before. Well, maybe I’m paying attention to what I hear a bit more. There are tons of places to get information about books, and I’ve always heard and read a lot about the books out there, but I’m coming to think that book blog sites are among the best sources of information because I can come to know and trust the writer’s opinions. There’s context there, a much more complex one than in a regular book review. Yes, I pretty much know what to expect from, say, the New York Review of Books, and that provides a context in which I can judge how to respond to a review, and there are some reviewers who publish so frequently I get to know their opinions and tastes, but in a book blog, I get a much stronger sense of the writer and so can trust the recommendations that much more confidently.

I mark up my books more than I used to, and I catch myself thinking of blog posts as I read, looking around for good quotations and trying to decide if a particular idea or scene is worth turning into a post.

My to-be-read list is growing rapidly. I’ve had such a list for a while, but it tended to be fairly short; I’d only put books on there that I was highly likely to read at some point in the near future. But now it’s growing, partly because I’ve made a conscious decision to make it more comprehensive, and partly because I’m coming across so many more things I’d really, really like to read.

Shortly after beginning the blog, I started reading more than one or two things at once after I read about other people’s multiple-book-reading habits. It sounded like such a good way to read in different genres and to read difficult things I might not want to spend hours with in one stretch. This makes it easier for me to read poetry and difficult nonfiction.

I wonder, as I go on, if the fact that I’m blogging about reading will affect my choice of books. I can see why blogging might lead to less re-reading, as Sandra points out, since I wouldn’t want to bore you with another review of the same book I read a year ago. On the other hand, though, if every reading of the same book is different – if I read Evelina differently now than I did in a graduate school class years back – then blogging about a re-reading might be interesting, for comparison’s sake. Sometimes I’m tempted to re-read pre-blog books I really love, just so I can have the fun of blogging about them.

I can imagine wanting to read the things that other book bloggers are reading in order to be a part of the conversation, but also NOT wanting to read what other book bloggers are reading, so that I’m not talking about the same thing everyone else is. The best thing to do, of course, is to try not to let these factors influence me and just pick books that sound appealing for other reasons, but I can see that I might be affected by what other bloggers are doing anyway.

I also wonder if and when the regular blogging gets tiresome. I haven’t felt anything but pleasure in it so far, but I would expect blogging over a long period could sometimes feel like a chore, like tyranny.

I am sometimes torn between the pleasure of reading books and the pleasure of reading book blogs. This may be one of the more difficult things of being a book blogger: that there are so many good book blogs to read and all those hundreds and thousands of blogs can be a distraction from what is the main point, really – reading books. I’m not sure if I read faster or slower, more or less than before I began blogging. Sometimes I want to read faster so I can be sure I have something to post about. Other times I have so many things to post about I want to read slower, so I won’t get even more ideas, and I don’t want to post too often and overwhelm readers – and myself. Does anyone worry that they won’t have anything to write about?

So, if you have a tale to tell about how blogging has changed your reading, I’m curious to hear it.

I was reading this review by Russell Baker of Stephen Miller’s new book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art in the New York Review of Books, and, while most of the review was good and the book looks interesting, I was bothered by one passage in it. In the process of analyzing the reasons why the art of conversation seems to be declining, Baker considers the way technologies such as television, radio, and internet can keep us from talking to each other because of their endless distractions. He says:

Television and radio, alas, are no longer the only irresistible forces destroying conversation. They are now supported, perhaps even outdone, by iPods, cell phones, computers, BlackBerries, electronic games, Netflix, and the Internet. For years books, newspapers, magazines, movies, and recordings have helped people achieve what Miller calls “conversational avoidance,” but in this new age of electronic miracles amok, conversation is being hard pressed to survive. The man who wants to say a few words of his own nowadays may have trouble finding anyone to listen, but never mind, he can always retreat to the solitude of his Web site and speak to the whole cyberworld through the electronic megaphone he calls his “blog.”

Now, I know the kind of “conversation” Baker (and Miller, but I say Baker because he’s the one I’ve read) is talking about is in-person, face-to-face conversation, and that that’s the dictionary definition of the word. I know he’s not considering the larger, perhaps metaphorical, sense of conversation as something one can have at a distance, through letters or email or comments on blogs. Perhaps I shouldn’t criticize Baker for not taking up all kinds of conversations, for having a narrower definition than the one I’m using. I know that face-to-face conversation is different than written exchanges: there’s a spark and spontaneity and vulnerability in these conversations which don’t exist in other kinds in quite the same way.

But I still thought this portrayal of blogs was off, and that blogs can foster a kind of conversation that is important, albeit different from face-to-face ones. Blogs don’t have to be megaphones. And because of the possibility for commenting and emailing through blogs, they strike me as in a different category than TV, magazines, movies, etc., which don’t allow interaction.

The problem with understanding conversation solely as spoken and face-to-face, I think, is that it privileges those who are good at speaking and thinking on their feet. Some people are good at this kind of conversation and others are not. Baker talks about whether the gift of conversation is just that — a gift — or whether it can be learned, but that aside, some shine at it, while others don’t. And for those who don’t, writing one’s thoughts and responding to others through writing can be an alternate way to excell at conversation. I bet a decent number of people who write blogs and comment on blogs are more comfortable writing than speaking. I think it’s true for me.

When I teach, I like to use electronic discussion boards as well as holding oral discussions for this very reason: some students love to talk and debate and others prefer to write out their thoughts. Whether spoken or written on a discussion board, it’s a conversation, and I think students can benefit from trying out both ways.

I do get the point that there’s something special about spoken, face-to-face conversation, but I don’t see the point of elevating that kind over others and failing to recognize the benefits of conversation through writing.