Blogblog: on litblogs and critblogs

Beginblog
Dan Green proposes a new category of book blogs: critblog. It's a useful distinction because, as his post explains, the proliferation of literary weblogs has been led by "superficial chitchat and literary gossip" rather than critical engagement with the oracle. His post reminds me of the daily shock of trawling through dozens of RSS feeds with only the slightest glimmer of interest. While hoping for reviews, speculation, discussion or just original links, I read instead three dozen reports of the death of a famous young author - as if I or anybody else was unaware of Ed Champion's grim post from several days before.

Developblog
This year I've wondered if the blog form had run its course. Did it reach a peak around 2006 as a friend has suggested to me? But what would reaching a peak mean? Dan laments the growth of blogs that do little "to the development of the litblog as a medium" - indeed, they circumscribe it to a bland daily digest - and reveals his plan to "inaugurate a new project" encompassing "more formally-developed critical essays, specifically essays on contemporary American fiction". I'm sure this is a good direction in which to go (as The Quarterly Conversation has proven). However, we should be clear: this is not blogging; a blog brooks no development. That is, if development is the cultivation of a project moving toward a positive fulfilment.

Digressblog
In 2000, when I began writing on Splinters, the idea was to draw attention to the essays, reviews and interviews on the wider site; an eddy in an otherwise stagnant backwater. It also enabled me to write on literary issues without having to expand an aside into an essay or review. Priority was always given to the longer form. Over the years, as blogging's profile rose, I still took time out to write long about Celan, Roubaud, Blanchot and, later, Sebald and Richard Ford, as well as individual reviews, believing this would rid myself of a certain lack. Perhaps there was a hope that the two would combine to form a distinct voice against the prevailing potatohead culture. If such a hope lived then, it's dead now. If we accept that winning is profile and popularity, the potatoheads have won. See, for example, the Guardian Book Blog's suspiciously minimal blogroll. The literary intellectuals at the newspaper evidently prefer to promote chicklit chat even though it makes Loose Women sound like an Oxford High Table.

Even though?

Anyway, such hope is a mirage looking back into the desert of the past. I have always written for reasons that are clear to me: to understand and unpack why, despite being island-bound and monolingual, I sense such an affinity to writers from the European mainland, and why English commensense realism and the happy freedoms of postmodernism* are irredeemably alien to me. If there are readers out there who recognise this feeling and who might then be saved from the dutiful reading of the latest potatohead favourite in order to find their own way, then my efforts have not been in vain.

*Postmodernism is a misnomer. It is the Victorianism of our age. Postmodernism is to Modernism what Victorianism is to Romanticism: a relapse, a celebration of unwitting failure, a backslide into the snug of timeliness and commerce. Modernism is still to come.

Backtothepointblog
The amusing thing about the rise of the blogging idiots - some in their unstately pleasure-domes, some in their Nick Cohen caravans - is that they herald not the decline in newspaper book coverage and, with it, the associated glorious benefits to all, but its success. Rather than facing up to books as unique interruptions to daily life, newspaper book coverage has corralled literature into the interminable chatter of culture. Blogging follows. However, blogging has the small advantage of being able to make the silence of literature its focus. A literary editor would not sanction such pretentious nonsense, as the absence from newspapers of our best reviewers attests.

Trapblog
But I must have said this all this before. Repetition is a necessity of blogging and I used to be happy with that. Yet now, as the delay in the fulfilment of writing becomes a cage rather than a clearing, another indistinct form becomes more attractive. How many blogs have been written in order to open the way for what blogging has replaced?! The question would then be: can another form maintain this spirit of need and enquiry toward its imaginary completion?

Endblog
Imagine then, a book.