The end of something

Thirteen years ago I posted The beginning of something to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Spike Magazine (not to be confused with Spiked Online), which I helped to found when the world wide web was forming, and to comment on the direction online literary culture had taken. By that point, the magazine was moribund and I was writing for (the unfortunately named) Ready Steady Book, which has become worse than moribund. There is no significance in the curious fact that both editors now work in businesses that specialise in underwater activities and that I used to work in one, but I would like to think there is.

When I read Ulysses for the first time, I made a list of words Joyce uses that were also used to name British submarines in the first half of the 20th century: Stoic, Spartan, Sybil, Selene. I found forty-five more. As these names indicate, ancient Greek and Roman culture was very familiar to the officer class of the empire and the names suggest a wishful continuity with mythical and martial traditions. Another submarine was called Telemachus, a word that doesn't feature in Joyce's novel despite its title. Officers would have pronounced it Tell-em-ackus, while those on the lower decks pronounced it Telly-mackus. Nowadays, the officers are likely to be more familiar with another Homer.

If such rambling is leading anywhere, it is to note the end of something. Not online literary magazines but their potential as an alternative to corporate literary coverage, as resistance to a tradition of consumerism, gossip, aesthetics and neutralisation. This may explain why they become moribund and those that remain lack any apparent vision or purpose, becoming landfills of reviews, essays, interviews, poetry and fiction "without truth or necessity", the words Blanchot used in a letter to Sartre quoted in my original post.

In the past, I have argued that it was because the form has been usurped by the same professional managerial class that took over British politics and media circa 1997. But that may be only half the story, as the form does not lend itself to a sustained approach to the unique space of writing. That is, the distinction we recognise, appear to know instinctively, between the everyday and literature, between criticism and its object, and yet which endures as a oracular presence we habitually avoid. Indeed, the culture demands that we avoid it despite relying on its aura. Hence my call for the solitary mutiny of blog writing. It's why I insist on continuing in this damned wilderness. But even book-reviewing blogs tend toward the same inherited format and clichés. With no expectation at all, I suggest adapting Lars Iyer's Dogma rules for academic papers, as set out later in the novel with the same title. So, Review Dogma:

• No character names
• No plot summaries
• No quotations
  
• No genre labels
• No reference to isms
• No comparisons
• No moralising
• Contra Dan Green, no dispassionate analysis
  
• No keeping to at least one of these rules