I’m interrupting your regularly scheduled Conrad programming to answer some questions posed by The Reading Ape as the last post in an excellent and thought-provoking series he’s done on issues in book blogging. I’ve been wanting to respond to the earlier entries, and may still do so in my sweet time, but tend to do more sighing and groaning than articulating on these topics. But here’s my shot at the questions.

1. What does book blogging do best?
Right away, I’m sighing and groaning a little bit again, because this question immediately brings up a problem. What does “book blogging” mean? There are a lot of different subgenres within that realm, and a lot of them do what they do really well. Blogging is a great platform, for example, for reporting on publishing industry news, real-life book tours, sharing photos of neat-looking libraries, and so on. But not only is that not what I do here, I don’t even read blogs like that.

I think in one sense what book blogging “does best” is devolve into an arm of the publishing industry consisting of a lot of enthusiastic and excited individuals all saying pretty much the same thing about a smallish pool of books.

I think in another sense what it does best is to unite a group of like-minded individuals to discuss books that they might never have a chance to discuss in real life, at least not with more than one or two people. It introduces people to things they have never heard of—things they would really have a hard time hearing of, not just some new release that didn’t get reviewed in The New York Times. They are a wonderful tool of and for amateurs and professionals alike to learn, exchange ideas, explore, &tc.

Ugh, I couldn’t really answer that one at all.

2. If you write a book blog, why do you?
This is easier. My primary reason for blogging is as a way to make myself think more about what I’ve read and hopefully synthesize those thoughts into something marginally interesting and/or meaningful. It provides a record of what I’ve read, but the writing process does much more than that by making my reading more active and requiring me to really think about what I’ve read afterward. And it’s helped me focus my reading, as the analysis I do leads to more and deeper ideas about connections between books and authors and more effective ways to follow the reading thread from one work to another as I go.

But without a really smart and supportive community of commenters, I doubt I would still be doing that. I work harder because I know the people who are reading deserve it—though I still don’t work nearly hard enough for you guys.

3. What do you think the future of book blogging is?
I think continued fragmentation is a big part of the future, including the professionalization of a subset of popular bloggers with wide appeal. Also continued growth of connections between bloggers and the industry.

4. What do your favorite book bloggers do?
My favorite book bloggers—and this term is really killing me, I normally say litbloggers—really. fucking. engage. with literature. And they read awesome stuff, old and new, well-known and obscure. Sometimes they make arguments, sometimes they only describe and tell me how great something is, but they almost always do it with examples from the text or at least specific explanations. They aren’t afraid to get past the plot or characterization and talk about language and structure, or to go against critics and other Important People.

5. If you could tell all book bloggers one thing, what would it be?
Just one? Proofread your posts!

Okay, here’s a better one: we don’t have to all be friends. As is the case with the internet overall, as blogging has moved beyond early adopters there seems to have been a tendency for a tyranny of niceness to develop. I am not nice, and while I’m also not mean I often feel dismayed when I see people seemingly cowed into an absurd kind of “tolerance” that stops them from saying anything is better or worse than anything else. It seems to be okay, for the most part, to judge a book, but judging anything else (say, a style of blogging about books), less so.

Oh, and one more: “book people” are not an ideologically uniform subsegment of the population. We don’t all support public libraries or tertiary education in the humanities, we don’t all think “buying local” has mystical economic benefits, and we aren’t all invested in the publishing industry as an immutable institution of civilization.

6. If you could change one thing about book blogging, what would it be?
I really don’t know that I would change much of anything, considering how many different blogs there are of different varieties. It would be nice if it were magically easier to find those I have a strong affinity for. Closer to the realm of reality (or is it?), I wish bloggers weren’t so close to the industry. Caring about publishing can get in the way of caring about literature, and I rarely enjoy any kind of blog written by an industry insider (or amateur who was subsumed by the industry). There’s just something about regular people writing about something they are interested in that’s part of what makes blogging special.

7. How do you think book blogging fits into the reading landscape?
For most people, it probably doesn’t fit in at all. Its biggest effect at this point is probably in marketing contemporary fiction and narrative nonfiction. But again, this really depends on the type of blog. For me, for the blogs I read, it’s more a learning and discussion medium, though I am frequently influenced to buy and read books based on the blogs I follow. Just usually not new ones.

8. What about your own book blogging would you like to do better/differently?
Um, all of it! I’d like to read more, think more, write more, think better, write better. Read better too. Sometimes I wish I had a magic formula to actually popularize a very niche blog, but that’s just silly blogger vanity. I guess my biggest wish is to look at an old post and not feel like an idiot. Once in a while it comes true.

On Saturday, Amanda at Dead White Guys posted about the sentiment that, even if it’s James Patterson or the Twilight series, “at least people are reading amirite NO YOU ARE NOT RIGHT.” I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment, and was excited to see someone else who “WOULD RATHER YOU WATCH EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION OR LISTEN TO NPR THAN READ SHIT BOOKS.” (It’s totally worth saying in all caps—although I’m not quite sure I “would rather” you do anything other than whatever you feel like, maybe that part should be lowercase.)

Anyway, lamenting that this is the stuff that most people do read, most of the time, she asks whether people are

actually stupider, or less appreciative of Good Writing than past generations? OR do good books have this air of Super Hard Snobbery around them that keeps most people away for fear that they will be bored/intimidated/feel stupid? Did the educational system and literary academia shroud good books in hardship?

Dickens may or may not have been the James Patterson of his day—the wholly different media landscape makes that a pretty faulty analogy, with Dickens likely writing for TV today—but in any case I think the real problem here is a nostalgia that ignores how basic a human desire is simple enjoyment. Last week The Reading Ape wrote about “The Tyranny of Pleasure,” and how “if you only or even primarily read ‘for fun,’ you are leaving the most complex, most nourishing, most soul-sustaining books on the shelf.” This isn’t a new characteristic of readers, or of people choosing a leisure activity. What’s more, I’d argue that someone who’s only reading “for fun” is just as likely not getting much more out of Dickens than Patterson, unless he’s simply getting more enjoyment, because Dickens is the better writer.

As I spent the afternoon reading the essays at the end of the Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford himself spoke directly to the issue. “Let us now consider the audience to which the artist should address himself,” he says in his wonderful 1914 essay, “On Impressionism.” “Since the great majority of mankind are, on the surface, vulgar and trivial—the stuff to fill graveyards—the great majority of mankind will be easily and quickly affected by art which is vulgar and trivial,” he says; but greatness is still possible:

But, inasmuch as this world is a very miserable purgatory for most of us sons of men—who remain stuff with which graveyards are filled—inasmuch as horror, despair and incessant strivings are the lot of the most trivial of humanity, who endure them as a rule with commonsense and cheerfulness—so, if a really great master strike the note of horror, of despair, of striving, and so on, he will stir chords in the hearts of a larger number of people than those who are moved by the merely vulgar and the merely trivial. This is probably why Madame Bovary has sold more copies than any book ever published, except, of course, books purely religious. But the appeal of religious book is exactly similar.

Ford thinks the English reading public are idiots, and practically equates “intelligent” with “foreign” throughout the essay to emphasize the greater reading competence of the Continent. Flaubert is much idolized, and much decried the fact that Flaubert is too sexy for British and American tastes. A really wonderful and clear essay on literature and literary technique; I’m going to be spending more time with it this week as I get back into the blogging saddle with Ford and Joseph Conrad. I’ve got a whole literary impressionism thing going on. And this essay has given me a whole list of new things to read.

Anyway, as one of Amanda’s commenters says: “Most of the shit of yesteryear has been weeded out for the good stuff. So in 2150, Stephenie Meyer’ll be a footnote in some doctoral candidate’s thesis.” Or, the focus of an awesome niche litblog? Maybe not, but The Little Professor is such a thing now, for some questionable literature of yesteryear, and it’s always a fascinating read.

I had big plans for the blog this coming week, which were supposed be carried out today, before I spend the week traveling. But after feeling pretty mediocre yesterday, today I am totally not up to it, and I wanted to give notice of my break so I would be able to lie around and recover without stressing myself out. I really hate not being able to get things done.

Especially since I have such a wealth of things to blog about. I’m finally way ahead in my reading again, and the books I’ve been spending time with are some of my favorites. I re-read both Heart of Darkness and The Good Soldier, and while it’s taking me a looong time to get through, I’m now loving Lord Jim. Plus some more Stevenson, Alfred Jarry…well this is some good stuff to look forward to at least, so I hope you’ll forgive me.

This past week I feel like I’ve finally started to get blogging back on track, and my resolution for the week to come will be to continue that progress. I have a lot of reading and writing to do this afternoon to help make that happen, but it’s disgustingly hot outside today and since I can’t quite handle putting the air conditioning on in the second week of April, I think sitting still with a book will probably be very much in my line this afternoon. And while I’m not a great fan of warm weather, I do appreciate when it’s nice enough to go read at the lake.

After finishing Nabokov’s third novel last week, The Luzhin Defense, I’ve held off on starting anything new in the interests of continuing with The Death of Virgil. BC and I are still making our way valiantly through and should resume posting on Part III before too long.

Also upcoming, at some point in the near future, will be posts on All Things Shining, the last of the Laura Ingalls Wilder novels, a collection of short stories by Rick Bass, and my re-read of The Good Soldier. A lot of good stuff, in other words, at least once I can compose it. And I’ve been thinking that I so rarely focus on anything not directly related to one of the texts I’ve been reading, but that I do have thoughts and opinions on other issues, so who knows, you may be seeing more posts like this one, which went over so well.

One thing that my opinions are still developing about is how the kind of writing I do here fits into a litblogging world that is in many ways more like the one I argued against in that post. Not in the sense just that it is into positivity, but in the sense that there’s a definite draw in blogging and social media in general to stay current and, as they say, “relevant.” bibliographing is not “relevant,” but I hope it is at least a bit interesting. Because I still have an interest in the kind of conversations and general socialization* that that relevance is aiming for. At least, to the extent anyone else is ready to have a conversation about some of the ridiculous things I read. (Actually, thinking about it, this year has been sort of “mainstream” so far. How can I change that?)

And last but most definitely not least, now that I’ve completed the first challenge, I’ve created a page for the bibliographing Reading Challenge outlining what’s done and what’s coming up. If we have plans that aren’t definite, let me know at your leisure when you want to pencil things in for. And if you’ve thought about the challenge and want in, let me know that too.

*On that note, if you’re into that sort of thing, you can like bibliographing on Facebook. And of course I’m on Twitter.

(Hell no)

Earlier this week I followed a blog trail that began, for me, with a post from Mark Athitakis responding to Amelia Atlas on “next-big-thingism” in book reviewing. Athitakis mentioned this post at HTMLGIANT, “On Criticism,” by M Kitchell. The post is oldish now, but it brought up so many issues I see repeatedly in discussions of the responsibilities of reviewers, of negative or otherwise nonpositive reviews, of niceyness in the litblog world, that I feel rather compelled to put down some of my own thoughts on the matter.

Kitchell’s essay, which is the only one I’m going to criticize here but which I think is solidly embedded in a whole school of thought, seems to me to confuse the issue by conflating several things. First is the conflation of “criticism” and “reviewing,” which I think is a mistake. But worse is the confusion between “liking”/”positive criticism” and “disliking”/”negative criticism.” The basic idea of the piece is that negative criticism is less useful (more pointless might be more accurate to my mind) than positive, and that ultimately there is no reason to write a negative review.

When you are not getting paid to write criticism, and you are doing so of your own volition, it strikes me as an incredible exercise in futility to waste energy writing negativity. Sure, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be able to articulate why you don’t like something, but it seems to me much more progressive & useful to be able to article why you do like something.

Now, the first thing that really struck me about this passage is the use of the word “negativity.” You’re not just writing something negative; you’re engaging in general downer-ness and discontent. (It reminds me of nothing so much as Khloe Kardashian explaining why she doesn’t want to hang around with Scott Disick. She just doesn’t need to be around that kind of negativity!) And then writing something positive isn’t just useful or helpful or constructive, it’s “progressive.” In this reading, writing about literature is a sort of New Age exercise in feel-goodism.

For more on what this “progressivism” might mean, let’s go on. Kitchell explains that after his initial affective response to a work, he likes to find out the why behind that response—how the literature or other artwork works. “This is a constructive approach to criticism,” he writes. “There is no negativity, and there is only forward progression.” Again with the “negativity,” and the progession is twofold: Kitchell finds out how something is working, and gains the ability to “work towards including the ‘thing’ in my own work. Not only this, but I can (theoretically), introduce other people to this ‘thing.’” And part of his claim is that this is easier to do with a work you like than one you don’t like.

Now, that just seems 100% subjective to me. My negative affective responses don’t overwhelm my ability to figure out the why behind them any more than my positive ones do. And it doesn’t seem any less useful to myself, to the world at large, or to any possible writers out there who might want to incorporate the information.

According to Kitchell, it is less useful at least in part because it won’t accomplish the goal of getting someone who liked a work to then dislike it based on a critical takedown. But the converse is also true, and would be clearly so if we weren’t confusing “liking” and “appreciating.” If I liked something bad, and someone explains why it is bad, I can’t go back in time and unlike it. But I can see that it’s not artful. Similarly, if you didn’t like something, I might be able to convince you to reevaluate and even re-read it. But I can’t go back in time and make you enjoy your first reading.

His final exhortation, “how about we pour our energy into writing about things we love instead of things we hate?” has the same problem. Where did we lose the difference between loving or hating, and positive or negative criticism?

But I need to get back to that idea of progression, because that’s where the real problem is for me, and why the difference between emotion and criticism matters. As I said in a comment on a related post by Sasha, my business here is to write about books and, in the process, hopefully to learn something. I’m not out to advance the cause of literature or the publishing industry. I’m not out to advance good new contemporary literature—or to put the damper on bad new literature either. And I’m very much not a writer of fiction, looking to advance my own craft. I like books, and I like art, and I like the confluence between the two. I want to see what I can figure out about that, and “talk” about it with some like-minded people, and you know, what the hell, sometimes discover something pretty cool. Writing about only the positive would wreck half my “progress,” and I hope my readers would agree. (Then again, what is probably my biggest hit piece got only one comment, so who knows.)

So, ultimately, I guess the real answer is that none of this even applies to me. I am not doing what Kitchell is talking about doing, or at least I don’t want to be. If I convince you all to read Richard Hughes, or Clarel, I don’t want it to be because I said positive things about them. I want it to be because I told you what they were up to and how well they accomplished it. And if you avoid The Kreutzer Sonata, it shouldn’t be because I hated it, but because you think there may be a real flaw in the structure of the novella. And really, you shouldn’t even avoid it—that’s not what I want. I want you to read it, and decide how well you thought it worked, and then write about it and let me know.

Alternate reading: Kitchell’s argument is actually inherent in the practice of appreciationism, and I agree with him, only wanting to hate on his squishy language. Please show your work.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that it’s been a bit slow around here lately. January’s momentum turned into February’s complacency and March’s FAIL. I was going to try to frantically do a lot of writing this weekend to get back on track, but I’ve decided that’s a dumb idea. I’m travelling all week so I’ll just get stuck again.

Instead, I think we’re going to do a nice little week of blogcation. Monday the 28 is my date for the Lost Generation Classics Circuit, so it works out perfectly (especially if you like Gertrude Stein, which is who I’m reading for that). See you then!

The first challengers are just about ready to kick off the bibliographing Reading Challenge, so I hope you’re ready to read about it!

The first book on the list is the monster The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. Okay, maybe it’s not that monstrous, but at nearly 500 pages challenger BC and I have decided to break it up and post separately on each of the four parts. Tomorrow BC will get us started with an excellent introduction to the read, and we should be continuing with part I next week.

Also next week (or thereabouts) look for me and challenger Matt Rowan of Bob Einstein’s Literary Equations to start writing about Patrick Somerville’s collection of linked short stories, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature.

Update: I (finally) made a button for the challenge! See the right sidebar.

I’ve been getting a bit worried that I was losing the momentum and motivation I had at the beginning of the year, and now February is half gone—the winter is just disappearing! But I tried to turn that around this week with a return to King, Queen, Knave, and I’m looking to keep it up. I still have more go to on the Little House books, and I’m liking the format of adding a post or so each week. In fact I’m still debating whether to read another volume; I haven’t re-read The First Four Years, feeling a little spent after These Happy Golden Years, but I have to say I’m keen to read more about Laura and Almanzo’s married life after re-living their romance. Swoon, so many buggy rides!

I’ve also got some more twentieth century Japanese literature to write about. Another Mishima and a couple of novellas by a new-to-me author, Kanoko Okamoto, should be coming up this week. I’m not sure when I’ll move on with the next Nabokov novel, The Luzhin Defense, but I’d like to pick it up relatively soon.

Before I do, though, I’m getting under way with the first in the bibliographing reading challenge. I’m spending a lovely Sunday afternoon with a contemporary Chicago writer and it’s going very well so far. Off to a good start!

Ah, how the joys of Sunday are multiplied when Monday is a holiday! And the progress I’m making: while I still haven’t managed to write anything about Mary, I’ve made a good start on King, Queen, Knave and I’m starting to feel like a person who reads Nabokov again. But not quite the same person I was when I went through my first round of reading him.

I’ve also been continuing my progress with Laura Ingalls Wilder. This morning has brought me to the beginning of The Long Winter. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Kevin’s sort of bad experience with a book from his own childhood, because I want to tell you all to run out and grab whatever you most loved at that age. I am clearly overwhelmed with nostalgia and not thinking straight. Sort of a similar thing going on with the Nabokov I guess. Whatever, these are all good books.

I finished another “good book” this week, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Those quotation marks aren’t facetious, just making reference to the canon and all, and the fact that while I think Mishima is good it is a much more distant goodness. It is hard for me to get past him as the author; I’m always thinking about Mishima while I’m reading. I’m going to try to work through that and write about it this week. But all this tough writing to do might mean you have to read some more about little girls living on the prairie as well.