Chabon on blogging

The author in less bloggy times.

OK, then, since Rhian likes it so much, here's a follow-up to that last post about engaging the world.  Michael Chabon did some pinch-hitting over at The Atlantic this week, and departed with some reflections upon the experience.

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. You find novelists going over and over the same ground in their novels [...] configuring and reconfiguring the same little set of preoccupations, haunted by missed opportunities. That may be because getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets. 

Then there's that whole business of the Comments.

The first thing that occurs to me, reading that, is that Chabon spent way too much time on that paragraph--you can tell he's new to writing for the internet.  The second is that, of course, he's quite right--if you assume blogging to be a particular kind of thing.  The thing he thinks it is, is, indeed, what it usually is.  But one thing I like about litblogging, as opposed to, say, tech blogging, is that it specifically doesn't depend upon timeliness and close attention.  It can be contemplative.  One can write about things published thirty years ago, that nobody is making any money on.  One can blog in reptile time, as he puts it.

The blog, like any technology, has many uses.  Zen sandbox is one of them.  Not that, say, responding to Anis Shivani posts is remotely zen--but engagement is a choice, level of engagement is a choice.  One can ask a litblog to fit into one's writing life, to support and nurture it.  Which I think this one has done for us.  Otherwise we wouldn't have kept it going for (!) four years.

Neutrino Clock Offense

Jill and I were in Rosarito, Mexico for the last few days, feasting on lobster Puerto Nuevo style and staying out of the cold, sharky waters. We brought along two books for the beach, Michael Chabon’s new Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Alec Wilkinson’s The Happiest Man in the World. I’ve enjoyed Wilkinson’s New Yorker writings about flatfooting it in Wellfleet, but my interest in the Happiest Man is closer to home. Its subject, Poppa Neutrino, is my friend Ingrid’s father, and I spent the afternoon with him back in New Orleans in November while I took a break from the Pirate’s Alley Words and Music Festival. He explained to me his Neutrino Clock Offense for football, which made sense, and plans he was making for crossing the Pacific Ocean in a raft made out of trash. Considering we were having this conversation in a backyard still drying out from a month underwater, such plans seemed completely reasonable. Stranger things had been discussed in that backyard. Before we moved away from New Orleans, at a barbecue in that backyard, a parrot had fallen into the yard and waddled toward our chairs, and hung out for an hour before flying away again.

Of course I wish I’d written the book about Poppa Neutrino, or that he’d written his own book. But I’m glad Wilkinson got around to it. Hiss account of spending time with Poppa is excellent, and generous, and appropriately flipping between skepticism and revelation. It’s Lawrence Wechsler territory; an exhibition about Poppa Neutrino belongs in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.